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paperback HK$129.00
Chameleon Press
Paddyfield.com
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More reviews by John Walsh
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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A Sea of Green by Bill Purves
Many industries claim to be globalised but very few really are. Apart from some high profile consumer goods, only firms involved in oil or mineral resource extraction, defence or large-scale construction can really consider themselves to be globalised. One additional industry in this category is shipping, which links nearly every country of the world, apart from those which are landlocked. Ships crisscross the seas and oceans of the world carrying a variety of industrial and consumer goods products, many of which are high volume and comparatively low value. This makes for a commodity market, in which the costs of completing a transaction are paramount. Ships involved in the trade, therefore, cut corners where possible, tend not to receive the upgrades or eve nthe maintenance they may occasionally need and search for their crew from those countries which offer the lowest labour costs. Such a ship is the Jing Xu, which is operated by a Taiwanese company and is crewed by Filipino officers and Burmese crew.
In A SEA OF GREEN, a journalistic investigation of the worldwide shipping industry by itinerant author BILL PURVES, we follow the Jing Xu as it travels to the unfamiliar seascape of Latvia and searches for a new cargo. The Taiwanese head office is in constant negotiations for a new contract and the dealing, in a deregulated global market, can be quite Machiavellian in nature. The Jing Xu is a bulker and so can carry wheat, clinker, cement and other not so exciting cargo. Yet the trade it contributes to is essential in keeping the wheels of the world economy going. Shedding light on the lives of the sailors and the work they complete is, therefore, of considerable interest.
Purves lays out with commendable economy of effort just about everything that there is to know about the shipping industry, from how to organize an insurance ring to why it is that sailors rarely receive the safety training they are supposed to have before they are allowed on board. There are useful tips on how to stowaway on a container ship and what to bribe a customs guard to enable unloading and reloading to take place without unnecessary delay. There is also enough detail to give the reader with at least a rough estimation of how much to pay for such a ship and whether a profit can be turned upon operating it - the trick is to have deep pockets, be lucky and look at the long-term. Should anyone wish to join a voyage, then there is useful advice as to what to do with the bilge water, where to stand in the event of the anchor being dropped and where to go to stand out of the wind and find the part of the ship which yaws, pitches, rolls and rotates the least.
A SEA OF GREEN does a nice job in describing the lives of people in a important industry which receives very little serious attention. The editor seems to have nodded from time to time but not in any disastrous way: the prose is smoother than the seas on which the Jing Xu rides and what could have been wide expanses of tedious cruising are nicely abridged with a telling detail or anecdote. The book deserves a wide readership, although it will perhaps require cunning marketing to overcome reader resistance to books about real life business.
John Walsh
17/07/2006
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John Walsh is Assistant Professor at Shinawatra International University, Bangkok. |
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