The New York Times is featuring a new four part series, Outlaw Ocean, by Ian Urbina, which presents a vivid and disturbing look at crime at sea.  Definitely worth reading.

The first installment, Stowaways and Crimes Aboard Aboard a Scofflaw Ship, looks at the case of two desperate men from South Africa who have the bad luck to stowaway aboard the Dona Liberta, Greek refrigerated ship, notorious for not paying its crew, cheating creditors and fouling the oceans. Only one of the twos stowaways survived.

The second installment, Murder At Sea: Captured on Video, But Killers Go Free, begins with a highly disturbing video of men floating in the wreckage of some sort of boat, being shot by unseen gunmen on boats circling around them. The article looks at the impunity in which murders are committed on the high seas by pirates, smugglers and even rival fishing boats.

Too often, writing about ships and the sea is either sadly uninformed or intended to promote a specific agenda. In many cases every ship is called a either a tanker or a cruise ship and every tall ship is dubbed a pirate ship. On the other end of the spectrum, one often sees headlines claiming the “16 largest ships produce as much pollution as all the cars in the world” or that “cruise ships flushed more than a billion gallons of sewage into oceans again this year.”  Neither claim happens to be accurate but they do become click-bait, and are often repeated around the net.

Urbina’s accounts are vivid and disturbing. Obviously well researched, the facts presented occasionally lack context, altough there is only so much that can be addressed in a newspaper series. Amidst the well crafted onslaught of images and information, the real value is that the articles introduce the reader to a wholly different and often violent world, that is largely or entirely invisible to those who do not live with it day to day.

Urbina also writes in the “Times Insider” about the research that went into the series. No More Sea Blindness: Covering Stowaways on a Lawless Ocean and Weapons on the Water, Violence at Sea are both well worth reading.