Real’s cargo had been loaded at the industrial harbours of northern Europe and seemed to contain basic materials for chemical manufacturing, high-tech medical equipment, and a disassembled yacht being transported to China. Callisto had very few full containers loaded at those industrial ports, and a great deal of what it took on at Damietta, Beirut, and Mersin consisted of refrigerated containers. Presumably, given the agricultural facilities and hinterlands of those three ports, the reefers (the refrigerated containers) were laden with fruits and vegetables and other farm products. I say ‘presumably’ because I could not view the bills of lading, but the hazardous goods documents indicated that not many of the reefers contained toxic materials (which are often shipped in refrigerated containers in order to ensure their stability).
Aboard both ships, we had to convoy on several occasions. Ships form convoys for safety or to follow prescribed routes. As expected, we had to form a cortège through the Suez Canal. A significant proportion of the canal is still one-way and either the southbound or northbound convoys must remain in bypass bays in the Great Bitter Lake until the other convoy has completely passed it and gone through the other one-way portion of the canal. But our ship also had to convoy with other ships upon arrival at Jabal Ali, because the approach channel from the anchorage to the port is surprisingly narrow; ships run aground far more often than one would imagine for such a significant port. In the Red Sea, ships are required to keep to their own lanes, with northbound ships closer to the coasts of Asia and southbound ships steaming along the African coast. Allowances had to be made in the ships’ routes for offshore oil and gas platforms, coral islands just under the surface of the sea, and tiny volcanic islets strewn near the coast, especially near the Bab al Mandab.
Another locale for convoying was along the coast of Yemen. Companies and navies often recommend that ships convoy together when passing through the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. At the height of piracy in the mid-2000s, the convoys were escorted by EU or NATO antipiracy forces or by naval vessels of individual European or Asian countries. The antipiracy convoys kept as far as possible from the African coast. They travelled along predrawn routes, marked and updated on naval charts.
When I was travelling on Callisto, the ship did not have the same imperative for speed as Corte Real and was commanded to slow down considerably in order to preserve fuel. Corte Real had also been ordered to steam closer to the coasts of Yemen and Oman to shorten its route. The ship thus held very close to the coast, and we could clearly see the dramatically jagged mountains of Arabia rising from the steamy shores. CMA CGM ships only bunker (or take on fuel) in certain countries because they get better deals in some ports, but also because the bunkering fuel in some ports is reputed to be adulterated.1 Both Corte Real and Callisto flew the British Red Ensign flag and had to follow European and British rules on sulphur emissions and other environmental regulations. Therefore, they could only take low-sulphur, untainted, uncontaminated bunkers on board. This also limited which ports were deemed appropriate for refuelling.
| Port | Annual bunker sale (millions of tonnes) | Last year available |
| Singapore | 42.4 | 2014 |
| Fujairah | 24.0 | 2013 |
| Rotterdam | 10.6 | 2013 |
| Hong Kong | 7.4 | 2012 |
| Antwerp | 6.5 | 2012 |
Table 1.1 – World’s biggest bunkering ports2
The differences in routes indicate that the delivery of specific commodities from a port of origin to a destination does not necessarily determine the path of travel. The specific qualities of ports that become nodes of trade matter: how updated their facilities are, how deep their harbours, what bunkering services they provide. Global factors also matter: a fall in trade saw many containers being shipped to China entirely empty. The volume of cargo shipped from one site to another in turn determines freight rates on those routes. The price of oil affects bunkering rates and therefore the unit cost of transportation by sea. But a ship’s route is not the outcome of a series of rational calculations. CMA CGM is, in some ways, distinct from the other European shipping firms with which it competes. The firm has Middle Eastern roots, with its founders hailing from Syria and Lebanon. A quarter of the company’s shares are, at the time of this writing, held by a major Turkish shipping and mining conglomerate, the Y ıldırım Group. CMA CGM has also long had shipping alliances with United Arab Shipping Company, the firm originally owned by several countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Many of CMA CGM’s hubs and smaller feeder ports (ports that receive transhipments from the hubs) are in the Middle East, and the sinuous routes that connect its European and Asian termini often snake through North African, Arab, and Turkish ports.
The routes that shipping companies or naval guards or international antipiracy organisations devise, for everyday shipping as well as in seas designated dangerous, so often seem ‘naturally’ made. Unlike markings on land, which the earth holds across time and space, the crossing of ships on the deep leaves little trace but the foam that forms in the wake. Yet shipping routes – or, more accurately, their representation on charts and maps and in the myriad documents of corporate planning – have a solidity, a durability that their marine ephemerality belies.
A range of political factors (including technological changes, economic calculations, and social upheavals) can spell the end of one route and the birth of another over the course of time. In the age of steam, ships are not beholden to wind and current patterns as they were in the age of sail, and routes are determined by the ports strung along them. Some ports remain constant and important: Jeddah, as the port of Mecca, has always mattered in the making of pilgrims’ sea routes and has been a crucial stop on the Red Sea, despite being flanked by perilous coral shoals. Aden was one of the earliest imperial coaling stations for Britain and for nearly a century and a half its most important strategic port in the Indian Ocean. The emergence of Jabal Ali (and its smaller cousins Khor Fakkan, Port Khalifa, Hamad, and Salalah, among others) in the Arabian Peninsula calls for an explanation: what accounts for such a proliferation of destination ports, when the population of the Peninsula is only around 60 million?
The answer is that everything from technological change – the coming of steam and the invention of telegraphs, tankers, container ships, and internet cables – to the end of empires and the emergence of new nation-states can shift the contours of these routes across the water. But this doesn’t happen in a uniform way. The technological innovations that remake communication and transportation sometimes reinforce existing routes and, at other times, redraw them. In the Arabian Peninsula, especially before the coming of oil, pilgrimage and the Suez Canal were the factors that determined where sea routes were pinned to the land.
But routes are not only prescribed by the exigencies of travel. What cargo is carried, and from where and in what volumes, determines the rates charged for routes. Routes are not only evanescent paths through the sea or lines upon the map, but also a series of calculations about costs and freight rates. The moment routes are quantified by way of pricing, they – the routes themselves, not what travels on them – can also become commodities to be speculated upon. So many of the ingredients of route-making in the age of sail shaped the paradoxes of our permanently transient routes; today, many of those old routes are embodied in the digital pathways of market models.
Admiralty Charts and the Making of Routes
Proudly, as always, the ships will set sail
for Madras, Algeria and Singapore;
in an office bent over some nautical maps
I’ll make calculations in ledger books.
Nikos Kavvadias, ‘Mal du Départ’
In
