Stormy Petrol

By Timothy Foote

SUPERSHIP by NOEL MOSTERT 332 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. So much for piety afloat and a reasonable profit through the ages. Trouble is these days, according to Noel Mostert, a South African-born shipping writer, more than half the business done upon great waters is carried in the bellies of a new breed of sea monster that threatens not only the wonders of the deep but the teeming life of whole oceans. The monsters are V.L.C.C.s and U.L.C.C.s (for very large and ultra-large crude carriers), huge oil tankers that already range from 200,000 tons burden up toward 500,000 tons. Such ships are so long that they have been rammed at night by smaller vessels trying to steer through the gap between their bow lights and stern lights. They will soon be bigger still. The million-tonner is on the way, close to a third of a mile long and so deep that Notre Dame, Chartres and Reims cathedrals could fit into its tank space with only the towers showing.

The average oil-burning landsman, shivering over November heating bills, may well ask: What's so wrong with that? The energy crisis glooms over us all, as does the memory of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that led to the closing of the canal and the rerouting of shipping round Africa. From such a perspective, the rise of the supertanker looks like the kind of triumph of greed and technology over circumstance that customarily passes for progress.

Alas, as Mostert makes clear, greed and circumstance have overborn technology. The great ships are badly built and hard to handle. They are also, it appears, crucially overloaded, sloppily sailed, sketchily regulated for safety and steadily dangerous. The problem is partly a matter of scale, a dramatic change that--as Lemuel Gulliver learned to his sorrow--can be catastrophic. Especially in congested shipping lanes, the V.L.C.C.s are simply too big and too inertia-bound to operate safely by current rules of navigation. (Among other things, Mostert urges the establishment of onshore control towers like those now handling flight patterns around jet airports.)

Mostly, though, the threat of V.L.C.C.s is a byproduct of the high value and the potential deadliness of what they carry. A company owning a supertanker can makeas much as $4 million profit on one run from Kuwait to Europe. But theship costs up to $50,000 a day to run--including insurance. A typical voyage lasts about 75 days, only five of which are spent in the stormy waters below Capetown. It is easy to see, therefore, why, at the urging of the owners, IMCO, a special U.N. maritime agency, by 1966 agreed to allow overloading for the whole trip well beyond the safety levels previously established for navigation around the Cape.

Since then, barely noticed by the U.S. and European public, which are only made aware of disasters nearer home like the Torrey Canyon, the big tankers have been sinking, burning up, running aground, leaking oil because of breakdown, and colliding with each other at an appalling rate--mostly round the Cape. (Among them: World Glory, 46,000 tons, Wafra, 70,000 tons, and Texanita, 100,000 tons, which sank, and Sevilla, 81,000 tons, Esso Essen, 48,000 tons, which leaked heavily after damage below the water line.) Result: a large portion of the crude oil deposited in the world's seas each year (estimates range as high as 10 million tons) winds up in the Southern Ocean, earth's most fruitful and fishiest body of water.

Mostert knows and loves the South Atlantic the way a fisherman knows his favorite stretch of dry-fly water. In melancholy detail, he discusses currents that spread oil slicks, damage fish and plankton, and petroleum-filled hulks now on the bottom that may take a generation to give up their deadly cargo. Though oil and shipping companies are naturally unhappy about the book, their substantive complaint is concerned with the fact that Mostert's accident statistics often deal with small old tankers as well as large new ones: Mostert is a restrained man, though, and few people are likely to regard Supership as a frenzied excursion into unnecessary ecological alarm.

Desperate Message. The description of oil-spill dangers alone would be enough to make the book a valuable document in the age of ecological angst and the energy crisis. Supership, however, is more than a case history or a polemic, because Mostert is more than an aroused journalist. He is a writer who can sketch a scene better than most novelists now at large and a man with historic perspective, a precise and convincing sense of what sort of contrivances, skills and loyalties men need to go on acting with good order and in good hope even (or especially) in a maze of mechanization.

He frames his desperate messages about the great tankers with the story of a trip he took round the Cape on Ardshiel, a 200,000-ton V.L.C.C. owned by Britain's famed P & O lines and run with all the care and discipline that he says are so lacking in ships that steam under flags of convenience. Basil Thomson, the captain of Ardshiel, is not, like the captain of the Torrey Canyon, suffering from extreme fatigue and tuberculosis. He does not, like the "cowboys" who frequently are referred to in the book, plunge through the English Channel ignoring rights of way; nor does he (as others do) sail his ship without proper navigational fixes and with the radar on the blink. Even so, the strains and dangers on Ardshiel are great.

By the time Mostert has evoked this world--as graphically as Conrad presents the Sturm und Drang facing the captain of the steamer Nan-Shan in Typhoon--the reader, stuffed with sea lore, has been shanghaied aboard a ghostly voyage from the demanding past into the threatening future. Ardshiel has bicycles--for exercising on deck--but no ship pets, because. Mostert suggests, there is no crew continuity. (By contrast, the Aquitania, when scrapped in 1950, disgorged ship's cats all descended from a tabby who went aboard on the maiden voyage in 1914). Mostert mildly mourns the fact that nobody refers to a V.L.C.C. as "she," and sadly notes the loss of rake and sheer in modern tankers' lines.

Such small things may be a less frivolous loss than one is likely to admit. Time seems to be running out, though, on old-fashioned virtues that Mostert does not think sea commerce can do without: pride in skill and a sense of being personally accountable for whether things work properly or not, and if not, why. Learning how to foster such qualities in the automated future, Mostert suggests, may prove as crucial to survival as the fight for oil. .Timothy Foote

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