Rogue Captain’s Mid-Ocean Detour Tips Investors to Crisis at Sea
How cargo ships turned almost overnight from the engines of global commerce into floating prisons.
Photographer: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg
This article is for subscribers only.
Terence Tsai started hearing about the growing labor crisis in shipping in a roundabout way. First, in March, an official at a ship management company in Hong Kong let slip that a captain had purposefully diverted a vessel under its control into the middle of the ocean to protest the treatment of himself and his crew.
Then, from the head of a large Asian shipping company, Tsai heard about a captain who wanted to attend his son's funeral in Eastern Europe. It took more than two months and a mountain of paperwork to surmount Covid-era port restrictions and travel complications to get him on a flight back home.