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       Route-Making

      We think of paths as existing only on land, but the sea has its paths too, though water refuses to take and hold marks … Sea roads are dissolving paths whose passage leaves no trace beyond the wake, a brief turbulence astern. They survive as conventions, tradition, a sequence of coordinates, as a series of waymarks, as dotted lines on charts, and as stories and songs.

      Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways

      The first time I travelled on a freighter, I boarded CMA CGM Corte Real in Malta in a Mediterranean winter. Though the headquarters of CMA CGM is in a building designed by Zaha Hadid in Marseille, the company’s European transport hub is in Malta. Malta’s free-port designation protects shippers from taxes on transhipments (goods that are passing through Malta from the port of origin to their final destination), while its proximity to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe makes it a geographically convenient distribution centre for goods to be transhipped from there. At that time, Corte Real was, at 366 metres long, one of the largest CMA CGM ships, and, because of its length and width, it could not berth at all the ports that dot the company’s maps of places it does business. Marsaxlokk in Malta has gantry cranes with arms broad enough to oblige Corte Real’s width, and berths long enough to allow the ship to fit alongside, and its harbour has been dredged deep enough to accommodate laden ships easily.

      The village of Marsaxlokk teems with international seafarers, and buses full of crew members and officers arriving to board ships or leaving to go home ferry between its modest hotels and the sun-drenched airport. The day I came aboard, the officers of Corte Real were ashen-faced with hangovers, though warmly welcoming. The city of Valletta, some ten kilometres away, is known for its bars and nightclubs, and its proximity and ebullient atmosphere make it a welcoming port of call for the seafarers. The sailors were also relieved to be in the Mediterranean, after having come from Bremerhaven and Antwerp through the Bay of Biscay, where, predictably, the sea had been unsettled. The other two passengers on the ship told me awed stories of the ship listing forty-five degrees in the storm. They’d had to tie down all furniture in their cabins to prevent it from flying around when the ship hit the trough of a gigantic wave.

      I travelled on Corte Real in February 2015, just before a dramatic collapse in global trade. Marseille ordered the ship to steam at speed to its next port of call, Khor Fakkan on the Gulf of Oman, a newish port in the Emirate of Sharjah, one of CMA CGM’s hubs and at the time one of Journal of Commerce’s top fifty ports in the world. As we arrived near Khor Fakkan, we saw dozens of tankers at anchor near the port of Fujairah, one of the busiest petrochemical terminals in the Middle East. After Khor Fakkan, our ship was to head to Jabal Ali, then and now the biggest port in the Middle East and the ninth busiest container port in the world, where I was to disembark and fly home. Because of congestion at Jabal Ali, Corte Real slowed down considerably after Khor Fakkan and spent a day or so at anchor while a berth became free at the port. Because the world trade in goods was still at full throttle, the containers transporting cargo from the industrial ports of northern Europe to the Middle East and onwards to China were all full and the arrangement of containers both below and above deck was dense, with boxes stacked high and blocking the view out of my cabin’s porthole.

      By contrast, in August 2016, the containers were placed much less densely on the deck of CMA CGM Callisto. All the way to Jeddah (the penultimate destination of the route segment I was taking) I had a clear view from the porthole. On that second journey, Callisto had scheduled stops at Damietta (Egypt), Beirut (Lebanon), and Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) before arriving in Jabal Ali. However, a day or so after leaving Malta, the ship’s master was directed to also make a stop at the port of Mersin in Turkey, between Beirut and entry into the Suez Canal. This detour entailed spending half a day at Beirut, then steaming north at speed from Beirut to Mersin. The arrival in Mersin was also a bit of an adventure. The port of Mersin had only just extended its berths to accommodate the largest ships, and the quays were still half finished. What concerned the captain of Callisto, however, was that, despite the berths having been extended, the breakwaters for the port were far too narrow for easily manoeuvring a ship as gargantuan as Callisto. Throughout this trip, we did not really have to wait at anchor anywhere – surprisingly, not even at Jabal Ali – because ports were nowhere as congested as they had been the previous year. The last-minute detour to Mersin was added, to the chagrin of the crew and officers of the ship, in order to make the trip profitable. The decline in oil prices which made fuel cheaper for each trip than the previous year, and therefore the ad hoc addition of a port of call, had a lower marginal cost and a potential to earn a bit more for the shipping company. The captain and crew did not much like these lightning stops, though, because the length of the stopover was too short to make a visit to the town practical and because arrival and departure are often the most stressful portion of any journey, requiring the attention and work of all crew members on board.

      Corte Real’s cargo had been loaded at the industrial harbours of northern Europe and seemed to contain basic materials for chemical manufacturing, high-tech medical equipment, and a disassembled yacht being transported to China. Callisto had very few full containers loaded at those industrial ports, and a great deal of what it took on at Damietta, Beirut, and Mersin consisted of refrigerated containers. Presumably, given the agricultural facilities and hinterlands of those three ports, the reefers (the refrigerated containers) were laden with fruits and vegetables and other farm products. I say ‘presumably’ because I could not view the bills of lading, but the hazardous goods documents indicated that not many of the reefers contained toxic materials (which are often shipped in refrigerated containers in order to ensure their stability).

      Aboard both ships, we had to convoy on several occasions. Ships form convoys for safety or to follow prescribed routes. As expected, we had to form a cortège through the Suez Canal. A significant proportion of the canal is still one-way and either the southbound or northbound convoys must remain in bypass bays in the Great Bitter Lake until the other convoy has completely passed it and gone through the other one-way portion of the canal. But our ship also had to convoy with other ships upon arrival at Jabal Ali, because the approach channel from the anchorage to the port is surprisingly narrow; ships run aground far more often than one would imagine for such a significant port. In the Red Sea, ships are required to keep to their own lanes, with northbound ships closer to the coasts of Asia and southbound ships steaming along the African coast. Allowances had to be made in the ships’ routes for offshore oil and gas platforms, coral islands just under the surface of the sea, and tiny volcanic islets strewn near the coast, especially near the Bab al Mandab.

      Another locale for convoying was along the coast of Yemen. Companies and navies often recommend that ships convoy together when passing through the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. At the height of piracy in the mid-2000s, the convoys were escorted by EU or NATO antipiracy forces or by naval vessels of individual European or Asian countries. The antipiracy convoys kept as far as possible from the African coast. They travelled along predrawn routes, marked and updated on naval charts.

      When I was travelling on Callisto, the ship did not have the same imperative for speed as Corte Real and was commanded to slow down considerably in order to preserve fuel. Corte Real had also been ordered to steam closer to the coasts of Yemen and Oman to shorten its route. The ship thus held very close to the