IMAGINE the beginning of a sea voyage, and you probably picture something like the frenetic preparations that Herman Melville describes in “Moby Dick”: “There was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming aboard, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging…the men…were working till long after nightfall.” Boarding a ship in that state was a perilous obstacle course.

Boarding a modern container ship, by contrast, is a simple and subdued process. You walk up a steep, narrow ladder, hand your passport to the officer on duty and follow him to the ship’s office—which, on Maersk’s giant, Danish-flagged vessels, is as clean and screen-stuffed as any on land. At most you pass one or two crewmen: modern ships are huge but their crews small. A short walk down a broad, fluorescent-lit hall and a brief ride in a lift—festooned, as on shore, with safety regulations—brings you to the bridge, a long, glassed-in eyrie ten storeys above the deck.

The bridge could easily accommodate 50 people, but at its busiest rarely holds more than ten. The high, surrounding windows and purposeful hush instil a vaguely ecclesiastical feel. At its centre is a large, sleek, wood-veneered steering wheel, used mainly when arriving and departing from ports. Otherwise the steering is automatic: if a human needs to intervene, he does so using a joystick the size of a child’s finger. Like the rest of the ship, the bridge smells of new-laid rubber and disinfectant—not an unpleasant smell, but a sterile one, with none of the undertones (tobacco, salt spray, fish, sweat) associated with sea journeys. Even in the ship’s bowels, the strongest odour is not the fuel oil used to power the engine but the coffee used to power the engineers.

Which artefact is the best emblem of modern life? The personal computer, perhaps, or the mobile phone, or the car. Or maybe, instead, the container ship, which transports all of those things and much besides: “90 Percent of Everything”, as the title of Rose George’s first-rate book on the shipping industry puts it. These ships are the workhorses of globalisation; they are also exemplars of another contemporary megatrend, automation. Their sterility would make them almost unrecognisable to Melville, the novelist-whaler, or to Joseph Conrad (who spent nearly two decades as a merchant marine).

Yet, as a crossing of the South China Sea on the Marie Maersk shows, not everything has changed. A voyage on these gigantic craft is a dizzying, paradoxical jumble of modernity and timelessness, gizmos and primitive wonderment.

Floating bazaars

Like the other giants in its class, the Marie Maersk was built for the profitable Asia-Europe route: from Busan and Kwangyang in South Korea, then along the eastern and southern Chinese coasts, down to Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal to Tangier and southern Spain, then up to Scandinavia by way of the Netherlands and Germany. Then back again; the round trip takes around six months. The kaleidoscopic cargo might include iPads, smartphones, cars, bulldozers, baseball caps and T-shirts from Chinese factories; then, on the return journey, fruits, chocolates, wine, watches and whisky.

The longest leg is from Malaysia to Port Said in Egypt. That takes ten increasingly stifling days—by the end, say the sailors, the containers that are refrigerated sweat almost as much as the crew. A power failure on this particular run would affect diners at sushi restaurants across Europe: among many other things, the containers hold 33,350 kilograms of frozen fish roe, loaded in Ningbo, China, plus roughly the same amount of surimi (the traffic-cone-orange fake crab that turns up in California rolls) and blast-frozen yellowfin tuna, both loaded in Kwangyang, South Korea, all bound for Gdansk or Algeciras. The scariest container is unrefrigerated. It contains 50 tonnes of fireworks, destined for Europe’s new year’s celebrations. The officers joke, mordantly and often, about what would happen if it caught fire.

The officers’ life has changed utterly. Legal documents from the 19th century refer to merchant-marine captains as “Masters under God” for the absolute authority they wielded. These days captains on European-flagged ships are bound by labour and safety regulations just like any other manager. That, in fact, is what they have become: neither snarling tyrants keelhauling miscreants, nor heroic helmsmen, but managers. Globalisation has made container ships the indispensable conveyances of the modern world. Automation has turned the men who sail them into administrators, overseers and technicians.

On this voyage, the Marie Maersk’s captain is John Moeller Jensen, a slight, shaggy Dane who wears his uniform in port but at sea prefers T-shirts and daringly short shorts. He has a wry, watchful manner and is a practised storyteller, given to punctuating his yarns with cartoon gestures, such as a riffling of hands to mime a corrupt port official pocketing money. “I’m not God sitting in an office,” Mr Jensen says of his daily rounds. “But you also have to keep a distance. You can’t play cards and go ashore with people and then fire them the next day.” It is easy to imagine him sacking someone: like many successful managers he can quickly turn serious, even lightly menacing. Recalling a confrontation with a phalanx of Chinese port inspectors, something behind his light-blue eyes switches off, his jaw clenches and he seems to grow taller.

When Mr Jensen started sailing in the mid-1970s, more than 30 people were needed to operate a container ship. The Marie Maersk crossed the South China Sea with 22, and can manage with 13. Jakob Skau, the chief officer, says that modern container ships can mostly sail themselves. People are there mainly to react to the (often irrational) behaviour of other people. Ship engines, like car engines, now self-diagnose: when something goes wrong they display the equivalent of a car’s “check engine” light. That means fewer engineers. Paint has become more weather-resistant, which means ABs (Able Bodied Seamen, the ship’s dogsbodies) spend less time painting—which means fewer ABs. E-mail has done away with radio officers. At night the only light on the bridge comes from the glow of screens showing the ship’s pre-plotted course, engine performance, ballast-tank levels and speed, while radar displays depict nearby vessels and their courses as blobs and contrails of lurid green.

Port calls that used to take a week now last eight hours. Cargo used to come in barrels, boxes, cartons, bundles and drums, all of which had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. Now cranes stack containers in an order predetermined thousands of miles away. At Tanjung Pelepas some containers await lorries to carry them up the Malay Peninsula, others the ships that will convey them to smaller ports: Sihanoukville, Brisbane, Auckland, Tanjung Priok. This efficiency has put paid to extended shore leave. “Sail around the world and see nothing,” jokes David Staven, the ship’s bearish third officer.

And if automation has made ships easier to sail, it has also made sailors easier to watch. Maersk’s are constantly monitored from a control centre in Mumbai, where a giant screen displays the position and course of every Maersk Line vessel in the world. The captain of a ship that deviates from its planned course or travels too quickly (thus using more fuel) can expect a prompt query. On this leg, for instance, Mr Jensen decides to sail east rather than west of the Paracel Islands, lengthening the journey but taking advantage of the current, which in October runs southward along the Vietnamese coast. “I send [the control centre] a long e-mail explaining our decision,” says Aditya Mohan, the ship’s swaggering, Marlboro-smoking second officer, “and when I don’t hear anything back, it’s because they know I’m right.”

Storms and silence

Still, sailing has always been tribal, and bean-counters on shore forever regarded as alien. The crew resembles those of Melville’s day in other ways, too. Then the American whaling industry was centred in Massachusetts, and many ships were owned by Quakers from Nantucket, but crews were wildly cosmopolitan. The Marie Maersk’s crew are Filipino, Danish, Ukrainian and Indian. Their meals reflect this diversity: Filipino greens, cooked in sweetened soy sauce, incomprehensible Danish cold cuts.

A mid-19th-century crewman described his quarters thus: “Black, and slimy with filth, very small and hot as an oven. It was filled with a compound of foul air, smoke, sea-chests, soap kegs, greasy pans, tainted meat.” Except for a couple of ABs, the crewmen on the Marie Maersk have their own rooms, which would pass muster at an American motel. The biggest complaint is the unreliable internet connection. “People come down,” says Mr Jensen, “have dinner for five or ten minutes, then go back to their laptops.” Mostly the sailors are motivated not by adventure or escape but by the salaries. Ronald Rivera, the engineer, says his is double what he could make in the Philippines.

At sea, even one of the world’s biggest ships is a speck in a vast, peaceful emptiness

Yet along with the mass-produced goods, container ships provide commodities that have grown increasingly rare. One is elemental awe: to board a ship is still to step into an in-between world, perhaps the only one this side of the grave defined equally by boredom and sublimity. Even when the ship pitches and rolls in a thunderstorm, the computers do the steering. But the crew watch. Eventually, as they come through, panels of white afternoon light slice through the grey on the horizon. Old hands stand transfixed, for a few moments, staring out through the bridge’s high windows.

Then there is the scale. Ishmael, who narrates “Moby Dick”, asks, “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage…did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?” That sense of smallness and transience remains thrilling. In port the Marie Maersk seems huge, and on a map the distance between southern China and Malaysia looks tiny. At sea, those proportions are reversed. Even one of the world’s biggest ships is a speck in a vast, peaceful emptiness. Beneath the sky is just sea, and above the sea just sky.

Finally, the silence. Conrad wrote that “the true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.” The Marie Maersk never gets that far on the South China Sea. But late one evening, after the captain has lingered at dinner telling old stories (sharkfishing off Mauritius; minatory pods of killer whales at Vancouver Island), natural-gas rigs belch commas of fire into the cloudless night. The ship sails forward, through a silent crescent of Vietnamese and Cambodian fishing boats, beneath an impossibly broad and luminous canopy of stars.