(04/18/2009 12:05 PM)
My comments
04/18/2009 12:05 PM
Lost At Sea.
If you can locate copies, look at Jim Morris and Kevin Moran, Lost
At Sea (cited below). It is an immensely
unflattering portrait of the international shipping
industry as it has evolved under competitive forces,
straight out of B. Traven's classic novel _The Death Ship_.
The kinds of ships which the Somalis are pirating are almost
all "Flag of Convenience" vessels, characterized by
all the baggage of a third-world industrial zone,
safety hazards, environmental hazards, poor pay and
labor exploitation, etc., etc., etc. We are talking
about a bunch of "Cheap John" shipowners, loyal to no nation, who
want the United States Navy to bail them out of the
consequences of their avarice, and who can always find venal
pundits to talk nonsense about Rampant Islamicism.
Some years ago, there was a proposal to restart the Philadelphia
Navy Yard to produce "FastShips," essentially 20,000 ton
torpedo boats with planing hulls for carrying cargo,
rail-ferry-fashion, at fifty knots or more. Such a
ship, of course, would be able to pay developed-country-wages, and
would be able to handily outrun pirates. The proposal never
came to anything.
(04/19/2009 11:55 AM)
Actually, the [common modern practice is the reverse of letters of
Marque nd Reprisal.] The standard procedure for converting
merchant ships into warships, adopted in the world wars by both
England and Germany, was as follows: 1) the government
purchases the ship under eminent domain, paying for it with a war
bond or whatever; 2) the officers and men are enrolled
into the navy, most stay with the ship, but the older and
more infirm ones get posted to shore duty; 3) the ship
is fitted with suitable armament; and 4) some officer of
worth and merit is appointed admiral, or commodore, or
flotilla-captain, in charge of a group of such ships. The navy
manages the process, in short. It doesn't just let people sail
away by themselves. This procedure was most commonly
used to convert fishing vessels into minelayers or
submarine-chasers. It was also used, to convert a German
freighter named the Goldenfels into the cruiser
Atlantis.
(04/20/2009 02:55 AM)
Of course, it is routine for governments to lightly arm private
merchant ships for self-defense in wartime, often sending aboard a
detachment of soldiers or sailors to man the guns. Merchant
sailors are very often enrolled in the Naval Reserve.
Graduates of King's Point, the American Merchant
Marine Academy, hold reserve commissions.
A peacetime military runs more officers through staff
college than it needs colonels or [navy] captains,
generals or admirals. A supply of potential commanders is
not generally a limiting factor, unless the officers are
resigning in protest on a wholesale basis. Even then, one can
usually get them back in an emergency, by appealing to their
better nature. Apart from ships, which take a long time to build,
the most probable shortage a navy might encounter is going to be
that of "ratings," or petty officers, that is, enlisted men
of ten years or so of service who are skilled
journeyman sailors. The manpower expedients usually have to do
with finding ways to keep in touch with someone who has
gotten too old to enjoy living like a teenager.
Over the last two hundred years, ships have been
getting steadily bigger, and faster, and more
labor-efficient. Comparatively high labor requirements have
been a characteristic of obsolete ships, say fifty years old, run
by cost-cutting, disreputable operators. The average
merchant ship sunk by U-boats in the North Atlantic,
the main commerce-interception theater, in the first
eight months of the Second World War was of 3400 tons,
and had probably been built circa 1920 or before [*]. There had
been, first, a glut of production during the First World War,
and then a long hiatus of construction due to the
Depression. The German surface raiders, operating in
the longer reaches of the South Atlantic, tended to
encounter somewhat bigger ships, adapted for the long
haul to India or Australia. The average
size of the Atlantis's captures was 6600 tons.
The United States was building Liberty ships of 7000 gross tons
(**) to replace the merchant-marine losses.
What it worked out to was that when two pre-war
cargo ships were sunk, the survivors of the crews (50-60%)
could go back to sea in one big new Liberty ship with at
least as much carrying ability as the ships
which had been sunk.
[(*) Something like Guy Gilpatrick's Inchcliffe Castle in the
Glencannon stories.]
(**) There are four different measures of ship tonnage, and
not everyone uses the same system, making for some
confusion. Depending on whose system you use, a Liberty
Ship's tonnage can be as high as 10,000 tons.
The point of stress and strain was in finding ways to build new
ships at unprecedented rates. The identifiable business
influence was that of Henry J. Kaiser, and his Six Companies,
and it operated on land, not at sea.
(04/20/2009 10:30 AM)
In round numbers, a modern destroyer, with a crew of three
hundred, costs about a billion dollars, or about
three million dollars per crew member. Using another
scale of comparison, that destroyer might have a tonnage of
7000-8000 tons, or about twenty-five tons a man.
Let's consider tanks. A tank costs a couple of million
dollars. An Armored battalion has about fifty tanks and
about five hundred men-- not just the crews, but
also certain necessary mechanics, etc. That works out to a
couple of hundred thousand dollars a man. Including the auxiliary
vehicles, the equipment might weigh the better part of
ten tons per man. You don't see Rent-a-Panzers either.
By contrast, irregular infantry might have five
hundred or a thousand dollars worth of equipment
per man, at most-- a tommy gun or assault rifle,
several hundred rounds of ammunition for it, web gear, and
maybe a steel helmet. The gun weighs less than ten pounds--
the ammunition might weigh fifty, depending on type
and quantity. Rental violence on land persists in the form of
irregular infantry, not armor, nor air power, nor
helicopters, nor heavy artillery.
The real point is that naval equipment is what one
might call "incipiently unmanned," and governments prefer to own
that kind of thing outright. They don't have to mess with
mercenaries, because they have "trusty and well-beloved" servants
to take charge of the equipment.
[At this point,Chris Bray interjected that Somali pirates were
functioning pretty much at the light infantry level, and drew the
false inference that the Unied States Navy had to respond in kind.
I responded as follows:]
(04/20/2009 10:10 PM)
The Right Tool For the Right Job.
A destroyer is neither necessary or appropriate for
inshore operations. American destroyers have a draft of
about thirty feet, largely due to their sonar bulbs. A major
design requirement is hunting nuclear-powered
submarines in the open ocean. Since the submarine
necessarily requires considerably deeper water in
order to submerge, the destroyer's draft is not an issue,
and it makes for more efficient Sonar reception. However,
particularly in areas like the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf, which
have a lot of shoal water, a destroyer's design makes
it unsuitable. Sometimes it may be impossible for the
destroyer to get closer than ten or twenty miles from
shore, especially if there are coral formations. What you
want in that case is a gunboat of about a hundred tons,
something like a Russian Stenka, with a draft of five or six
feet, and about the same order of armament as a tank,
but also with sufficient speed and range to allow it
to operate autonomously, rather than merely being
a ship's boat.
The most extensive inshore operations I can think of in recent
memory were those along the Mekong River and its delta, during
Vietnam, and these were still tiny compared to the scale of
the adjoining land warfare. Part of the issue is that
inshore operations tend to be self-limiting. The only lake
in the third world which figures in international commerce is
Gatun Lake in Panama. The great rivers of the
world are the Amazon, the Parana, the Nile, the Congo,
the Niger, the Ganges and Indus, the Yangtze and
Huang Ho in China. In every case, they go into the heart of
their respective countries, and it is difficult to
imagine a scenario for patrolling them which does not involve
grossly exaggerated imperialism. Lakes? Titicaca in South
American, Nicaragua in Central America, the East
African Rift Lakes, of course, Lake Chad, Lake Baikal
and Balkhash and the Caspian and Aral
Seas. All more or less irrelevant to international
commerce. Ignore all the large bays and
gulfs where the direct route past the bay or gulf runs a thousand
miles from land. If you draw a route on a map,
representing the shortest distance between
two points by sea, that route tends to take you
through the middles of oceans, not along their edges. There
are only a handful of exceptions: Panama, the environs of
Singapore, and Suez. The approaches to Panama
are mostly peaceful, with the chronic exception of
Haiti. Singapore is the center of a regional commercial empire,
and is capable of managing its affairs without outside
interference. That leaves Suez, and the Red Sea. The Navy has
enough SEALS for the kinds of inshore jobs which fall
within its business. It doesn't need to recruit auxiliaries.
(04/21/2009 04:51 PM)
The Difference Between Land and Sea.
When you have a job which is, by its nature, equipment-dominant,
the best way to make money is usually to sell
the government the equipment. There are firms like
Thorneycrofts in England, who are famous makers of torpedo/patrol
boats for export. A boat like that can generally go at forty or
fifty knots, planing along on top of the water, water-ski-fashion,
and it can therefore patrol a lot of space fast. It
has a nice sort of radar and infrared detection system,
located on a mast maybe twenty or thirty feet above the
waterline, which can see better than any human eye, especially at
night. Since you cannot walk on the water,
jobs at sea tend to be inherently
equipment-dominant.
You can buy a decent pair of binoculars at Walgreen's for
ten dollars. I'm not saying they are as good as the kind
issued to American soldiers; they aren't, of course; but they
work. On land, moving by "ankle express," you can take those
binoculars up to the top of a hundred-foot hill, and
you can see for miles. Unless you have the angelic gift of
levitation, you cannot do the same thing at sea. On the contrary,
sitting in the kind of boat, with an outboard motor, which
you can get at Sears for a thousand dollars or so, most of the
time you will actually be below the level of the
wavetops, and that will impede your field of view considerably.
On the other hand, no one has yet found a practical
mechanized method of patrolling villages.
Thorneycrofts also made an abortive excursion into cargo ships
with the "FastShip" design, which no one was willing to
actually build. It was a nice idea, but it did not
make allowance for the hyper-abundance of cheap labor. The
global merchant-marine is effectively immune to immigration
controls, and tends to gravitate down to Chinese
standards. In short, the FastShip was the kind of
thing which defense contractors tend to come up with
for civilian uses.
The legitimate merchant-marine of a developed country tends to
shade off into that country's navy. If you want to become a
sailor on an American-Flag ship like the Maersk Alabama, you
join the Navy, and go into one of the "sailor ratings"
(Boatswains Mate, Quartermaster's Mate, Machinists' Mate,
[Diesel] Engineman, Boiler Technician, etc.), and when
you get out of the Navy, after, say, eight
years, you hire on with a firm moving government cargo. Of course,
such a ship is not competitive in the commercial market, and the
only stuff it moves is government cargo (such as food-aid).
This reminds me of an anecdote: A few years ago, on a Philadelphia
street corner, I saw a couple of French sailors in their
dress uniforms, complete with pom-pom hats. Later that day, I
asked a friend who was the executive officer of the Philadelphia
Naval Reserve Depot about the sailors. "Oh, yeah," replied George.
"The Jeanne D'Arc is in port." He added, ruminatively, that
the pom-pom hats would of course all be given to girls
before the ship put out to sea again. I am sure
that the ship's armory must have contained large numbers of
tommy guns, apart from everything else, but of course it was
a complete non-issue. The Philadelphia police understood, without
anything ever being said, that the guns were safely locked up.
That's the way it is, between friends. One could not
envision the third-world sailors off a flag-of-convenience ship
getting that kind of welcome. Rather, it is a case of "merchant
sailors and dogs keep off the grass." In any case, the ship
captain is likely to have impounded their passports, so they
can't even go ashore. Effectively, they are slave-mariners.
Is it any particular wonder that when the Somali pirates
come aboard a Flag-of-convenience ship, the slave-mariners won't
fight?
The pirates tried to take an Israeli ship, but were met by
the kind of predictably furious counter-attack which one
expects from Israelis. If the Maersk Alabama had done a bit
more in terms of rigging barbed wire, etc., it would probably not
have been taken either.
[David Silbey suggested the analogy of naval warfare in the
eigheenth cenury, when privateers flourished. I replied that:]
(04/22/2009 01:49 PM)
Ships Are Not Quite the Same Thing as Machinery
In the eighteenth century, ships ran on human muscle, lots of it,
of all different qualities. The slave galley was obsolete as
a decisive instrument of battles, but it still had its
moments, because it could move without reference to the wind.
Now, a big British battleship of the time would have been a "Ship
of the Line," a "74" [gun ship], or a "third rate," which
would have had a crew of about six hundred men, and a displacement
of about fifteen hundred tons. The lower class of the
ship were the so-called "landsmen" or "waisters." They had no
sailor skills-- in fact, they had typically come from
onshore jails, where the mortality rate was approximately
that of a twentieth century concentration camp, and they had been
allowed to volunteer for the Navy as their last chance of
life, and more or less to save the government the trouble of
hanging them, typically for offenses like theft. They
constituted the majority of the ship's crew, and served as
human winches. All the old sea chanties were
originally cadences for hauling on ropes, or turning
capstans. "Yo, ho, and up she rises..." is for hauling up the
anchor from the sea bottom. The petty officers
literally drove the waisters to their work, swinging whips,
just like the overseers on the slave galley. The working-class
elite of the ships crew were the "topmen," the able sailors. Of
course the topmen could do things like splicing ropes,
and they knew how to row a boat efficiently, keeping in
stroke, but those were minor skills. Their main ability was
to climb up the mast, a hundred feet or more above the
deck, and take in or let out the sail. Particularly in a storm,
this could be a task on the order of mountain
climbing. The Navy obtained a sufficiency of topmen by the
Press-gang, a legal form of shanghai-ing merchant sailors, either
from the ports, or from ships at sea. Finally, there were a
handful of ship's tradesmen, the ship's middle-class, for
example, the carpenter, the cooper, the surgeon, the purser,
the sailing master, and the sailmaker, and their
mates, and the petty officers; and lastly, the
officers.
The heaviest cannon in the ship, the 24-pounders in the lower gun
deck, had crews of a dozen men each, most of whom did
nothing except pull on the ropes to wheel
the gun back and forth. The gun might weigh anywhere
from one ton to two tons, and was mounted on a four-wheeled
carriage. The Navy was experimenting with Caronades, guns mounted
on lubricated sliding tracks, which could be handled by a crew
perhaps a fifth of the size required for a
conventional gun. A small craft like a Barbary Pirate ship would
not have had such an elaborate division of labor as a ship of
the line-- everyone pulled whatever ropes needed pulling.
It is this sort of unthinking labor-intensiveness that
differentiates the world of the eighteenth century from
the machine age. One of the unspoken assumptions of the
machine age is that to do a bigger job, you just need
a bigger machine, you don't need radically more men to
operate it. The main difference is that certain peripheral tasks,
which have previously been hand-labor get big enough that
they require machines to do them. For example, when a
steamship reached a certain size, it was found to require power
steering (a "steering engine"), as the rudder forces went
beyond a man's strength. In the late nineteenth century, some of
the surviving sailing ships nonetheless adopted
steam-powered motor-winches, especially for tasks such
as raising the anchor. Five horsepower might be the equivalent of
fifty men or so.
Of course, in the eighteenth century, ships normally exchanged
cannon fire at a hundred yards or less, and naval
combats often ended in boarding, and in a
massive armed brawl, because, even at point-blank range, the guns
were not powerful enough to wreck a ship instantly. That began to
change in the 1820's, with the exploding-shell gun, though,
of course, during the long peace of the nineteenth
century, the changes were not consistently visible. By
contrast, if you look at naval artillery duels from the Second
World War, you find that they typically started at about
twenty thousand yards, and by the time the range got down to
ten thousand yards, one party or the other had
sustained unacceptable losses, ie losing ships, and had turned and
fled. At ten thousand yards or less, naval gunnery would be
getting essentially 100% hits on a target the size of a ship,
rather than merely one round for every couple of salvos. Ships
commonly blew up, as the effects of exploding shells spread to
their fuel supply and/or ammunition magazines and/or cargo.
Long before anyone got close enough to board, one ship or the
other would be literally destroyed.
When steamships came into use, the ship's ghetto was the
stokehold, deep inside the hull, where the stokers-- otherwise
known as "the black gang"-- shoveled coal into the
engine's furnace, doing heavy work in a minimally ventilated
space with a temperature of a hundred and twenty
degrees or so. In 1940, the older ships built before 1920
still used coal-- but the newest ones had gone over to oil fuel.
The stokers were notoriously the most savage of sailors.
After 1940, with the disappearance of the stoker, ships had crews
consisting entirely of tradesmen and officers.
(04/23/2009 05:45 AM)
Actual Cost of Privateers
Obviously, governments employ mercenaries as a measure of
desperation, as an expedient, not as a first choice. To my
knowledge, Sir Thomas More, in Utopia, was the first
political philosopher to talk about the inter-relation of war and
crime, to raise the idea that mercenaries tended to become
brigands. That applies to privateers as well, of course, and to
the likelihood of their becoming outright
pirates, preying on all nationalities. The question to
ask is why, against their better judgment, did governments
in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries promote
privateering.
The figures I have seen, in the writings of Basil Lubbock
and elsewhere, suggest that, circa 1850, a clipper ship of about a
thousand tons would have sold for something like $80,000, or
about four million dollars in modern money (the rule of
thumb for conversion between modern money and the gold-backed
money of the nineteenth century is 50:1). That is the price
of a very large house, a structure roughly comparable in
size and complexity to the ship. Alternatively, it is the
level of capital commonly employed in small business, or the
capitalized value of about four professorships. With
three hundred men or so aboard, that clipper ship would have
made a satisfactory large privateer according to the standards of
the Napoleonic wars. The sums required to fit out a privateer
were not out of step with the incomes of the social
class which would do so, people who were prosperous, but not
overwhelmingly rich. If an aspiring privateer captain could
recruit three hundred young men to sail with him, say from a
town of six thousand people, he could also get a hundred or so
people to buy shares in the ship. In round numbers, a modern
warship carrying that many men might be about a hundred times more
expensive, relative to personal incomes. Obviously, this
hundredfold shift is important.
To put it another way, the cost of a privateer ship was on
the same order as a year's wages for the crew, and indeed,
the crew might also have been the shipbuilders in a rural
area such as Maine where multiple and alternative occupations were
the norm. Maine was full of men who were fishermen some of
the time, farmers some of the time, and lumberjacks some
of the time. By contrast, a modern warship costs
considerably more than the crew will earn in a lifetime.
[there is a danger of cofusing] mechanical labor-saving with
computer-based cybernetic labor-saving. They are two very
different things. Mechanical labor-saving derives its
economy from its size. To take an analogy, in 1800,
virtually the entire population were farmers. Now, less than
a percent of the labor force grows the food for everyone else.
There have been various changes which have ensued from
this fact, including successive agricultural bankruptcy crises.
Over the same time span, various kinds of industry were
experiencing the same kind of detachment from hand labor which the
Navy was experiencing. Many of them responded by becoming
public corporations with professional management, rather than
personal proprietorships. When metal mines got big enough, as a
function of the geology, the independent prospector
with his burro was superseded by the mining
corporation with its large ore refineries, eventually using such
methods as the cyanide process.
[David Silbey observed that "...And the cost of a high speed
powerboat, ten guys with AK-47s, a GPS unit, and enough food and
fuel for them to get into the shipping lanes?" To which I replied
(Ships as Distinct from Boats, 04/24/2009 02:38 AM) that:]
We are talking about ships, not boats. There is a difference. An
ordinary ship will be built of steel plates an inch thick.
On land, that would be considered armor plate, and it would
compare favorably to most fighting vehicles. A ship is built
on the scale of an unusually solid building, not on the scale of
an automobile. To a ship, an AK-47 is simply a mosquito
bite. Pirates have sometimes fired light anti-tank weapons at
ships, but these too have proved ineffectual.
Something which would reliably punch holes in a ship would be
something like a high-velocity anti tank gun, weighing a couple of
tons, and with more than enough recoil to tip a
small boat over. Even that would be marginal. The pirates have
only been successful because they have been able to slip on board
ships, and even then, their success has depended on the crews'
total lack of resistance and the fact that the crews are
studiously disarmed, having to obey the gun laws of the countries
they visit.
Once a Flag-of-Convenience ship has its remote-controlled
water cannons, the Chinese and Filipino sailors will discover
that it is safe, easy, and _fun_ to kill Somali pirates.
Under the circumstances, they will probably be quite pitiless
about it, using the water cannons to hunt down half-drowning men
swimming in the water, dumping buckets of kitchen offal over the
rail to attract sharks to the survivors, etc. After
having done so, they might well keep quiet about it. As the
farmer's maxim goes, in respect of feral dogs, etc., "Shoot,
Shovel, and Shut Up." If the Somalis have not gotten word of
the arrival of the water cannons, and do not realize
the extent of what is happening, they might walk into a wholesale
massacre, with thousands of Somalis being killed in a few days.
[David Silbey claimed that my "...parsing of this is the
equivalent of claiming that Iraqi insurgents can't possibly resist
the United States because they can't afford M-1 Abrams." To which
I replied ("Two Spheres," 04/24/2009 03:37 PM)]:
Well, I don't maintain anything of the kind. What I do
maintain, is that the sea is different from the
land, and that this difference is ultimately founded on the
nature of water, [and its difference from dirt], and that this
difference ultimately finds political expression. Analogies
between the sea and the land are usually false analogies.
The same applies, I might add, for the air, and for outer
space. Granted, there are "ambiguous zones" which are neither the
one nor the other, eg. marshes, tidal zones, etc., but these are
special cases, not encompassing very much area, and
easily bypassed at need. If the Red Sea turns out to be such
an area, it too can be bypassed, via the Cape of Good Hope.
The writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan are applicable to the sea, and
not to the land. The reverse is true of the writings of Chairman
Mao, to name one noted theoretician of Guerrilla Warfare.
The significance of Iraq ultimately comes down to something like
"Keep the empire within its bounds," not to a fundamentally
different view of America's place in the world.
============================================================
============================================================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_J._Kaiser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ships
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_ship
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103209615
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1638229
SCRAP:
Let's do some rough-and-ready fuel-range calculations,
taking a typical sort of boat, in the link below. Say, 50
km/hr, 85hp, 8.5 gal/hr, say about 1.4 lbs of fuel/mile at
30 mph, say the weight with engine is 700 kg., nominal
capacity available, 500 kg. If you overload the boat,
it will ride deeper, and the speed will be less,
and the fuel consumption per distance greater.
Carrying three men, and 500lbs of fuel, that would
work out to 350 miles range/ or 175 miles action radius. In
an overload scenario, say that 12 men weigh 900 kg,
and, with 500 lbs of fuel, overload the boat to the point
that it can only do 20 mph (16 knots), and its
range is only about 200 miles. Of course there is a
good deal of error in the above figures, but when the
numbers are against you by a factor of ten, a 50% error is not
enough to matter.
http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/hebisheng/product-detailWoRnYQezIPVr/China-Speedboat-with-Outboard-Motor-550-.html
http://www.marineenginedigest.com/specialreports/fuelflowchart.htm
The reported experience seems to be that ships capable of
about twenty knots can simply outrun the pirates. All
the cruise ships seem to fall in that category. A ship's
relative speed and fuel economy varies according to its
length, and a little speedboat simply cannot compete with a
ship five hundred feet long.
Lost At Sea Series:
Back in 1996, there was a series of articles published in
the _Houston Chronicle_, "Lost At Sea," by Jim Morris and Kevin
Moran, with Armando Villafranca. It is in effect, a book in
installment form. The authors ought to have republished it as a
book, and I do not know why they failed to do so.
Viz:
10:19 PM 8/15/1996 Lost at sea: Uneven regulation and
a ready supply of cheap labor have added a hard reality to the
romance of going to sea, NOT FOUND
11:45 PM 8/19/1996 Lost at Sea/Danger Aboard/When seafarers are
injured on the job, they face medical and legal
complications,KEVIN MORAN, Staff, TUE 08/20/1996 HOUSTON
CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1, 3 STAR Edition.
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360579/lost-at-sea-danger-aboard-when-seafarers-are-injur.html
3:24 PM 12/13/1996 Lost at Sea/New rules pushing towboat
industry/Aftershocks still being felt in wake of deadly 1993
accident, JIM MORRIS, Staff, SUN 12/15/1996 HOUSTON
CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1, 2 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1383690/lost-at-sea-new-rules-pushing-towboat-industry-aft.html
>> 8:32 PM 8/21/1996 Lost at
Sea/Looming Change/Panama Canal pilots worry as U.S. control nears
an end, JIM MORRIS, Staff, THU 08/22/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE,
Section A, Page 1, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360886/lost-at-sea-looming-change-panama-canal-pilots-wor.html
---------------------------------------------------
6:29 PM 8/18/1996 Port chaplains tend the human side of
shipping: ยท Maritime ministries form a worldwide network of
care for sailors, with churches in every major port -- and clout
with the industry, KEVIN MORAN, Staff, MON 08/19/1996
HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 9, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360397/port-chaplains-tend-the-human-side-of-shipping.html
5:19 PM 9/27/1996 Cruise workers must endure long hours for
others' leisure NOT FOUND
4:47 PM 9/28/1996 Lost at Sea/Sounding the alarm/As the cruise
industry grows, so do concerns about passenger safety, JIM MORRIS,
Staff, SUN 09/29/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1, 2 STAR
Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1368233/lost-at-sea-sounding-the-alarm-as-the-cruise-indus.html
------------------------------------------
7:12 PM 11/22/1996 Lost at Sea/Dangers Afloat: Safety rules are
tightened for passenger vessels
JIM MORRIS, Staff, SUN 11/24/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section
A, Page 1, 2 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1379753/lost-at-sea-dangers-afloat-safety-rules-are-tighte.html
5:52 PM 9/30/1996 Lost at Sea/Shipshape: U.N. agency takes on the
complex task of regulating the far-flung shipping industry, JIM
MORRIS, Staff, TUE 10/01/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page
1, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1368680/lost-at-sea-shipshape-u-n-agency-takes-on-the-comp.html
10:21 PM 8/15/1996 Lost at Sea/Uneven regulation and a ready
supply of cheap labor have added a harsh, modern reality to the
romance of going to sea/`He felt only pressure', JIM MORRIS,
Staff, Copyright 1996 Houston Chronicle, SUN 08/18/1996
HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1, 2 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360090/lost-at-sea-uneven-regulation-and-a-ready-supply-o.html
8:42 PM 9/29/1996 Incident illustrates potential for disaster in
shipping industry, NOT FOUND
4:45 PM 12/20/1996 Lost at Sea/OFFSHORE RISKS/Offshore Risks:
Safety concerns rise with return of oil, gas boom, JIM MORRIS,
Staff, SUN 12/22/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1, 2 STAR
Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1384981/lost-at-sea-offshore-risks-safety-concerns-rise-wi.html
6:16 PM 8/20/1996 U.S. merchant fleet rapidly fading away NOT
FOUND
6:35 PM 8/21/1996 Lost at Sea/`Flags of convenience' give
owners a paper refuge/ Banners don't always represent a nation -
and they can mean a way around shipping regulations, JIM MORRIS,
Staff, THU 08/22/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 15, 3
STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360880/lost-at-sea-flags-of-convenience-give-owners-a-pap.html
10:05 PM 8/15/1996, Lost at Sea/Pressure to set sail/U.S. Coast
Guard bears the burden of safety against owners and crews pushing
to keep cargo moving, JIM MORRIS, Staff, SUN 08/18/1996 HOUSTON
CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 25, 2 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360104/lost-at-sea-pressure-to-set-sail-u-s-coast-guard-b.html
9:30 PM 9/18/1996 Lost at Sea/Legislation pushed to curb
foreigners' use of U.S. courts, KEVIN MORAN, Staff, THU 09/19/1996
HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 7, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1366396/lost-at-sea-legislation-pushed-to-curb-foreigners.html
9:18 PM 10/2/1996 Lost at Sea/Legislation pushed to curb
foreigners' use of U.S. courtsForeign seafarers retain access to
courts in U.S.
KEVIN MORAN, Staff, THU 10/03/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A,
Page 17, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1369039/foreign-seafarers-retain-access-to-courts-in-u-s.html
9/13/1996 Lost at Sea/Vessel is docked until it's shipshape, KEVIN
MORAN, Staff, SAT 09/14/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1,
3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1365326/lost-at-sea-vessel-is-docked-until-it-s-shipshape.html
9:47 PM 12/30/1996 Lost at Sea/Firm must shape up for vessel
to ship out/Greek craft seized while in Galveston, KEVIN MORAN,
Staff, TUE 12/31/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 21, 3
STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1386588/firm-must-shape-up-for-vessel-to-ship-out-greek-cr.html
6:21 PM 8/18/1996 Lost at sea/Stranded/From backwaters
to major ports, seafarers are abandoned with no pay and only
promises from owners, KEVIN MORAN, Staff, MON 08/19/1996 HOUSTON
CHRONICLE, Section A, Page 1, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1360373/lost-at-sea-stranded-from-backwaters-to-major-port.html
9:04 PM 12/19/1996 Lost at Sea/Stuck on a ship to
nowhere/Crew stranded in Houston as tanker seized over debt
ARMANDO VILLAFRANCA, Staff, FRI 12/20/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE,
Section A, Page 37, 3 STAR Edition.
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1384647/stuck-on-a-ship-to-nowhere-crew-stranded-in-housto.html
8:43 PM 9/29/1996 Lost at Sea/`We're kind of
overloaded with what we're doing'/ Increased ship traffic in
Houston and other U.S. ports puts a strain on `ancient' control
system, JIM MORRIS, Staff, MON 09/30/1996 HOUSTON CHRONICLE,
Section A, Page 8, 3 STAR Edition
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1368553/lost-at-sea-we-re-kind-of-overloaded-with-what-we.html
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(articles downloaded in 1999)
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