Power and Empire

Captain Leong Tang, a thirty-two-year veteran of China Global Shipping Lines, pressed the small of his weary back against a leaning post on the bridge of Orion. It was dark outside, but his running lights pushed back the night and illuminated the expansive deck of the great ship.

The big low-pressure system whirling up from the southwest had chased Orion across the 124 line and into the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca two hours before. The Canadians controlled the separation of shipping traffic up to roughly the 124th meridian of longitude, but when inbound traffic passed Cape Flattery, U.S. Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Services took control. Seattle Traffic already knew they were coming, even before they took over from the Canadians. Like every legal commercial ship on the seas, Orion’s automated information system broadcast a unique identifier. Much like an air traffic controller, the vessel traffic coordinator called in periodically to make Orion aware of other commercial vessels, logging tugs, or some other such hazard. Shipping was an around-the-clock business, but Captain Leong could relax and sip his coffee here, even amid the blow outside. Compared to Shanghai, the strait was comparatively dead this time of night. The young woman working VTS was all business but cordial enough. She understood Leong’s English — which many other people didn’t, no matter how much he studied.

Leong consulted the electronic chart plotter above his console, leaned in to make out the numbers, then nodded to himself. They’d make Ediz Hook in just over an hour. There, they would pick up the pilot who’d drive the ship the rest of the way into the Port of Seattle.

He took a sip of Sumatran coffee from a ceramic mug that bore the image of a blue-and-silver Dallas Cowboys football helmet. He was not a fan of the team or the game. He only kept the mug because, though it signified something so uniquely American, it had MADE IN CHINA etched on the underside. Culturally, Captain Leong should have been drinking tea, but the rigors and travels of a sea captain’s life had simply taught him to know better. Chinese tea had a place among women and gentle souls, but sea captains needed coffee, and Captain Leong preferred beans from Sumatra, made even smoother when drunk from his made-in-China Dallas Cowboys mug.

He’d departed Dalian fifteen days before, steaming his way down the eastern coast along the Yellow Sea to make stops in the ports of Tianjin and Qingdao. He topped off his ship at the frenetic Port of Shanghai with six thousand more TEUs filled with buttons, eyeglasses, smartphones, dinnerware, and countless other shiny trinkets bound for American consumers. There were, no doubt, a few drugs and an illicit weapon or two hidden in some of the containers, but the captain was a freight man, not a smuggler.

Anything illegal on board was the fault of the shipper, not the ship.

Captain Leong and his crew of thirty-one souls — seven officers and twenty-four “ratings,” or able-bodied seamen — had steamed Orion out of the busiest seaport in the world at precisely midnight. Navigating the heavily used sea lanes was made easier for the monstrous ship by a harbor pilot and two tugboats. They left under cover of darkness, not because they wanted to hide anything, but because that’s when the last TEU was secured to the deck and the final piece of paperwork was signed and stamped by port officials. Captain Leong wanted his ship loading, unloading, or sailing. Anything else was wasted time — and money.

At 165,000 tons, and fifty meters longer than an American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, Orion required a great deal of space for the basic maneuvers of simply stopping and turning. Two tugboats worked in concert with the Shanghai pilot on board to assist her in negotiating the crowded waters of the harbor, one ready to bump the side, the other with a steering cable off the ship’s stern. They cleared the entrance in less than an hour. The pilot exited through the bunker door below the bridge castle and hopped onto one of the tugs, leaving the huge vessel to her own devices and the crew’s good seamanship.

Orion’s powerful Wärtsilä diesel pushed her northeast on glassy seas at a steady twenty-two knots. The design of his mammoth container vessel made it impossible for Captain Leong to see the water directly around his ship, but he could imagine Orion’s bulbous bow pushing up a frothy white wake on either side. A British sailor would say she’d “taken the bone in her teeth.”

The crew had watched the sparkling lights of Shanghai grow dim and finally wink out behind them, leaving them alone in the purple night. Shortly after sunrise, Orion sailed below the southern Japanese island of Kyushu to catch the dark waters of the Kuroshio Current. Similar to the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, the Kuroshio flowed up from the equator, pushing her warm waters north and east — and saving Captain Leong and his company precious fuel.