Researcher Helen Sampson shines light on the hidden world of seafarers’ working lives in her new book Sea-Time: An Ethnographic Adventure
A review by Irene Rosberg, Programme Director, Executive MBA in Shipping and Logistics (The Blue MBA), Programme Director, Blue Board Leadership Programme (BBLP)
What does time mean to you? Your answer might be the hours of work in an office or at home, plus periods for domestic tasks and relaxation. Sea-time is a measure in a quite different world and has its own connotations and rigours. It is the years and months of often arduous ‘on board’ experience accumulated by seafarers. It includes the 12 months cadets must serve to gain their junior officer certificate; and the extra time required before they can either sit exams for further licences or be considered for promotion.
Sea-time is the key factor for men and women who, paradoxically, may live only for their next moments ashore. Seafarers desire this valuable commodity, yet many loathe it, Helen Sampson says in her new book Sea-Time: An Ethnographic Adventure.
As director of Seafarers’ International Research Centre at Cardiff University, she has for almost a quarter of a century written reports and books and documented on film the working lives of seafarers. In 2014 she won the BBC/British Sociological Association ethnography award for her book International Seafarers and Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century; and her new work again demonstrates her ability to get beneath the skin of the shipping industry. The earlier book focused on migrant contract workers. Now, looking back on her 10 voyages of research, she pivots the spotlight onto what global changes in merchant shipping have meant to those who labour under its regulation and management.
Her exhaustively researched account in 103,000 words lifts the lid on the deep psychological impact of life at sea. The core of her book is the ‘ethnography’ of one of the voyages that she undertook, interwoven with her experiences travelling on other ships and her insights from interviews with seafarers. It is enlivened by her personal reactions to sharing sea-time with crew. Saturated with meaning, the reports of her observations are the more powerful because she writes engagingly and empathetically about her subjects.
Professor Sampson’s vividly written, jargon-free sweep of narrative should be required reading for all in the maritime industry and will be revelatory to outsiders. She communicates her warmth eloquently and displays a keen, untiring eye for detail. She describes her voyages – her ‘sea-time’ – as data-collecting exercises, although they are redolent with social scrutiny. It is seldom that compassion seeps so thoroughly into a researcher’s assessment of their targeted environment.
She analyses the hierarchies on board ship, and the stresses faced almost constantly by every member of the crew, not least encouraging us to appreciate how their lack of sleep – often the result of delays in port arrivals and departures and discharging cargo – disrupts concentration on their daily tasks. There are long and tedious periods of waiting: ‘waiting for information about schedules, waiting for pilots, waiting for better weather, waiting for a berth at a congested terminal’ … and all this may happen while land is ‘tantalisingly in sight’. ‘Seafarers are often flown half-way around the world to kick their heels awaiting a delayed ship’.
Workers identified to her the problems associated with the fast turnaround of vessels as part of the difficulty in getting shore leave, and they struggled with the way modern ports have been relocated away from city centre waterfronts into what seem like empty landscapes. ‘Ports are no longer a focus of excitement for seafarers[…]; rather, they have become sites of trepidation and lost sleep’. Time takes on a particular significance as seafarers wish their time (and their life) away on board, craving their vacations at home.
For most of the public, shipping is ‘shrouded in mystery and romance’, because of its association with the sea. Ships remain remote, out of sight and largely out of mind. Few people have any idea of the life and work on board a cargo vessel, yet shipping is central to world trade and to taken-for-granted consumption patterns of modern societies. An estimated 1.9m people (they are mostly male) are needed to operate the trading fleet that totals 2.2bn tonnes deadweight.
A raft of regulatory requirement dominates shipboard work, so that seafarers spend much time generating documentary records of compliance with international rules on pollution control, safety, security and much else. Enforcement of such rules has resulted in the criminalisation of some seafarers held personally responsible for breaches and incarcerated or fined by port-based authorities. Rules are to be obeyed – while the sea itself is eternally ungovernable. The importance of skills and experience has been downgraded in favour of rule-adherence and compliance with decisions made by managers ashore.
In Helen Sampson’s telling, many seafarers consider that the increased levels of surveillance by managers ashore, and lack of autonomy on board, place them in an impossible position where they bear responsibility for decisions into which they have no significant input.
She makes “greater use of myself” as a participant than in her previous surveys, rendering the research process more transparent and intimate. “Although our tasks on board are different, the living conditions and circumstances of seafarers are shared by any researcher who sails with them. As a result, researchers can come to understand more about what it is like to work at sea than they would using any alternative method of research,” she tells the reader.
Aboard a containership which she names as Beluga she made an unbroken sea-passage of two weeks across the Atlantic. She details seafarers’ routines and finds that there are ways in which ports emerge as ‘threatening’ to people on the vessel, rather than a welcome respite from institutionalised living. She looks at the ways in which sea-going employees must adapt their sleep patterns, social patterns, and working patterns to itineraries that are laid down for them by shore-based staff.
She remembers that boarding her first ship, in 1999, was an extraordinary exercise in informality. “We drove up to the quayside, stopping only at a simple road barrier to ask directions. There were no passport checks, no customs searches, no officials to meet or to question us. And then… there I was, on board, and off to sea.” Since then, the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001 led to a seismic shift in security practices.
As she contemplates joining the ship, she reflects that seafarers’ levels of anxiety must be ‘sky high as they leave elderly parents, children, and wives. ‘Seafarers face relationship rupture with every contract. Their relationships with children, with partners, and with friends follow a kind of stop start trajectory’. Many described to the author the pain they experience when their young children fail to recognise them when they return from a long voyage. Seafarers regularly miss funerals, births, anniversaries, and weddings. “It is a heavy price to pay for the privilege of work. No wonder so many choose to find work ashore at a relatively young age.”
Ahead of joining the shipshe felt the nervous expectation of being incarcerated with a group of strangers with whom she would have to work, an apprehension that must be shared by many seafarers. It was not like starting a job on land with unknown workmates, for the sea colleagues are people you will have to live with in a contained and constrained environment. ‘Some will have power over you, and with such power comes the capacity for abuse’.
She joins the ship in Panama to cross the Atlantic to Spain and Malta, and from there Turkey and the Bosporus, then crossing the Black Sea for a brief sortie to Ukraine and Russia before returning to Istanbul.
“As the chief officer and third mate tell me one morning, the happiest day of a seafarer’s life is when he stands at the gangway with his luggage and waves goodbye to his former companions. They say the feelings are akin to those of a prisoner who has been released at the end of his sentence,” writes Helen Sampson. I have heard this before, but on each occasion, it is said with such feeling and sincerity, that it always sounds shocking.”
There is great wariness in this pressure cooker of a working environment, “and rightly so.” Minor slights and criticisms, if mishandled, may become major points of conflict. Pilotage is especially stressful: it may take many hours, at any time of the day or night. Deck and engine officers may be working when they would otherwise be sleeping, and once they ‘tie up’ things hardly get any better. Many ports work 24 hours a day and in some countries port officials board berth ships in droves.
The company ‘prides itself on safety in every respect. It appears to make efforts to ensure that seafarers comply with mandatory rest hours, but to save a few dollars it provides mattresses that undermine that very rest’ by making it hard to sleep. There was no social activity on the ship in the almost five weeks that she was on board. “If it were not for the stairs up and down between the various decks, I would fear losing the use of my legs, such is the limited nature of the space on board!”
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed stark realities about the labour rights. International regulations and the International Labour Organization’s Maritime Labour Convention were set aside at the expense of seafarers’ welfare, and occasionally their lives, to maintain international supply chains and protect the wellbeing and needs of land-based communities.
Professor Sampson is deft at handling gender questions although the bulk of her report is not self-consciously ‘about women’. Shipping remains almost as heavily male-dominated today as it was 20 years ago. Shipowner organisations estimate that only 1.28% (the equivalent of 24,059 seafarers) of the global workforce is female. “It is not so much the vessel ‘ceiling’ that is made of glass but the walls.” The Maritime Labour Convention is said by industry observers to be ‘silent’ on many issues which affect the possibilities for women to work at sea. A study by Professor Sampson and a colleague confirmed that the situation for women on board on provision for menstruation had changed little.
She meets a woman working in her ship’s deck department who is gaining sea-time to become an able seafarer. The woman says that her dream was always to come to sea, and she says she loves it. She is not homesick and finds the seafarers on board just like a family. ‘It would seem there are still some people who are suited to a ‘sea life’. It is certainly a better job for the young and unattached than for those who are married with children’.
All the same, the institutionalised, remote, and male-dominated environment on board poses a particular threat to women. In 2022, repeated examples of harassment were given to researchers by women seafarers, and shockingly many felt sufficiently fearful to install additional locks on their cabin doors.
Women seafarers say that a little bit of a favourite hand cream or soap provides them with a small sense of ‘time off’ from work, a break from the masculine, public, and work-oriented world on board. Helen Sampson took with her some things “just to provide the very smallest semblance of home comfort – a nice bar of soap (not the standard Lux invariably found on board), a bath towel and a moisturiser. I have found to my surprise that once on board such things have come to be of value to me: a reminder of another existence…a life beyond the controlled, monotonous, ascetic life on board.”
In early 2023, 73 countries were still refusing shore leave on the grounds of Covid precautions, and in another 14 the policy was not clear. Unable to get ashore, seafarers were often trapped on board their vessels, The tedium of living and communicating with a small group of people (perhaps 20 on average) in isolation from the world cannot be overstated. The author suggests that what is needed is a thorough review of the Maritime Labour Convention and an upgrading of mandatory requirements taking account of living standards ashore.
She warns that if companies continue to regard it as legitimate to keep the costs of seafarers’ welfare as low as possible to gain competitive advantage, it is unlikely that seafarers will ever feel that they have sufficient time for themselves built into their contracts. “This is the crux of the deep dissatisfaction felt by many seafarers on cargo ships.”
There are compensations. On her earlier trip on a tanker, she recalls a day when “the sea was like art glass …pools of contiguous colour in circular shapes, deep blue in the centre with greyer tones towards the outside of each ring. The wind stung my eyes, but it was cool and refreshing and the sound of the sea was soothing.”
On another occasion, “standing on the bridge wing I watch the bow wave as the ship carves her way through the water. For a moment the strings of tiny water droplets that she kicks up resemble coral fronds of the purest white before they disperse into a soup of deep blue. There are still moments like this at sea when nature wows you with something unexpected. They are generally brief.”
On her earlier voyage on a tanker: “I watched the dawn break. It was stunning. In the east the sun came up behind some cumulus clouds (like inverted Mr Whippy ice creams) […] It burnt the edges bright orange and beneath the cloud, on the horizon, the sun rose glowing red. In the northern and western skies, a watercolour emerged reminiscent of Monet.”
In her distinctive, penetrating style, excelling in investing to the best use her sea expertise, Helen Sampson hails the heroes and heroines who strive to measure up to what society expects of them despite great sacrifice of their precious personal time.
