Step Up Marine Enterprise, the Singapore-based company that recruited Mr. Andrade and the other villagers, has a well-documented record of trouble, according to an examination of court records, police reports and case files in Singapore and the Philippines. In episodes dating back two decades, the company has been tied to trafficking, severe physical abuse, neglect, deceptive recruitment and failure to pay hundreds of seafarers in India, Indonesia, Mauritius, the Philippines and Tanzania.

Still, its owners have largely escaped accountability. Last year, for example, prosecutors opened the biggest trafficking case in Cambodian history, involving more than 1,000 fishermen, but had no jurisdiction to charge Step Up for recruiting them. In 2001, the Supreme Court of the Philippines harshly reprimanded Step Up and a partner company in Manila for systematically duping men, knowingly sending them to abusive employers and cheating them, but Step Up’s owners faced no penalties.

The Philippine authorities have charged 11 people tied to Step Up with trafficking and illegal recruitment of Mr. Andrade and others from the Philippines. But only one person, allegedly a low-level culprit, has been arrested and is likely to be tried: Celia Robelo, 46, who faces a potential life sentence for what prosecutors say was a recruiting effort that earned her at most $20 in commissions.

Mr. Andrade’s story was pieced together from interviews with his family, other seamen recruited in or near his village, police officers, lawyers and aid workers in Jakarta, Manila and Singapore. It highlights the tools — debt, trickery, fear, violence, shame and family ties — used to recruit men, entrap them and leave them at sea, sometimes for years under harsh conditions.

No country exports more seafarers than the Philippines, which provides roughly a quarter of them globally. More than 400,000 Filipinos sought work last year as officers, deckhands, fishermen, cargo handlers and cruise workers. Mr. Andrade’s death shows that governments are sometimes unable or unwilling to protect the rights of citizens far from home.

The abuse of Filipino seamen has increased in recent years, labor officials in the Philippines say, because the country’s maritime trade schools produce, on average, 20,000 graduates a year for fewer than 5,000 openings. As men grow desperate for work, they take greater risks. Roughly a third of them now use agencies that are illegal — unregistered and willing to break rules, the officials said.

Such agencies, favored by ship operators and workers looking to shave costs, compound the problem of lawlessness on the high seas. Scofflaw ships cast off stowaways and deplete fishing stocks. Violence is rampant, and few nations patrol the waters, much less enforce violations of maritime laws or international pacts.