Issue Fifteen

IAN URBINA

Farinella, who is softly spoken with a shaved head, neatly trimmed beard and full sleeve of tattoos, was excited about the prospect of living abroad for the first time. True, this would be a high-pressure job, and he would miss Christa, his wife, but he had negotiated a salary of $300,000 a year, more than double what he’d earned at another seafood company in the United States. He joked that he was now the best paid shrimp worker who did not own his own company.

IAN URBINA

The men are helpless in the open water, clinging to floating debris, tossed by the rolling ocean waves. Several large fishing ships circle. None of the victims have life jackets, but no one makes a move to help. This isn’t a rescue.

A voice, off camera, shouts in Mandarin: “In the front, to the left! What are you doing?” Then: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

IAN URBINA

While forced labour exists throughout the world, nowhere is the problem more rampant than in the South China Sea, and especially in the Thai fishing fleet. Tens of thousands of migrants from Cambodia and Myanmar are whispered into Thailand each year to make up a chronic shortfall of mariners. Then, unscrupulous captains buy and sell the men and boys.

IAN URBINA

There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: Too big to police and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation of the marine life below the surface and the humans working the boats above it.

IAN URBINA

SONGKHLA, Thailand — Lang Long’s ordeal began in the back of a truck. After watching his younger siblings go hungry because their family’s rice patch in Cambodia could not provide for everyone, he accepted a trafficker’s offer to travel across the Thai border for a construction job.

It was his chance to start over. But when he arrived, Mr. Long was kept for days by armed men in a room near the port at Samut Prakan, more than a dozen miles southeast of Bangkok.

SCOTT REID

The boy was to work, and the work was to make him a man. The conversation ended upon the satisfaction of all parties. The boy would work, and his sisters could go to school. It was simple. And that’s what a man does, he sacrifices. See you in three months said the father to the son. See you in three months he replied.   

PUSHPANJALI KUMARI

Nights creep closer, like the ghost in charge

of overseeing the soundless beheading

of every creature that emerges from the sea,

in silent anticipation of its own turn.

CATH DRAKE

Her house  brims with penguins  

and penguins  have such flexibility.   

They can be any household item, 

 interchangeable with unicorns,  

Shrek or bow-tied bears.

EUNICE ANDRADA

What did you do

when no one looked? I wasn’t there.

In my absence, I paraphrase,

I parasite. My imagination

serrated by empire.

IAN URBINA

The area’s unpredictable depths have also meant that, over the centuries, merchant ships and explorers tended to avoid these waters. It has long been the type of fantastical realm so uncharted that on the old maps, it would be designated, ‘Here Be Monsters.’

IAN URBINA

Often described as the lungs of the ocean, seagrasses capture about a fifth of all its carbon and they are home to vast biodiversity. Thousands of species, including in the Saya de Malha Bank, many as yet unknown to science, depend on seagrasses for their survival.

To avoid wasting space in the ship hold, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It’s a wasteful process and a slow death, as the sharks, still alive but unable to swim, sink to the seafloor. To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crew to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port, off books.

IAN URBINA

In one of his last calls to his family through Facebook, Khunsena said he had witnessed a fight that resulted in more than one death. He said the body of a crew member who was killed was brought back to the ship and kept in the freezer. When his family pressed for details, Khunsena said he would tell them more later.

IAN URBINA

Vast and sometimes brutal, the high seas are also a place of aspiration, reinvention and an escape from rules. This is why the oceans have long been a magnet for libertarians hoping to flee governments, taxes and other people by creating their own sovereign micronations in international waters.

The Saya de Malha Bank has been especially attractive for such ambitions.

IAN URBINA

To vacuum up the treasured nodules requires industrial extraction by massive excavators. Typically 30 times the weight of regular bulldozers, these machines are lifted by cranes over the sides of ships, then lowered miles underwater, where they drive along the sea floor, suctioning up the rocks, crushing them and sending a slurry of pulverized nodules and seabed sediments  through a series of pipes to the vessel above.

IAN URBINA

The trawlers dragged their nets over the ocean floor, scooping up various types of forage fish, as well as brushtooth lizardfish, round scad, and sharks. Their catch would be turned into protein-rich fishmeal that gets fed to chickens, pigs, and aquaculture fish.

The illegal or unregulated behavior of this fleet has since been well documented. At least 30 of them had arrived in the Bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, according to a report from Greenpeace.