Imagine the Empire State Building. Now imagine tipping it on its side, nudging it into the Hudson, and putting out to sea. That was the scale of thing I contemplated one day in late November, as I gaped at the immense navy hull of CMA CGM Christophe Colomb, one of the world’s largest container ships, which stretched above and out of sight on either side of me, on a quayside in Hong Kong. Nearly twelve hundred feet long, it’s bigger than an aircraft carrier and longer than the world’s largest cruise ships. On Christophe Colomb, all of that space goes to boxes. The ship has a capacity of 13,344TEUs—“twenty-foot equivalent units,” the size of a standard shipping container. These are stacked seven high above deck and another six to eight below. In cheerful shades of turquoise, maroon, navy, gold, and green, they look like a set of Legos designed for a young giant.
Trying to see where one even boards such a vessel, I noticed a steep aluminum gangway and went up its seventy-four steps, through two hatches, and into the eight-story “castle” that sits above the main deck and houses the ship’s living quarters, offices, and bridge. This was to be my home for nearly four weeks, as I took passage on Christophe Colomb from Hong Kong to Southampton, England, via the Suez Canal. (...)
In the 1960s, the shipping industry was transformed by the widespread adoption of the standardized shipping container. Developed by American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean, the container served as a one-size-fits-all package for goods. These twenty-foot boxes could be packed at the place of consignment (whether a factory, a warehouse, or a person’s front door), hitched up to a truck, driven to the quayside, lifted off the truck by a crane, and loaded directly into their designated places in a ship’s hold—thus eliminating expensive, time-consuming transfers from land transport to port warehouse, warehouse to ship hold. If 13,000 containers seem like a lot to load onto a ship, consider what it was like when every single item within those containers would have to be loaded individually; inventories of even modest-sized ships in the pre-container age ran into the hundreds of thousands of items. Now it can take less than a minute for a gantry crane to grab a container off the quayside, lift, swing, and drop it into place on a ship, then slide immediately back for another. (...)
When a container ship arrives in port today, it slides into a 24/7 operation superintended by logistics experts in distant offices. On board ship, the chief officer checks to make sure things go according to the computerized plan sent to him by the logistics office. As we watched the boxes pile on board Christophe Colomb in Hong Kong, I asked the chief officer if he had any idea what was in them. He shrugged, not even curious. All he knows—all anybody on board knows—is whether they need to be refrigerated, or whether they contain hazardous materials and need to be placed in a secure storage area. A port call lasts only six to twenty-four hours, and sailors rarely bother to get off the boat. The containers thus put up a wall between sea and land, making each side less accessible to the other.
By reducing the cost of transport, containerization accelerated a process of global economic integration whose earlier stages Conrad had witnessed. Today “shipping is so cheap,” writes the British journalist Rose George in Ninety Percent of Everything, “that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters.” Residents of the English port city Southampton were recently asked what percentage of goods they thought traveled by sea. All their answers, George says, “had the interrogative upswing of the unsure. ‘Thirty-five percent?’ ‘Not a lot?’ The answer is, nearly everything.” Ninety percent of everything, to be more accurate: most of the clothes you put on this morning; the coffee or tea you drank; your car, or at least parts of it, and some of the gas you put into it; your computer, television, phone, earphones—in short, the stuff of daily life.
Trying to see where one even boards such a vessel, I noticed a steep aluminum gangway and went up its seventy-four steps, through two hatches, and into the eight-story “castle” that sits above the main deck and houses the ship’s living quarters, offices, and bridge. This was to be my home for nearly four weeks, as I took passage on Christophe Colomb from Hong Kong to Southampton, England, via the Suez Canal. (...)In the 1960s, the shipping industry was transformed by the widespread adoption of the standardized shipping container. Developed by American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean, the container served as a one-size-fits-all package for goods. These twenty-foot boxes could be packed at the place of consignment (whether a factory, a warehouse, or a person’s front door), hitched up to a truck, driven to the quayside, lifted off the truck by a crane, and loaded directly into their designated places in a ship’s hold—thus eliminating expensive, time-consuming transfers from land transport to port warehouse, warehouse to ship hold. If 13,000 containers seem like a lot to load onto a ship, consider what it was like when every single item within those containers would have to be loaded individually; inventories of even modest-sized ships in the pre-container age ran into the hundreds of thousands of items. Now it can take less than a minute for a gantry crane to grab a container off the quayside, lift, swing, and drop it into place on a ship, then slide immediately back for another. (...)
When a container ship arrives in port today, it slides into a 24/7 operation superintended by logistics experts in distant offices. On board ship, the chief officer checks to make sure things go according to the computerized plan sent to him by the logistics office. As we watched the boxes pile on board Christophe Colomb in Hong Kong, I asked the chief officer if he had any idea what was in them. He shrugged, not even curious. All he knows—all anybody on board knows—is whether they need to be refrigerated, or whether they contain hazardous materials and need to be placed in a secure storage area. A port call lasts only six to twenty-four hours, and sailors rarely bother to get off the boat. The containers thus put up a wall between sea and land, making each side less accessible to the other.
By reducing the cost of transport, containerization accelerated a process of global economic integration whose earlier stages Conrad had witnessed. Today “shipping is so cheap,” writes the British journalist Rose George in Ninety Percent of Everything, “that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters.” Residents of the English port city Southampton were recently asked what percentage of goods they thought traveled by sea. All their answers, George says, “had the interrogative upswing of the unsure. ‘Thirty-five percent?’ ‘Not a lot?’ The answer is, nearly everything.” Ninety percent of everything, to be more accurate: most of the clothes you put on this morning; the coffee or tea you drank; your car, or at least parts of it, and some of the gas you put into it; your computer, television, phone, earphones—in short, the stuff of daily life.
by Maya Jasanoff, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Ocean/Corbis
