Lost at Sea

There is no reason for them to know what day it is. Time is kept only to manage shifts, generally six hours long. Sleep is a shift, too. The merchant mariner, the seafarer, knows what ports he has been to, and what port is next. Sometimes, if the next port is in Turkey or India, he may not know what lies beyond it. Often this is because the ship owners would rather not frighten their crews by telling them that they are to cross the Suez Canal, because this means traversing “Pirate Alley.”

Seafarers hail from nearly every country in the world, though the majority are from India, the Philippines, countries formerly part of the USSR, China, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries. Americans and Western Europeans are in the minority.

“They pay us $75 in extra pay if we agree to travel through pirate waters. This means, to me, that our lives are worth $75.” Rao is 55, from a rural community in India.1 He became a seafarer in his late teens and has climbed the ranks slowly to boatswain, an unlicensed position of authority over the other unlicensed crew, equivalent to a third mate. He is married, with four children, two boys and two girls. His current assignment is aboard a vessel carrying building supplies from southeast Africa to North America, and because of this he has crossed, and will continue to cross, Pirate Alley over the course of his six-month contract. The crew of this vessel has spotted suspicious ships three times and in one case observed another vessel captured within their visual range.

Rao is one of over sixty men I have interviewed since January 2010. In the summer of 2009, I was asked by a friend and colleague, a psychiatrist with close ties to the Episcopal Church, to speak to Father David Rider, who directs the Seamen's Church Institute. SCI was founded 176 years ago, initially as a church floating atop a barge moored to the South Street Seaport in New York City, where seafarers, longshoremen, and others involved in the maritime industry could seek solace a