Richard Pollak

In the face of killer storms, fires, piracy and the growing threat of terrorism, container ships the length of city blocks and more than a dozen stories high carry 90 percent of the world’s trade. This is an account of one ship’s voyage and of the sailors who daily risk their lives to deliver six million containers a year to U.S. ports alone. Inside the 20- and 40-foot steel boxes are the thousands of imports, from chinos and Game Boys to garlic and frozen shrimp, without which North America’s consumer society would collapse.

To explore this little-known universe of modern seafaring, Pollak joined P&O Nedlloyd's Colombo Bay in Hong Kong and over the next five weeks sailed with her and her 3,500 containers across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. En route, this mammoth vessel called at Singapore and Colombo, passed through the Suez Canal (toll: $250,000), then put in at Malta and Halifax before tangling with Hurricane Karen on the two-day run to New York. Here is the story of the ship’s unheralded 24-man company, of the unflappable British captain, Peter Davies, a veteran of four decades at sea; of Federico Castrojas, who like the rest of the hard working Filipino crew must daily confront the loneliness of being away from his family for nine months at a stretch; of Simon Westall, the 21-year-old third mate, who reveals what it is like to be gay in the broad-shouldered world of the merchant service.

It is a world where pirates in the Malacca Strait sneak up behind ships at night in fast power boats, then clamber aboard and either rob the unarmed sailors at gunpoint and escape into the dark or throw the crew into the sea and hijack the ship, plundering her cargo and sometimes repainting her and setting out to do business under another name and flag. It is a world where families desperate to get to the United States or Europe pay thousands of dollars to the Chinese Snakeheads and other criminal gangs, who secrete these wretched migrants in stifling containers; after a week or more at sea in their dark, fetid prisons, these stowaways arrive in the Promised Land either starving or dead.

Pollak, who at age sixty-seven never had been to sea, anticipated the unexpected, but nothing as catastrophic as what he awoke to in Hong Kong after flying from New York on September 10, 2001. Two days later he sailed into a changed world, on one of 7,000 container ships whose millions of uninspected boxes suddenly had become potential Trojan Horses in which terrorists could transport weapons of mass destruction into the heart of the United States.

Throughout his riveting narrative, Pollak interweaves the insights of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, whose masterful portrayals of seafaring make the voyage of the Colombo Bay a dramatic reminder of what a hard and rarely reported life merchant seamen have always led out on the “unhooped oceans of this planet.”

This is "a fascinating inside look at how everyday goods now get to their final destination," reports Library Journal, a book, concludes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, "that will delight any armchair sailor."

To read an excerpt, click here.