Transported by the romance of the high seas, and by container ships

The thought of five weeks at sea, far from the comforts of home, would be daunting for most people. But when Rose George stood at the dockside in Felixstowe, in eastern England, staring up at the giant container ship that would take her 17,201km to Singapore – via six ports, five seas and two oceans – she felt like a giddy child, alive with excitement.

She had her own reasons for relishing the idea of escape. Her stepfather, after suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years, had recently become violent, and had to be sectioned. George had been ill herself, too.

Knowing that her mother and stepfather were safe and secure, she felt free to run away to “the world’s wildest place”: the ocean. “I felt guiltily relieved,” says George. “There’s nothing you can do when you’re out there in the middle of nowhere. It’s a selfish place, the sea.”

Besides, she was writing a book about the hidden world of global shipping, Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything, and how better to get to grips with it than to spend 39 days on an 80,000-tonne container ship, the Maersk Kendal?

George points out that we have become increasingly cut off from the sea. “Over the last 100 years or so we have seen an increasing disconnection between consumer and product,” she says. “We don’t make stuff any more; we don’t know where things come from, as long as they’re there when we want them. In Ireland and the UK there used to be many seafarers, but not any more; ship owners often employ foreign crews. Now the sea is seen as something to be used for leisure, yachting and so on. Otherwise you just fly over it.”

This “flight of the ocean from our consciousness”, as George puts it, means we are blind to what happens out there: the loneliness, the lawlessness, the vast, slow, global procession of container ships carrying thousands of boxes, bringing us almost all the items that enable our daily lives.

The popular notion that most foreign goods arrive by cargo plane turns out to be false. “Planes are only for perishables, or for crises and cock-ups,” says George. “Ninety per cent of all trade travels by sea.”

And it’s cheap, ludicrously cheap: it costs only a cent or two to send a T-shirt halfway around the world. George discovered that it made more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent 16,000km to China to be filleted and then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants than to simply pay Scottish filleters. It sounds bizarre, but, as George remarks in her book, that’s “just shipping”.

This industry operates according to its own mysterious rules and obscure logic. Often the crew members don’t know and don’t care what’s in the boxes they are carrying. Only 13 per cent of containers in Europe are physically inspected; worldwide, George estimates, the rate of inspection is between 2 and 10 per cent. Flags of convenience used by 70 per cent of ships mean that operators pay lower taxes, have no obligation to employ unionised crew, and offer anonymity.

It’s unsurprising that people traffickers and drug barons are drawn to the vast wild west of the seas. Even al-Qaeda is thought to own or charter its own small fleet.

Although shipping is probably a greener form of cargo transportation than planes and trucks, George explains that it’s certainly not benign, as there is just so much of it. It emits a billion tonnes of carbon a year and is responsible for nearly 4 per cent of greenhouse gases. These giant freighters burn “bunker fuel” – “really disgusting stuff, the dregs of the refinery,” says George – and each one can send as much pollution into the atmosphere as a coal-fired power station.

Life aboard sounds monotonous and repetitive: nothing to do, nowhere to go, no internet except the dial-up variety, and a series of unappetising meals. But George found the simple routine curiously soothing. “I slept really well, I got up whenever I wanted, I read books and I went to the gym. I had cushions, I had coffee. I suppose you just remember the good stuff; there must have definitely been times when I was going stir crazy. And I understand that it would have been different if I was actually working there”– as George notes, some seafarers joke that their job is like being in prison with a salary – “but for me it felt like home during that five-week period.”

There were moments of extraordinary beauty: off the Sumatran coast, George watched in delight as pod after pod of dolphins raced the bow of the ship. But even in times of real fear, when they were travelling the dangerous, pirate-ridden parts of the Indian Ocean – the portholes blocked against potential invaders, her imagination running “as wild as the waves” – she never regretted making the journey.

And when they finally reached Singapore she was melancholy. If she’d been given the chance, George says, she would have happily gone back up the gangway and done the whole voyage all over again.