The hearts of all maritime workers stopped earlier this month when news hit that the ship El Faro, a US-flagged cargo vessel with thirty-three crew members aboard, was dead in the water north of the Bahamas with no propulsion power and directly in the path of a rapidly intensifying Hurricane Joaquin.

At 7 AM on October 1, within thirty hours of departing Jacksonville, FL, the captain made satellite contact with TOTE, the ship’s owner. While that conversation has not been made public, apparently the ship had taken on water in a hold, listing her dangerously. And without a powered propeller, El Faro was helpless before waves that reached fifty feet and a counter-clockwise spiral of winds up to 125 miles per hour. It was sucked into the eyewall of a Category Four hurricane.

Within twenty minutes of the ship captain’s final communications with the ship’s owner, the US Coast Guard reported that El Faro’s signals from her Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beam had stopped. The Coast Guard immediately contacted the shipowner and was informed of its daunting conditions. But efforts by the Coast Guard to communicate with the El Faro were futile. The ship had disappeared into the deep. A quick, dark fate awaited the crew.

Now, at the same time the crews’ family and mariners around the world are in mourning, shipowners and their friends in the media are diverting attention from the real cause of the disaster.

On Monday, the conservative National Review cried crocodile tears, opining: “Hurricane Joaquin wasn’t the sole culprit; it had an accomplice, and that accomplice is a monstrous piece of legislation known as the Jones Act.”

Passed in 1920, the Jones Act was promulgated to ensure that US coastal waterways trade remains open to American unions, i.e. ships were required to be built and manned by American citizens. A key sector of maritime interests complain that union wages make it too costly and would prefer highly exploited, nonunion crews from Third World countries and build ships elsewhere. Dumping the Jones Act would destroy maritime unions and make the maritime industry a free-trade zone on steroids.

But it wasn’t the Jones Act that sunk the El Faro and its crew. More likely is that it was TOTE’s drive for profit.

In fact, before the El Faro left from Jacksonville, it had already been forecast that then–Tropical Storm Joaquin would develop into a hurricane by the next morning — and it was heading directly into the ship’s charted navigational course.

Aware of the deadly weather prior to El Faro’s departure, TOTE Maritime could have ordered a course change or even delayed the departure. Had El Faro gone down the coast of Florida, it would have lengthened the journey. But she and her crew could have avoided the hurricane, sought a safe haven, or at least had a better chance of rescue had Hurricane Joaquin turned in that direction.

For whatever reason, on the Tacoma-to-Anchorage run, a Tacoma longshoreman tells me that TOTE ships took the Inside Passage from Vancouver Island up the coast to Alaska for safe sailing when there was a storm forecast. Why didn’t the ship sailing from Jacksonville similarly steer clear of harm’s way?

For TOTE and other shipowners, time is money. Typically that means captains are under tremendous pressure to deliver cargo as quickly as possible. But the opposite can be true as well. During the 1970s oil crisis, I was at the helm of a tanker traveling from the Gulf to New York. With lines at gas stations getting longer and longer, we were ordered to slow down — prices, and oil companies’ profits, were skyrocketing by the hour.

The drive for profit can also impel companies to forgo needed repairs. In the case of El Faro, TOTE refused to have the ship’s engines and structural welding repaired before departure — or better yet, to have her replaced with a newer ship. (One experienced longshoreman in San Juan who’d worked the El Faro frequently told me the ship was scheduled to have her engines replaced.)

Crew members and dockworkers alike complained about the lack of safety. Chris Cash, whose last voyage on El Faro ended in January, told CNN the ship was fit for the scrap yard. “It was a rust bucket,” Cash said. “They were bandaging the ship with extra steel all the time… It seemed like they didn’t want to put any money into the ship. When things would break they would just patch it up rather than really fix it.”

It also appears that the past repairs might have undermined the ship’s seaworthiness. In 1993, the owner retrofitted it in Alabama Shipyard, adding a midbody and lengthening her ninety-one feet with stacked tiers to accommodate more containers (and thus generate more money). The San Juan longshoreman said, “it would make it top heavy and less safe to maneuver under tough sea conditions.”

TOTE claims that the El Faro was regularly inspected by the American Bureau of Shipping and the US Coast Guard. They should have no problem opening their books to the public then.

There were other telltale signs of dangerous cost-cutting. The five Poles who perished on the El Faro were a “riding crew” — a group of additional workers brought on board to complete special projects due to inadequate manning for essential maintenance. Reduced to skeleton crews, many ships now rely on these ridings crews. The riding crew aboard El Faro, Cash said, was there to weld. But proper welding and repairs should have been done on the forty-year old vessel in a shipyard to maintain and repair the ship’s structural integrity and stop leaks like the one workers identified in the cook’s porthole.

But bowing to concerns about crew’s safety by delaying the sailing time or making potentially live-saving repairs diminishes profits. So, companies often don’t.

This is not a new sea story. Tales of horror — where lives were sacrificed at the altar of corporate greed — have been told by the greatest sailor writers: Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Jack London, Mike Quin, and especially B. Traven in The Death Ship. All excoriate the base motive — profit.