"The Outlaw Ocean brings the reader up close to an overwhelming truth... An impressive feat of reporting... Urbina deftly reveals complicated ideas through his stories."
—The Washington Post
"This body of work is a devastating look at the corruption, exploitation, and trafficking that thrive on the open ocean... The writing is straightforward but clever... Eerie and beautiful."
—Outside
"The Outlaw Ocean is enriched by Urbina’s gifted storytelling about the destruction of marine life and the murder, crime, and piracy that make the seas so dangerous for those who make their living on them."
—The National Book Review
"What we learn from Urbina’s journeys is nothing less than the deepest aspects of humanity itself. Dropped into a world without terra firma’s systems and foibles, our darkest impulses emerge. But our most noble intentions—to save, to protect, to establish fair rule of law—appear as well."
—Paste
“In The Outlaw Ocean, Urbina focuses that eye on understanding his characters and their context to show why these crimes get committed and why the culprits rarely get prosecuted. Urbina goes further than most to do this. He shows you a problem from the front lines, by talking to the people there.”
—Vice
"New York Times journalist Ian Urbina explores a parallel world, spanning two thirds of the Earth’s surface but almost entirely hidden from public scrutiny... With the world’s seafood stocks in crisis, Urbina lifts the thick veil on a global criminal culture, at just the moment when the damage inflicted on the oceans is becoming terminal."
—The Guardian
"The most valuable contribution of The Outlaw Ocean may be to the literature, unfortunately quite extensive by now, of pessimism about human nature…in aggregate his stories reveal that something like a Hobbesian state of nature still exists and is available to anyone willing to float a few dozen miles offshore.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The Outlaw Ocean is an outstanding example of investigative journalism, illuminating some of the darkest corners of a world we often don't think about… what he found ranges from horrible to shocking and from unfair to unbelievable… a magnificent read… proof that outstanding writing is still one of the best tools we have to get to know the world we live in.”
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“These chapters are vibrant as individual stories, but as a collection they’re transcendent, rendering a complex portrait of an unseen and disturbing world. Urbina pursues a depth of reportage that’s rare because of the guts and diligence it requires… The result is not just a fascinating read, but a truly important document… It is a master class in journalism.”
—Blair Braverman, The New York Times Book Review
"A fast-paced read, both riveting and harrowing."
—Civil Eats
"The scope of reporting in The Outlaw Ocean is remarkable. Urbina covers a wide swath of oceangoing banditry and mayhem, and delivers his findings in clear, transparent prose that brings this sordid activity to life."
—Lee Polevoi, Highbrow Magazine
"A riveting, terrifying, thrilling story of a netherworld that few people know about, and fewer will ever see . . . The soul of this book is as wild as the ocean itself."
—Susan Casey, best-selling author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
“Not just a stunning read, this book is a gripping chronicle of the watery wild west and it shows us—frankly unlike anything I've read before—how global indifference can trap innocent people in endless cycles of exploitation, how the vast ocean has become a danger zone, and ultimately how we all pay a price for this mayhem and mistreatment."
—John Kerry, former Secretary of State and founder of the Our Ocean Conference
“Imagine a fantasy movie in which an explorer from Earth arrives on the surface of a living planet, to discover a lawless place where brutality is the only order and greed and fear the only motivators. Welcome to The Outlaw Ocean. In this utterly groundbreaking, often disturbing book, Ian Urbina has put his life on the line to lay bare the stunning inhumanity that reigns unchecked over two-thirds of Earth’s surface. This constantly astonishing book is seasoned with rare heroes—the author himself among them—who at great risk have weaponized their lifelong quest to shine righteous light and apply justice to the cruel anarchy that reigns over the majority of the planet.”
—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words and Song for the Blue Ocean
“Our planet is 70% ocean and yet to watch the tv or read the papers you'd have little idea humans ever ventured offshore. Thanks to Ian Urbina for beginning to close the reporting gap, and for showing the high drama to be found on the high seas."
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
"A swift-moving, often surprising account of the dangers that face sailors and nations alike on the lawless tide."
—Kirkus Reviews
“In The Outlaw Ocean, Ian Urbina offers a gripping series of portraits of scofflaws, renegades, con men, vigilantes and activists whose combat on the open seas has profound effect on our everyday lives and the world we inhabit. It’s a wild adventure story and terrifying cautionary tale, that should not be missed.”
— Sam Walker, former deputy enterprise editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of The Captain Class
"This is just incredible investigative work."
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything
Outlook Review
How lawlessness and ignorance are harming our oceans
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By Alyssa Rosenberg
Opinion writer September 12
Alyssa Rosenberg writes about culture and politics for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.
Fish swim in a reef near La Ciotat, France. Ian Urbina argues that most of us don’t know much about what takes place in and around the oceans, from overfishing to slavery. (BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images)The remote is now very near: Mount Everest has traffic jams, and Instagram influencers are posing at Chernobyl. The Google Car maps where we live, photographing our homes usually when the lawn is unkempt. The world has never felt smaller or more known, for good and ill.
Into that world comes Ian Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean” bearing an unsettling idea: There is still much we don’t know about our world, and the consequences of our ignorance are likely to arrive onshore not in a gentle swell but with crashing force. Urbina argues that the vast oceans and their borders with land are changing more quickly than we can imagine. The wide expanses of the sea are ungoverned, if not ungovernable, because it benefits too many powerful people to let them stay that way. The result is a book that leaves behind the unnerving feeling that we’re becalmed and can move in no positive direction: “The Outlaw Ocean” brings the reader up close to an overwhelming truth, but the magnitude of the revelation is paralyzing.
(Knopf)The book grew out of Urbina’s reporting about the sea for the New York Times, and as a result, it is constructed as a series of seafaring yarns. The installments vary wildly in tone, as you might expect in the nautical genre of storytelling. Max Hardberger, a raffish oceanic repo man, stars in Urbina’s heist story. Offshore abortionist Rebecca Gomperts helps women in an outlaw feminist fable. Captains Adam Meyerson and Wyanda Lublink are the book’s environmentalist Ahabs, chasing down not a fearsome whale but a Japanese ship that slaughters whales in exceptionally brutal fashion. And men like Lang Long, a Cambodian who was trafficked and sold into the Thai fishing industry, are modern-day Billy Budds in a system that lacks even the rough justice of a drumhead court-martial.
That Urbina has been able to pluck these people out of the vast blue expanse that surrounds them and locate them, both on the map and in our minds, at least for a moment, is an impressive feat of reporting. (It’s also to his credit that Urbina knows how to serve as a gangway between his reader and his subject material without making himself the story.) While all nonfiction books presumably exist to tell readers something they didn’t already know, “The Outlaw Ocean” uses our lack of knowledge to bolster his argument: If we don’t know much about sea slavery or the battles between environmentalists and the fishing industry, it’s because it’s hard for us landlubbers to know what happens so far from shore.
This isn’t the only sense in which Urbina has constructed his book as a kind of inexorable current, circling around and around again. Though it certainly has its lighter segments, especially Urbina’s visit to the Principality of Sealand, a micronation founded in 1967 on an abandoned offshore platform, his stories keep converging on a grim point: that the vastness of the ocean has served the purposes of governments and businesses that prefer to operate in a realm without rules.
There are exceptions, like the tiny island nation of Palau, which is trying to curb illegal fishing through quirks of maritime law that give it dominion over 230,000 square miles of ocean. But apparently, there are plenty of powerful people who stand to benefit from the lawless state of the ocean — and plenty more of us who so badly want to believe that we can have cheap, ethically harvested seafood that we’re willing to let them keep it that way. That may be difficult to do after reading “The Outlaw Ocean.” Urbina’s chronicles of man’s inhumanity to man, as well as to fish — some of which leave the creature in “Jaws” looking less like a monster and more like a justified revolutionary — had me considering giving up seafood.
Urbina is so successful at communicating the scale of the ocean, and the cruelty and neglect above and below its waters, that reading his book sometimes feels like gasping for a breath of air before slipping under the waves again.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
About a hundred miles off the coast of Thailand, three dozen Cambodian boys and men worked barefoot all day and into the night on the deck of a purse seiner fishing ship. Fifteen-foot swells climbed the sides of the ship, clipping the crew below the knees. Ocean spray and fish innards made the floor skating-rink slippery. Seesawing erratically from the rough seas and gale winds, the deck was an obstacle course of jagged tackle, spinning winches, and tall stacks of five-hundred-pound nets.
Rain or shine, shifts ran eighteen to twenty hours. At night, the crew cast their nets when the small silver fish they target—mostly jack mackerel and herring—were more reflective and easier to spot in darker waters. During the day, when the sun was high, temperatures topped a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but they worked nonstop. Drinking water was tightly rationed. Most countertops were crawling with roaches. The toilet was a removable wooden floorboard on deck. At night, vermin cleaned the boys’ unwashed plates. The ship’s mangy dog barely lifted her head when the rats, which roamed on board like carefree city squirrels, ate from her bowl.
If they were not fishing, the crew sorted their catch and fixed their nets, which were prone to ripping. One boy, his shirt smudged with fish guts, proudly showed off his two missing fingers, severed by a net that had coiled around a spinning crank. Their hands, which virtually never fully dried, had open wounds, slit from fish scales and torn from the nets’ friction. The boys stitched closed the deeper cuts themselves. Infections were constant. Captains never lacked for amphetamines to help the crews work longer, but they rarely stocked antibiotics for infected wounds.
On boats like these, deckhands were often beaten for small transgressions, like fixing a torn net too slowly or mistakenly placing a mackerel into a bucket for sable fish or herring. Disobedience on these ships was less a misdemeanor than a capital offense. In 2009, the UN conducted a survey of about fifty Cambodian men and boys sold to Thai fishing boats. Of those interviewed by UN personnel, twenty-nine said they witnessed their captain or other officers kill a worker.
The boys and men who typically worked on these ships were invisible to the authorities because most were undocumented immigrants. Dispatched into the unknown, they were beyond where society could help them, usually on so-called ghost ships—unregistered vessels that the Thai government had no ability to track. They usually did not speak the language of their Thai captains, did not know how to swim, and, being from inland villages, had never seen the sea before this encounter with it.
Virtually all of the crew had a debt to clear, part of their indentured servitude, a “travel now, pay later” labor system that requires working to pay off money they often had to borrow to sneak illegally into a new country. One of the Cambodian boys approached me, and deeper into our conversation he tried to explain in broken English how elusive this debt became once they left land. Pointing to his own shadow and moving around as if he were trying to grab it, he said, “Can’t catch.”
This was a brutal place, one that I spent five weeks in the winter of 2014 trying to visit. Fishing boats on the South China Sea, especially in the Thai fleet, had for years been notorious for using so-called sea slaves, mostly migrants forced offshore by debt or duress. The worst among these ships were the long haulers, many of which shed hundreds of miles from shore, staying at sea sometimes for over a year as mother ships provided supplies and shuttled their catch back to shore. No captain had been willing to carry me and a photographer the full distance, more than a hundred miles, out to these long-haul boats. So, we instead hopscotched from boat to boat—forty miles on one, forty on the next, and so on—to get out far enough.
As I watched the Cambodians, who, like some water-bound chain gang, chanted to ensure synchronicity in pulling their nets, I was reminded of an incongruity that confronted me time and again over several years of reporting offshore. For all its breathtaking beauty, the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law—often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes—is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.
There were other contradictions. At a time when we know exponentially more about the world around us, with so much at our fingertips and but a swipe or a tap away, we know shockingly little about the sea. Fully half of the world’s peoples now live within a hundred miles of the ocean, and merchant ships haul about 90 percent of the world’s goods. Over 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats and another 1.6 million on freighters, tankers, and other types of merchant vessels. And yet journalism about this realm is a rarity, save for the occasional story about Somali pirates or massive oil spills. For most of us, the sea is simply a place we fly over, a broad canvas of darker and lighter blues. Though it can seem vast and all-powerful, it is vulnerable and fragile in part because environmental threats travel far, transcending the arbitrary borders that mapmakers have applied to the oceans over the centuries.
Like a dissonant chorus in the background, these paradoxes captivated me throughout my journeys spanning forty months, 251,000 miles, eighty-five planes, forty cities, every continent, over 12,000 nautical miles across all five oceans and twenty other seas. Those travels provided the stories for this book, a compendium of narratives about this unruly frontier. My goal was not only to report on the plight of sea slaves but also to bring to life the full cast of characters who roam the high seas. They included vigilante conservationists, wreck thieves, maritime mercenaries, defiant whalers, offshore repo men, sea-bound abortion providers, clandestine oil dumpers, elusive poachers, abandoned seafarers, and cast-adrift stowaways.
Since I was young, I’ve been enchanted by the sea, but it was not until one brutally cold Chicago winter that I acted on my fascination. Five years into a doctoral program in history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, I decided to procrastinate on completing my dissertation by fleeing to Singapore for a temporary job as a deckhand and resident anthropologist on a marine research ship called the RV Heraclitus. For three months, the whole time I was there, the ship never left port due to paperwork problems, and I spent the time getting to know the crews from other ships docked nearby.
This stranded stint port side in Singapore offered my first real exposure to merchant seafarers and long-haul fishermen, and the experience left me riveted by what seemed like a transient tribe of people. These workers are largely invisible to anyone leading a landlocked lifestyle. They have their own lingo, etiquette, superstitions, social hierarchy, codes of discipline, and, based on the stories they told me, catalog of crimes and tradition of impunity. Theirs is also a world where lore holds as much sway as law.
What became especially clear in these conversations is that moving freight by sea is much cheaper than by air partly because international waters are so uncluttered by national bureaucracies and unconstrained by rules. This fact has given rise to all manner of unregulated activity, from tax sheltering to weapons stockpiling. There is, after all, a reason that the American government, for instance, chose international waters as the location for disassembling Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, for conducting some of its terrorism-related detention and interrogation, and for disposing of Osama bin Laden’s body. Meanwhile, the fishing and shipping industries are as much victims of offshore lawlessness as they are beneficiaries and perpetrators of it.
I never finished my dissertation. Instead, I took a job in 2003 at The New York Times, and over the next decade, as I learned how to be a reporter, I occasionally and unsuccessfully pitched the notion of doing a series about this offshore world. I leveraged every persuasive comparison I could muster. An all-you-can-eat allegory buffet, the seas offer inestimable opportunity, I argued. From a storytelling perspective, this two-thirds of the planet is virgin snow, I contended, because few, if any, other reporters are comprehensively exploring it.
In 2014, Rebecca Corbett, my editor at the time, agreed and in embracing the proposal, wisely nudged me toward focusing more on the people than on the fish, delving primarily into the human rights and labor concerns, because the environmental issues would arise as well through that lens. The first story from The New York Times’s Outlaw Ocean series ran in the paper in July 2015, with another dozen or so pieces published in the subsequent year. I took a fifteen-month leave from the paper, starting in January 2017, to continue reporting for this book.
···
During my travels, I had a lot of downtime, which I spent immersing myself in books about the ocean. Experientially and philosophically, the sea is and has always been many different things to different people. It is a metaphor for infinity and a place of the purest form of freedom, distinctly divorced from government meddling. An escape for some, the sea is also a prison for others. Full of devouring storms, doomed expeditions, shipwrecked sailors, and maniacal hunters, the canon of sea literature offered a vibrant picture of a watery wilderness and its untamed rogues. Like birds on the Galápagos, these men, over centuries, had done mostly as they pleased, evolving largely without predators. The surprising fact is that they still do. My hope with this book is to offer a sketch that brings into the present our awareness of these people and this place.
To make the book more of a first-person travelogue (“Tell stories, don’t write articles,” my editors used to remind me), I tried to rely less on shoreside interviews or archival testimonials than on reporting from the ships themselves. Mostly these were fishing ships, but also cargo vessels, cruise liners, medical boats, floating armories, and research and advocacy ships, as well as navy, port police, and Coast Guard cutters.
As a writing project, there was real risk in tackling such an ambitious topic—or, as the expression goes, trying to “boil the ocean.” At times, the reporting process was so zigzagging that it felt less like journalism than an attention deficit disorder. But the more I traveled, the more one story led to another—none of them neat or tidy, none of them split clearly between right and wrong, villain and hero, predator and prey. Like the oceans themselves, the stories that emerged were too sprawling to force into a single, straight-line narrative. So, instead, I organized the chapters as a series of essays, con dent that readers would connect the dots in their own ways, beyond the patterns I spotted.
In the end, the goal of this project is to bear witness to a world rarely seen. It recounts a maritime repo man spiriting a tanker from a Greek port into international waters, and a doctor clandestinely shuttling pregnant women from Mexican shores to the high seas to administer otherwise illegal abortions. It chronicles the work of vigilante conservationists, who in the South Atlantic Ocean chased Interpol’s most wanted poacher ship and then in the Antarctic hunted and harassed Japan’s last factory whaling ship. In the South China Sea, I landed in the middle of an armed standoff between two countries, each of which had taken hostages from the other. Off the coast of Somalia, I found myself temporarily stranded on a small wooden fishing boat in pirate-infested waters. I saw a ship sink, rode out violent storms, and watched a near mutiny. Reporting these stories took me from a submarine in the Antarctic and South Atlantic Oceans to offshore weapons depots in the Gulf of Oman, and to oil platforms in the Arctic and the Celebes Sea.
For all that adventure, though, the most important thing I saw from ships all around the world, and have tried in this book to capture, was an ocean woefully under-protected and the mayhem and misery often faced by those who work these waters.
