THE OUTLAW OCEAN

Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

By Ian Urbina

If you’re like I am, you don’t think much about the oceans — what Ernest Shackleton called “the void spaces of the world.” When I’ve thought about them, it’s mostly in the context of how they affect the land: what rising sea levels mean for coastal cities, for example, or how the Gulf Stream shapes the Arctic climate. In “The Outlaw Ocean,” the journalist Ian Urbina highlights how, in overlooking the seas, we’ve allowed that void to become a vacuum for corruption, violence and lawlessness, a stage for gruesome deaths and even more gruesome lives — and then he brings us into intimate contact with those lives, forcing witness.

“The Outlaw Ocean” represents a four-year project, built on a series of deeply reported features for The New York Times that brought Urbina from the Antarctic to Somalia — but most of it takes place in the impenetrable vastness of the high seas, a region that begins 13 miles from shore. Each chapter tells a different story, in locations ranging from the City of Lights, a glowing patch of the Atlantic where hundreds of poachers shine light into the water to catch squid, to unmarked pirate ships and even cruise ships, which Urbina calls “a kind of gentrification of the ocean.”

Many of these stories revolve around the lives of fishermen, who are overwhelmingly poor and unprotected. We meet 31-year-old Eril Andrade, an aspiring policeman who traveled to Singapore for a deckhand job and was sent home to the Philippines dead, seven months later, his body blackened from the onboard freezer. In tracking Andrade’s course, Urbina uncovers a network of exploitation, piecing together a path that leads to a greasy, urine-scented apartment — with a manager who rapes the prospective fishermen at night — to tuna ships where the crew members are routinely threatened and beaten. But more than that, he uncovers a system designed to prevent accountability. The ocean “lends itself to a bystander’s syndrome: a pathological and unshakable assumption that someone else will police those crimes or fix those wrongdoings. … This void is not a tragedy but an opportunity.” In other words, for those who employ fishermen, the impunity is the point.