driving the forward winch. Mooring at ECT/Sea-Land Terminal. Maasvlakte, Port of Rotterdam.
41The Sea-Land Quality dockside at automated ECT/Sea-Land Terminal. Port of Rotterdam.
42Ship models in vitrine with linear scale. Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam.
43David Brown telephones his wife in Jacksonville from ECT/Sea-Land Terminal. Port of Rotterdam.
44The Sea-Land Quality departing Rotterdam for Bremerhaven.
Voyage 167 of the container ship M/V Sea-Land Quality from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Rotterdam. November 1993.
WALKING IN CIRCLES
Port Elizabeth–Norfolk–Rotterdam–Bremerhaven–Felixstowe–Le Havre–Boston–Port Elizabeth. While crisscrossing the North Atlantic, David Brown works twelve hours a day for a month at a time, putting in an extra watch of work on deck from 0800 to noon, chipping and painting, standing watch at the wheel from noon to 1600, then back at the wheel from midnight to 0400. The extra watch at overtime pay allows him to earn “just enough to make the trip worthwhile,” considering his family in Jacksonville and the fact that despite his years as a merchant sailor, the scarcity of American-flag ships means that he usually works for only six to nine months out of twelve.
A day before landfall, nearing the end of his watch and restless from standing in one place for four hours, Brown leaves the wheel on autopilot and begins to describe Ethiopian dockworkers unloading a cargo of grain, gaunt and wiry men walking in circles carrying huge sacks on their backs. Brown stoops and begins to pantomime a precise memory of their movement, pacing a repetitious circle in front of the navigation computer, bent over in the ancient stance of the stevedore, assuming the burdened posture found in the monochromatic floor mosaics still visible amid the ruins of the Roman port of Ostia Antica, called into life wherever there were or are no machines to lift the weight of cargo.
Haunted by this image of sheer Sisyphian toil, Brown turns abruptly to the case of a hypothetical worker who loses his job to automation: “First he lose his sanity, then his car, then his house.” The circle narrows and one world falls into the vortex of the other.
“SIBERIA”
For the crew, this crossing is the first to make port at the new robot terminal built on the ever-expanding landfill at the outer reaches of the River Maas. The Dutch engineer responsible for designing the system of automated cranes and trucks that gives the ECT/Sea-Land Terminal an eerie depopulated aspect even in pleasant weather remarked that the new method is “much more comfortable than when you have a lot of individuals under the crane. They say hello to each other, they talk to each other.” He warned me away from the path of the robot trucks: “Watch out, they don’t see you!”
In winter, the outer dike wall does little to shield the ship and the dock from the North Sea wind. A freezing forty-five-minute hike through the container stacks and across the sandy soil leads to the solitary truckers’ bar nestled up against the dike at the foot of a row of roaring windmills. Beyond that, it’s a half-hour van drive to the nearest store, a duty-free shop surrounded by oil tanks in the Botlek, where Russian and Filipino sailors remind Americans what it means to comb the shelves for bargains. But the nickname for this new port of call–barren, cold, and far from everything regarded as interesting and human–had stuck earlier, in the middle of the Atlantic, as someone recalled a farewell visit a month earlier to a familiar neighborhood bar just outside the old terminal twenty-five kilometers upriver toward Rotterdam. It is no longer possible, as it was three centuries ago on the River Maas, to infer the warmth of a still life from a picture of a wooden ship full of whale blubber.
SEVENTY IN SEVEN
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45The LNG carrier Hyundai Utopia, designed to transport liqufied natural gas from Indonesia to South Korea, nearing completion. Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard, Ulsan.
46Model of ironclad “turtle ship” used by Admiral Yi Sun-Sin to defeat invading Japanese fleet in 1592. Hyundai shipyard headquarters.
47Finishing propeller shaft in the engine shop. Hyundai shipyard.
48Company golf course reserved for visiting shipowners. Hyundai shipyard.
49–50Cutting steel in the plate and sub-assembly shop. Hyundai shipyard.
51Mother
