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