The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

by William Langewiesche Narrated by William Langewiesche

Overview

Riveting stories of our last frontier and the acts of God and man upon it

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.
With typically understated lyricism, William Langewiesche explores this ocean world and the enterprises--licit and illicit--that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons. Forty-three thousand gargantuan ships ply the open ocean, carrying nearly all the raw materials and products on which our lives are built. Many are owned or managed by one-ship companies so ghostly that they exist only on paper. They are the embodiment of modern global capital and the most independent objects on earth--many of them without allegiances of any kind, changing identity and nationality at will. Here is free enterprise at it freest, opportunity taken to extremes. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews, and the growth of two perfectly adapted pathogens: a modern and sophisticated strain of piracy and its close cousin, the maritime form of the new stateless terrorism.
This is the outlaw sea--perennially defiant and untamable--that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild.

Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker

For Langewiesche, the ocean is still a frontier, a lawless domain where brute economics always trumps moral considerations. His overview ranges from a story of contemporary piracy off the coast of Indonesia to a portrait of the ship-breaking yards of India, where workers die by the dozen. The centerpiece of his exploration is the sinking, in 1994, of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea, in which more than eight hundred and fifty people died. In harrowing detail, Langewiesche describes the chaos—sons abandoning mothers, criminals robbing fellow-passengers amid the confusion—and then follows the botched investigation that ensued. He makes an eloquent case that the ocean’s forgotten corners have become too dangerous to neglect: Al Qaeda has begun to use freighters to smuggle its members across international borders.

The New York Times

The book ends in a place called Alang on the Gulf of Cambay in the Arabian Sea, where worn-out ships are driven onto the beach and cut into scrap by Indian laborers who are primitively equipped and in almost constant danger...Watching the mammoth metal corpse of a ship being carved into pieces, he cannot help seeing the eviscerated wreck as "a monument to the forces of a new world." As he demonstrates time and time again in this brave, often electrifying book, it is a world that is both new and very old, and we ignore it at our peril.—Nathaniel Philbrick

Kirkus Reviews

Lest we forget: The ocean is cold, cruel, and unforgiving. Even though the vast majority of the Earth's surface is salt water, as the comparatively small landmass is increasingly tamed and corralled, it becomes easy to forget that the teeming seas have not and never can be controlled or organized in any meaningful manner. Langewiesche (American Ground, 2002, etc.) takes it upon himself to remind readers of this in an effective, occasionally savage text. Although the author spends some time discussing one of the open sea's more modern threats, terrorism (Osama bin Laden purportedly owns a small fleet of ghost freighters), he first deals with a problem so old many probably thought it gone for good: piracy. "Naval patrols hardly matter at all," notes Langewiesche in typically dry, dour fashion: 1,200 pirate attacks were recorded between 1998 and 2002. He deals in depth with one: the Alondra Rainbow, hijacked in the Strait of Malacca in 1999 by a highly coordinated band who tossed its crew into the sea in a life raft. The castaways were rescued ten days later, but the ship itself, worth some $20 million with its cargo, simply disappeared. Whether discussing hijacking, the black market in dismantled ships, or the horrors of ferry accidents, Langewiesche again and again beats home the point that the sea is uncontrollable. This fact of nature is exacerbated by the shadowy man-made rules of ship registration: a vessel can sail under one nation's flag, be registered by another, and claim as "owners" a murky network of companies that are often no more than brass nameplates on a door. There are times when one wishes to tie Langewiesche down and make him follow his streams of thought more thoroughly;this work could well have been a third longer, but what is here is nevertheless impressive and well-wrought. Adapted from an article he wrote for the Atlantic, a fiery piece of work that speaks from a primal and awesome place.

From the Publisher

Astonishing . . . Langeweische's narrative achieves an almost operatic grandeur . . . As [he] demonstrates time and time again in this brave, often electrifying book, [the sea] is a world that is both new and very old, and we ignore it at our own peril.” —Nathaniel Philbrick, The New York Times Book Review

“The Outlaw Sea is impossible to put down.” —People

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171777982
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	05/01/2004
Edition description:	Unabridged

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