StayAwayMonday

The notion that terrorist sleepers could be aboard ships raised a few skeptical eyebrows. However, on February 19, 2002, in a joint naval operation, American and Italian forces intercepted the general cargo vessel Twillinger at Trieste and discovered aboard eight Al-Qaeda operatives posing as crewmen. On August 5, the tramp steamer Sara, on a passage from Morocco, was intercepted off the shores of Sicily with fifteen Pakistanis holding false seafarers’ credentials; Italian officials identified them as Al-Qaeda operatives. Both vessels were part of the same fleet as the Karine-A, the small cargo ship that was arrested in early 2002 for carrying weapons to the Palestinians; all three were registered in Tonga, under a flag of convenience. The Sara was a phantom ship, and the vessel’s original name had been sloppily painted over.

Last night we were either “pirated” or we picked up a stowaway. A stowaway is worse. If the stowaway is Vietnamese and we find him, then we can hand him over to the local police: best-case scenario. But if he is a Filipino who boarded when the ship called in at the Philippines some weeks ago, then Petroships would have to find a country that would accept him. Few countries would. Captain Than tells me that some stowaways have been known to remain on a vessel for as long as a year, locked in the cabin when in port, free to roam the ship when at sea. One Shell tanker had picked up a stowaway in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They tried to get rid of him in a half-dozen ports in the Mediterranean and Europe but no one would take him. The ship had to keep him on board until it returned to the East African port many months later. “Greek ships—they find stowaway,” Captain Than says, “they throw overboard. That is easier. They don’t want the problems.

Four months after the collision, workers at the breaker’s yard of the Guangdong Shunde Shipwrecking Company in southern China were beginning to dismantle a 17,000-ton cargo vessel then called the Hai Sin when they noticed a putrid stench coming from somewhere down below. Cautiously they opened the heavy doors of the ship’s long-idle walk-in refrigerators and found, piled in ashen, decomposed knots, ten charred corpses—many naked, none with any personal effects or identification. Their bodies had been doused with gasoline and torched. Eric Ellen, a former chief constable of the Port of London, was the man who created the International Maritime Bureau. Until he retired, he had waged a twenty-year war against high seas piracy. The attack on the Nagasaki Spirit and Ocean Blessing and the discoveries of the corpses on the Hai Sin occurred on his watch. The Hai Sin, an investigation revealed, was the missing Erria Inge, an Australian-flagged bulk carrier pirated a year earlier. Ellen believes that the bodies found in the reefer of the Erria Inge were some of the crew of the Nagasaki Spirit. How they got there is a mystery; theories abound, but Ellen and others think it could be evidence of murder. Examination of the remains by a forensic pathologist led to conclusion that the bodies were probably Caucasian and not Chinese. “The bodies had no sign of injury,” Ellen says. “When found, they were badly burned and there was a smell of petrol. I can think of no other reason why the bodies should have been in the refrigerator room unless they had been picked up from the sea. That they might have been refugees can easily be discounted. They were not crew of the Erria Inge. There were no other reports of missing persons.” Perhaps more to the point is that no authority even to this day has investigated how ten corpses could be stashed in the cold stores of a stolen ship. Equally dismaying is that no investigative authority has looked into what happened to the forty-four missing crewmen from the collision. “If ten rotting corpses were found in an apartment in New York or London,” Ellen says, “police inquiries would be relentless. If a crime is committed in international waters, then life is a cheap commodity,” a statement that pretty well covers the infrequent and usually futile efforts to track down and apprehend these sorts of pirates. “Nobody is interested in what happened to the crews—they are not even statistics.

When there is a ship available and the price is right and the demand is there, they will move the crude wherever. The conveyor may change direction but it never stops. It is not unusual for one of these big M-class vessels to lift at Saudi, steam down the Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz, then hover off the Omani coast and wait until the charterer finds a buyer for the floating 300,000 tons of crude oil. Only then will the captain of that vessel know where on the globe he is heading.

The difficulty lies in the large amount of time it takes to eat raw food. Great apes allow us to estimate it. Simply because they are big—30 kilograms (66 pounds) and more—they need a lot of food and a lot of time to chew. Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, spend more than six hours a day chewing. Six hours may seem high considering that most of their food is ripe fruit. Bananas or grapefruit would slip down their throats easily, and for this reason, chimpanzees readily raid the plantations of people living near their territories. But wild fruits are not nearly as rewarding as those domesticated fruits. The edible pulp of a forest fruit is often physically hard, and it may be protected by a skin, coat, or hairs that have to be removed. Most fruits have to be chewed for a long time before the pulp can be fully detached from the pieces of skin or seeds, and before the solid pieces are mashed enough to give up their valuable nutrients. Leaves, the next most important food for chimpanzees, are also tough and likewise take a long time to chew into pieces small enough for efficient digestion. The other great apes (bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) commit similarly long hours to chewing their food. Because the amount of time spent chewing is related to body size among primates, we can estimate how long humans would be obliged to spend chewing if we lived on the same kind of raw food that great apes do. Conservatively, it would be 42 percent of the day, or just over five hours of chewing in a twelve-hour day.

Even more distinctive of humans is that each sex eats not only from the food items they have collected themselves, but also from their partner’s finds. Not even a hint of this complementarity is found among nonhuman primates. Plenty of primates, such as gibbons and gorillas, have family groups. Females and males in those species spend all day together, are nice to each other, and bring up their offspring together, but, unlike people, the adults never give each other food. Human couples, by contrast, are expected to do so.

Steak tartare supposedly gets its name from the Tartars, or Mongols, who rode in Genghis Khan’s army. When soldiers were moving too fast to cook, they sometimes drank horse blood but they were also reported to put slabs of meat under the saddles, riding on them all day until they were tender.

Raw eggs would seem to provide an excellent food supply not only because their protein needs no chewing but also because their chemical composition is ideal. The amino acids of chicken eggs come in about forty proteins in almost exactly the proportions humans require. The match gives eggs a higher biological value—a measure of the rate at which the protein in food supports growth—than the protein of any other known food, even milk, meat, or soybeans. Raw eggs have other natural advantages. Their shells make them safer from bacterial contamination than cuts of meat. When aborigines on the beaches of Australia’s tropical north coast are thirsty, they look for turtle nests and readily drink raw egg whites. Eggs are the only unprocessed animal food that can safely be stored at room temperature for several weeks.

It is hard to find anything similar to Egyptian or Mesopotamian beer today since very few unhopped beers are made commercially. A rare exception is the King Cnut Ale made by St. Peter’s, a British brewery, based on a recipe from the first millennium CE and named for King Canute, the eleventh-century ruler of Denmark, Norway, and England. It is made with barley, juniper, orange and lemon peel, spices, and nettles. It resembles beer, but without the bitterness of the hops it tastes sweet and fruity—and, in fact, rather like wine. Drink this beer, and you will understand why Nabonidus, the last king of the NeoBabylonian Empire, referred to wine as “the excellent ‘beer’ of the mountains.” Another example of an unhopped beer that is still made today is Sahti, a Finnish folk beer. Michael Jackson, a beer expert, calls it “the last primitive beer to survive in Europe.” Traditionally a seasonal beer, it is available all year round at Zetor, a pub in the center of Helsinki, where it is kept in plastic kegs in a fridge. It has a bouquet of stewed chicory and the tang of a wheat beer but, of course, no hops. Instead, as with King Cnut Ale, juniper berries are used to balance the taste of the grain.