route to the west appeared as a scorpion-shaped expanse of light blue. Sinuous purple lines represented the elaborate network of underwater communication cables that link the United States to the Caribbean islands, South America, and Europe—cords that could be cut by the keel of a ship if it dragged over them.
Joaquin had moved farther west and south, which meant that if they’d continued on their original course, they’d run straight into it, Shultz said. “I mean, our timing was perfect to reach the eye. Now worse comes to worse, we can duck in behind the islands.”
“We’re gonna get slammed tonight, though,” Jeremie said grimly, studying the chart in front of him. A slight heading change wouldn’t buy them much, he thought, and sixty miles from the eye was at least forty miles too close.
Jeremie looked up to nod at Jack Jackson, his helmsman on the 8:00 to noon watch, who’d just come up from breakfast. Jack stood by while the chief mate and third mate discussed the new plan. “It’s been too quiet this season,” Jack observed.
“Been that way last year and the year before,” agreed Jeremie. Very quiet hurricane seasons. Good weather could breed complacency.
“Out in the Pacific, it’s been one typhoon after the other, a daisy chain of ’em,” Jack said. “One in Taiwan hit 180 miles per hour.” He shook his head thinking about that kind of wind. It was enough to give an old mariner like himself a good scare.
Davidson came back up to the bridge to check in on his third mate. “So we got a little weather coming in,” he told him. “I’m sure you heard,” he continued. “Joaquin morphed its ugly head between the time we left and the morning when we woke up. Tough to plan when you don’t know but we made a little diversion here. We’re gonna be further south of the eye. We’ll be about sixty miles south of the eye. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine—not should be—we are gonna be fine.”
The captain looked at his third mate intently, confirming that the officer understood the plan. Satisfied, he left the bridge to Jeremie and Jack who together watched the rising sun cook the already hot Caribbean waters into a soupy haze.
Jeremie was known for speaking his mind. Unlike the other officers aboard El Faro, he’d come up through the hawsepipe, meaning he hadn’t graduated from one of the country’s seven maritime academies. Instead, he’d signed on to the merchant marine as general crew when he was eighteen years old and worked his way up. During his downtime aboard the vessel, he’d studied the ship’s books and manuals and often surprised his fellow officers with the depth of his knowledge. Most of them were older and had little interest in exploring all the bells and whistles offered by advancing technology. They could run a ship with or without it. But Jeremie liked figuring things out.
Once he had enough proficiency and experience, Jeremie screwed up his courage and took the third mate’s test. The exam is a brutal, three-day trial of knowledge and nerves. It was especially hard for Jeremie, who got anxious at the thought of taking tests. After passing, he didn’t want to go through that again, so he remained working as a third mate for the next decade. Sailing as a second mate would have meant more money and more authority on the bridge, but for him, it wasn’t worth the stress. He lived modestly on shore, focused on family. He was married to an African American woman who ran a day-care center on the remote Florida island where they lived with their two teenage children. When he was off duty, he helped her with the business and kept to himself.
A few years back, Jeremie joined his fellow ship’s officers Captain Pete Villacampa, Chief Mate Paul Haley, and Second Mate Charlie Baird at their union’s ultra-advanced simulation center in Miami. He was a generation younger than the other officers. For four days, they worked together on a computer-generated bridge, which rocked and rolled like a real ship, enough to make a person seasick, as the program generated complex maritime situations for them to work their way out of. Jeremie’s understanding of the weather systems, radar, and loading software—things he’d taught himself—proved invaluable. The team earned one of the highest scores the instructor had ever recorded.
Three months after that simulation test, Villacampa and Haley were fired by the shipping company, along with two other seasoned officers, Captain Jack Hearn and Chief Mate Jimmy Armstrong. The official line was that they’d lost their jobs because illegal drugs had been found on one of TOTE’s ships.
In July 2012, US customs agents in Jacksonville saw a suspicious shipping container coming off El Faro’s sister ship, El Morro. The box looked like it had been tampered with, maybe pried open after it had been sealed. Sure enough, a couple of the unlicensed crew—an ever-changing cast of characters hired through the union by the shipping company’s crewing manager—had stashed forty-seven kilos of cocaine inside it, a $3.5 million haul bound for the US market. After the seamen were busted in Jacksonville, the ship’s steward—a Puerto Rican named Danny, and another family member—were gunned down by a member of the drug cartel in a San Juan restaurant while Danny’s vessel was docked nearby.
That shipping containers had been used to transport contraband surprised absolutely no one. Roberto Saviano’s book on the Italian mafia, Gomorrah, offers a shocking example of the disturbing things people stuff in these nondescript steel boxes. In his book’s opening scene, a crate being loaded onto a ship in Naples accidentally opens midair and dozens of human corpses pour out of it and onto the ship’s deck. The dead immigrants had paid a lifetime’s worth of wages to the Mafia to have their remains repatriated to China; they were unceremoniously scooped back in and shipped according to plan.
No port authority has the resources to monitor what’s inside the hundreds of thousands of shipping containers crossing the oceans at any one time. Worldwide, approximately 1 percent of the boxes are actually opened and inspected. Drug dealers and arms brokers count on this fact to move their illicit wares around the globe; they build rare losses into their business plan. Because occasionally, someone gets caught.
Jack Hearn was captain of El Morro when the drugs were found, but how could he have known about them? Jacksonville Port was known as a major gateway for drugs traveling from South America to the US, especially since Puerto Rico’s economic collapse created a jobless, desperate population on the island. Of course TOTE’s ships occasionally carried contraband.
Hearn’s job was to deliver cargo and keep the vessel and crew safe. He’d done just that for more than thirty years. In that time, he’d watched the profession go from sextant to satellite. And in that time, the role of the captain evolved from running the ship to pushing paper. Hearn spent countless hours in his stateroom logging records, time charts, and data, managing the milk run back and forth to Puerto Rico. It was load and roll. Everyone was hustling. There wasn’t time for him to inspect every box that went on his ship and quiz every deckhand. Following the arrests, TOTE hired security guards to search crew as they came aboard.
TOTE’s firing of the four officers came as a shock to those working on the vessels. Haley wasn’t even on duty when the drugs were found. Two respected captains and two chief mates, all elders of the trade, were gone. With them, decades of knowledge and experience had been tossed out like yesterday’s garbage. The message was clear: no one’s job—on land or at sea—was safe.
TOTE became ruthless, driven to squeeze as much profit as possible out of an operationally expensive industry. Some mariners who worked for TOTE say that the company was making a significant profit at that time. The ships cost several million dollars, the labor, the berthing, the fuel, the endless maintenance, plus the insurance (El Faro’s hull and machinery were covered for $24 million)—all these big-ticket necessities cut into their bottom lines.
And lately, cargo prices had plummeted; worldwide, there was too much capacity, an abundance of ships, and not enough customers. Hanjin, one of the world’s largest shipping companies,
