Liners, tramps and slow steaming: life aboard the world's merchant fleet
As of December 2018, one in four merchant sailors on Earth had been born in the Philippines. They crew a fleet that grew from about 30,900 large ships in 2005 to nearly 39,000 in 2010. Researchers find that when mariners quit, the reason is almost always the same: they want to be home with their families.
Boats have carried goods since around 4000 BCE, when river and coastal peoples such as those of Mesopotamia built simple craft for food and trade. For most of history ships hauled loose break-bulk cargo that dockworkers loaded by hand, a slow process that became a bottleneck as 20th-century trade boomed. Standard containers, spreading from the 1970s, swept much of that away. UNCTAD put shipping's share of international trade at roughly 80 percent in 2020.
Ships run in two broad styles. A liner keeps a fixed timetable, so it is built with more power and better seakeeping to push through bad weather, which makes it costlier. A tramp goes wherever the next cargo takes it, perhaps grain from Canada to Latvia and then coal from Britain to Melanesia. A cargo crossing from Europe to the United States usually takes 10 to 12 days, and container lines sometimes deliberately cruise slower, a practice called slow steaming, to burn less fuel.
Rivers and canals extend the network inland. Hanseatic cities tamed northern European rivers and harbours, and today the Saint Lawrence Seaway links Great Lakes ports with Atlantic routes while Illinois canals connect the lakes to New Orleans.
A crew splits into deck, engine and steward departments. Engineers look after propulsion and also the hotel services of sewage, lighting, air conditioning and water, while a chief steward plans menus, orders stores and may bake the bread. Satellite distress and communication systems made dedicated radio departments largely unnecessary, and many radio officers retrained as electro-technical officers. The sea stays unforgiving: a memorial in Gloucester, Massachusetts, lists more than 10,000 fishermen, and over 10,000 vessels have gone down on the Great Lakes since the 1800s. Satellite phones now ease the isolation, though they remain expensive.
Source: Maritime transport
