Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
    The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
    The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

    Written by William Langewiesche

    Narrated by William Langewiesche

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Riveting stories of our last frontier and the acts of God and man upon it

    Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.
    With typically understated lyricism, William Langewiesche explores this ocean world and the enterprises--licit and illicit--that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons. Forty-three thousand gargantuan ships ply the open ocean, carrying nearly all the raw materials and products on which our lives are built. Many are owned or managed by one-ship companies so ghostly that they exist only on paper. They are the embodiment of modern global capital and the most independent objects on earth--many of them without allegiances of any kind, changing identity and nationality at will. Here is free enterprise at it freest, opportunity taken to extremes. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews, and the growth of two perfectly adapted pathogens: a modern and sophisticated strain of piracy and its close cousin, the maritime form of the new stateless terrorism.
    This is the outlaw sea--perennially defiant and untamable--that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateMay 1, 2004
    ISBN9781593974572
    Author

    William Langewiesche

    William Langewiesche is the author of four previous books, including the National Book Critic’s Circle Award finalist American Ground. He is currently the international correspondent for Vanity Fair.

    More audiobooks from William Langewiesche

    Related to The Outlaw Sea

    Related audiobooks

    Ships & Boats For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Rumrunners

      Dec 7, 2021

      The Rumrunners
      6 min read

    • Article

      Hell On High water

      Dec 28, 2022

      Hell On High water
      8 min read

    • Article

      By Sail & Steam

      Jul 27, 2021

      By Sail & Steam
      6 min read

    • Article

      Who Owns The Sea?

      Aug 21, 2019

      Who Owns The Sea?
      10 min read

    • Article

      The West Africa Squadron

      Dec 19, 2017

      The West Africa Squadron
      8 min read

    • Article

      Navigating Our Heritage

      Jun 4, 2021

      Navigating Our Heritage
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Pioneers Set Sail

      Jul 9, 2020

      The Pioneers Set Sail
      7 min read

    • Article

      Stranding Of Ever Given In Suez Canal Was Foreseen By Many – Analysis

      Mar 28, 2021

      Authorities have blamed strong winds, possible technical faults or human error for the stranding of the Ever Given in the Suez canal. But the running aground of the “megaship” – which salvage teams continued to try to free on Sunday as preparations w

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sea Power Makes Great Powers

      Oct 19, 2021

      Sea Power Makes Great Powers
      8 min read

    • Article

      Effort Must Be Made To Preserve Slave Ship And Its History

      Jul 23, 2019

      The wreck of the Clotilda, the last ship to transport enslaved Africans to the United States, sits entombed in mud at the bottom of the Mobile River in Alabama. It is the only ship from the American slave trade ever found. In fact, out of more than 2

      4 min read

    • Article

      American Oligarchy

      Dec 13, 2023

      American Oligarchy
      22 min read

    • Article

      A New Age Of Naval Warfare

      Mar 16, 2024

      A New Age Of Naval Warfare
      3 min read

    • Article

      Classical And Hellenistic Greek Piracy The Pirate Crew At Work

      Dec 20, 2022

      So too in the early archaic period - the period reflected in the Homeric poems - we find small, pre-state societies dominated by wealthy galley-owners, who take their companions (hetairoi) with them on summer plundering voyages; these raiders sometim

      8 min read

    • Article

      Buoys Will Be Buoys

      Jul 27, 2022

      Buoys Will Be Buoys
      3 min read

    • Article

      Skipper’s View

      Dec 4, 2020

      Skipper’s View
      1 min read

    • Article

      Skipper’s View

      Dec 4, 2020

      Skipper’s View
      1 min read

    • Article

      Cruise Control

      Jun 17, 2020

      Cruise Control
      16 min read

    • Article

      Ready For Sea

      Mar 14, 2024

      Sam Llewellyn writes nautical thrillers, edits The Marine Quarterly, and is perpetually patching up a 30ft ketch: samllewellyn.com Late in the 1980s, I was at a festival in the Baltic, doing some research for a thriller I wrote called Blood Knot, whi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hunting Antelope

      Feb 22, 2022

      Hunting Antelope
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Codfather

      Apr 1, 2017

      The Codfather
      12 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Outlaw Sea

    3.5/5

    96 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Book is a collection of nonfiction pieces that all concern the sea and ships: a shipbreaking yard in India, piracy in the Melaka Straits, a mammoth ferry disaster, the difficulties of regulating international shipping. Interesting read.
    • 4/5
      The Outlaw Sea examines several ways that chaos erupts on or around the ocean: the (sometimes literal) race to the bottom created by 'flag of convenience' system of maritime regulation; piracy; individual behavior in the midst of a ship sinking; and the disposal of old ships. Langewiesche tells each of the stories well, and it only begins to dawn later that they aren't closely related, except that they all involve ships in some way. The author writes from an interesting place -- a deep awareness of the inequities of opportunity and wealth in the world, and an impatience with one-size-fits-all worldviews. At the same time, in contrast to, say, John McPhee, who revels in the random tangent, and whose subjects almost always come across as complex and ambiguous, Langewiesche cuts off his loose ends; everything in his writing reinforces his main theme. In Isaiah Berlin's metaphor, drawn from the Greek lyric poet Archilochus -- 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing' -- Langewiesche is a hedgehog, not a fox; and yet so much of his writing is a moral argument in favor of foxhood.
    • 3/5
      While ocean travel might be safer now that is has ever been, that's not to say it isn't trouble-free. Profit motives and lax regulations can lead to maritime disasters, such as unseaworthy ships sinking in rough seas losing most of their expendable crews, or ferry disasters caused in part by overloaded ships. Then there are nefarious activities, such as ship graveyards that can destroy coastlines of countries desperate enough for the business. Some of these stories made a splash on the news when they occurred (such as the sinking of the Estonia). Most news stories garner but a few days attention -- here we find our about the aftermath involving court battles many years later.The Outlaw Sea is somewhat dramatized, particularly when the author ostensibly follows individuals that did not survive the incidents recalled in this book. The audio version is read in a rather dead-pan monotone...in some cases appropriate, but mostly the stories seem less interesting than they might otherwise be. If you're going to add some drama, the voice should bring excitement as well. Still, Langewiesche attempts to tell the stories of people that otherwise escape our notice and tries to humanize these stories a little more that we get from the news.
    • 4/5
      I listened to this on audio, read by the author himself. It was a random pick from the library, though I am somewhat familiar with the author’s work for Vanity Fair. In reading other reviews once I finished, I learned that the books was really a collection of articles Langewiesche wrote for The Atlantic. I would not have guessed that, as it was pretty seamless, though more interesting in some parts than others. Langewiesche recounts various episodes of crime, piracy and tragedy on the high seas (especially moving was the account of the sinking of The Estonia, a ferry between Talinn and Stockholm which sunk in 1994). The overarching concern of the book seems to be the effects of economic globalization on the safety and health of the world’s oceans.
    • 5/5
      The title and supposed theme is a bit misleading. These nonfiction pieces all concern the sea and ships: shipbreaking yard in India, piracy in the Melaka Straits, a mammoth ferry disaster, the difficulties of regulating international shipping. But what exactly do Western attempts to regulate conditions for workers breaking ships in Alang have to do with the Estonia ferry disaster? For me, the former would be better among stories about so-called progressive people boycotting, say, shoes from that Nike factory in Cambodia--which pulled out of the country after an inaccurate BBC report that a 15-year-old working there (at the legal, livable minimum wage) had lied about being 16. A country where the only other job most likely would be prostitution. Much better to send such a factory to a more closed country like Vietnam or China, somewhere without unions or the ILO pioneering a monitoring program. But I digress: Langiewiesche does what I expect him to do in India: talk to lots of people, notice the far worse, more dangerous jobs these shipbreaking workers would be doing, He notices that in the evening they do have a little social life in their camp. Anyway--he's just a great, thorough detailed reporter. I ripped through the detailed accounts of the pirated ship and the ferry disaster in awe: to get all this details! The reconstruction! The amount of research and tracking down! Something akin to Sebastian Whatsis's. The Perfect Storm. But living near enough to Indonesia and knowing how much piracy goes on in that region (and of course near Somalia right now*), I could appreciate how much time and effort it would be to track down all these sources. There really are so many of these incidents and we rarely ever get the full or even partial story.It's hard for me to understand why there were readers that couldn't finish reading that essay or the one on the ferry disaster. The construction, they physical explanation of why it flipped! The chronology with the first-hand account woven through. Well, this could be a text in journalism school--the literary nonfiction class.The conspiracy theories about why it sank are also pretty funny,sad. Anyway again , his book on the Sahara is great as well. *And he did write recently in the Atlantic about a French yacht that was captured by Somalian pirates. You can look it up. The Atlantic is more relaxed in editing him than the New Yorker was, but still ...
    • 5/5
      William L (as I will call him for the sake of convenience) has written a classic here, but be warned it is not a book with easy answers.The author is not a left wing radical at all, he seems a very typical small c conservative if anything, and yet he finds the unregulated nature of the sea deeply concerning - in terms of piracy, rotten ships, poorly regulated passenger boats, terrorism, and pollution.He's undoubtedly right. The accounts of shipwrecks (and the poor state and utter lack of control in most of the world's merchant ships) are chilling on both a personal and a social level. The book review I read before buying this said that the reviewer did not finish the chapter on the Estonia ferry disaster. Neither did I.Having been sailing on small boats I have infinite respect for the sea, and this book certainly increased that - it also highlights the scale - it really is possibly for pirates to steal a massive container ship and never be caught, even in the modern world of radar and satellites.The final chapter explores the ethical dilemmas of the famous ship-breaking yards of South Asia (where boats are simply run up on the beach to be dismantled by hand...this includes tanker sized vessels). Western efforts to regulate yards in more responsible countries like India, have, if anything, forced the trade elsewhere while ruining livelihoods. Having recently met someone who had visited the same breaking yard and said much the same thing, it is yet another reminder that little about the modern world is simple. The same can be said of many of the issues raised in this book.