Richard Pollak

"ALL THINGS CONSIDERED".

On January 11, 2004, the author discussed his voyage on the Colombo Bay with Steve Inskeep on NPR's "All Things Considered." To hear their conversation, which takes place in the last quarter of the hour-long broadcast, click here. The transcript follows.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

Few people travel by sea anymore, but many of our belongings do. The author Richard Pollak decided to follow along with them, so he spent five weeks on
a cargo ship that was loaded with products bound for sale in the United States. Pollak boarded the ship in Hong Kong and traveled south to the Indian Ocean, then through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, past the Rock of Gibraltar and west across the Atlantic to New York City. He traveled on a ship called the Columbo Bay, which is also the name of the book he wrote about his journey. He begins that book with a confession.

Mr. RICHARD POLLAK (Author, the "Colombo Bay"): (Reading) `I am a landlubber. Though I grew up hard by Lake Michigan, the mighty ore boats on the horizon did not make me yearn to ship out for Duluth. My heroes were not Horatio Hornblower and John Paul Jones, but Superman, Batman and Robin, who dispatched not pirates but the bad guys of Metropolis and Gotham City, gritty urban realms like my own Chicago.'

INSKEEP: The city where Richard Pollak grew up. He's the author of the "Colombo Bay."

And given that, Mr. Pollak, after more than 60 years of life on land, what made you decide to go to sea?

Mr. POLLAK: I live in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River, and for the last several years, I've been kind of curious about where these ships go and
what they carry and what life on them is like.

INSKEEP: Now I'm looking here at a picture of the ship on the cover of the book. It looks like it's carrying stacks and stacks of railroad cars, almost, or the backs of semi-trailers: red, orange, blue and white.

Mr. POLLAK: Well, they go on railroad cars and semitrailers. They're called containers, and there were 3,500 of them aboard The Columbo Bay. The North
American consumer society would collapse without these ships. There are 7,000 of these ships on the high seas at any given moment; six million of these containers come into the United States every year. And it's an absolutely invisible universe to most consumers.

INSKEEP: Tell me about the guy who made container ships so common.

Mr. POLLAK: Well, his name is Malcolm McLean, and those who know about him in the shipping industry compare him to Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright
brothers. And that really is not such an exaggeration because he had the idea to stop this loading and unloading of ships by piece, which took a long, long time, and he says, `Why not put these products in a container at the loading dock, at the factory where they are made, put them on a truck or a train, take them to a dock, put them on a ship without taking them out of the container, just with a gantry, lift the container and put it on the ship, take it wherever it is going, take it off in the container, put it on a truck or train and take it to the consignee?' And that literally, in the last third of the 20th century, revolutionized world trade, perhaps the greatest revolution in world trade since the coming of steam in the beginning of the 19th century.

INSKEEP: Because it was so much more efficient than the old way of longshoremen picking off one object at a time and...

Mr. POLLAK: Correct. And one casualty of that has been longshoremen's unions because in the early '70s on the West Coast, the ILWU, the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union--there were a hundred thousand members; there are now 10,000 members. And that is simply the result of containerization.

INSKEEP: It's one thing to hear you say that you were on a single ship, one of thousands, and that single ship had 3,500 of these large containers. But I suppose it must be another thing to actually be on the ship and walking among them.

Mr. POLLAK: Well, it is. It's like you're kind of a second-class citizen to stuff.

INSKEEP: Could I get you to read on page 36, I believe it is? You have a description of some of the cargo on this ship.

SOUNDBITE OF PAGES BEING FLIPPED

Mr. POLLAK: All right. (Reading) `There are more than 3,000 containers on The Columbo Bay, most of them 40-footers, filled with hundreds of commodities: baby garments, puzzles, dolls, lamps, sporting goods, auto
parts, laminated bags, hand tools, machinery, meat, fruits and nuts. Much of this shipment consists of Jeeps, jungle fighters and other military action
figures made by a firm whose name would not have been likely to pass muster in the days of Mao: The Dabu Great Profit Toy Company Limited(ph).'

INSKEEP: Dabu Great Profit Toy Products Company. That's of China; that's a Chinese company.

Mr. POLLAK: Correct.

INSKEEP: What was the crew like?

Mr. POLLAK: There were eight British officers on this ship and 13 Filipino crew. They are on the ship for nine months at a crack. And containerization is so efficient, as you pointed out earlier, that when you get to port, you're not in port for days; you're in a port for a few hours. So there's really no time for the Filipinos or the British officers, who are on for
three months at a crack, to get any R&R.

INSKEEP: The Columbo Bay sailed from the port of Hong Kong on September 13th, 2001, so it was right after the September 11 attacks. It's surprising that you say it didn't really make the trip all that different, but I suppose it does raise questions about port security, doesn't it?

Mr. POLLAK: Well, it certainly does. Because this whole world is so invisible and because you, Steve, and I and most of our listeners fly and because the tragedy of 9/11 was a function of airplanes and because our politicians all fly, airport security gets $80 billion. But security for ports and for vessels is a second thought.

INSKEEP: Out of those millions of containers, how many do get opened and inspected?

Mr. POLLAK: Roughly 2 percent are inspected at all, and of that 2 percent,the number that are opened is tiny, and there's a reason for that. Containers have conditioned the world of commerce to depend on enormous efficiency and they want these boxes to move lickety-split along the supply chain. Wal-Mart and Target and other stores, they don't want these boxes
held up at the port of New York or the port of Los Angeles. They want them put on the trains and the trucks and moved to their warehouses as fast as
possible.

INSKEEP: I gather that the security reforms that the United States has tried to make have affected shipping crews, including some of the people that you
knew on board the Columbo Bay.

Mr. POLLAK: One of the distressing things that happened is that US visas were withdrawn, so that even the small amount of time that some of these men
managed to get in port before September 11th is now denied them. And immediately after September 11th, Shaquille Azim(ph), who was the second mate on The Columbo Bay and a British citizen, but he's Pakistani born--and his visa was just automatically lifted. And so when he calls in the United States, he can't get off the ship.

INSKEEP: Richard Pollak is the author of the "Colombo Bay." That's the title of his book and, also, the name of the ship that he took from Hong Kong to the United States.

Mr. Pollak, thanks very much.

Mr. POLLAK: Thank you.


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