The Outlaw Sea: Chaos and Crime on the World's Oceans

Contemporary Review, July, 2005

The Outlaw Sea: Chaos and Crime on the World's Oceans. William Langewiesche. Granta Books. [pounds sterling]12.00 p.b. ix + 239 pages. ISBN 1-86207-731-2. This book, which was first published in the U.S., may be called a survey of the sea and an expose of the lives and risks common to ships and men who sail upon it.

The book began as articles in the Atlantic Monthly and is based on research and interviews. Mr Langewiesche starts with the story of a worn-out tanker which broke apart in the Atlantic and then moves on to discuss other aspects of life on the ocean or of life which draws on the ocean: piracy in the Strait of Malacca; the horrors of ship-breaking in India; and the sinking of the Estonia in 1994. In many ways the book is a twenty-first-century version of R.H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast except here the culprit is not the U.S. merchant fleet but the lack of regulation in shipping which remains 'an inherently disorderly affair'. (G.F.B.)