If that sounds like typically combative union rhetoric, ITF will point to, for a start, the £20 million they recovered in 2010 of wages unpaid to seafarers who had earned the money. The blankness of that blue sea on our maps of the earth applies to the people who work on it too: buy your Fairtrade coffee beans, by all means, but don’t assume that Fairtrade governs the conditions of the people who fetch it to you. You would be mistaken. The great Norwegian-American seafarer unionist Andrew Furuseth – known as Lincoln of the Sea for his cheekbones and achievements – was once threatened with prison for violating an injunction during a 1904 strike. 'You can throw me in jail,’ he responded. 'But you can’t give me narrower quarters than, as a seaman, I’ve always lived in, or a coarser food than I’ve always eaten, or make me lonelier than I’ve always been.’ More than a century on, seafarers still regularly joke that their job is like being in prison with a salary. That is not accurate. When the academic Erol Kahveci surveyed British prison literature while researching conditions at sea, he found that 'the provision of leisure, recreation, religious service and communication facilities are better in UK prisons than… on many ships our respondents worked aboard.’