aluminum foil, others were pancaked flat. One of the China’s sixty-two cargo bays gaped like a missing tooth; an entire row of containers, stacked six high and sixteen across, had been swept away.
Later that afternoon, hoisted up in a man basket by a crane, Rich Austin got a better view of the devastation. “It looked almost like a landfill in some areas,” he remembers. Containers had split like dropped melons, spewing cargo: remote-control boats, golf clubs, frozen lobster tails, thousands of plastic air fresheners. Many photographs of the ravaged China were taken that week. Photos of bay 1 show boxes stuffed with clothing labels yet to be stitched on. With a magnifying glass, you can read what the labels say: DANNY & NICOLE. Scrolled bolts of cloth protrude from the ruins of a container in bay 15. Striped, child-size shirts of the sort favored by Sesame Street’s Ernie drape the scaffolding in bay 17. In photos of bay 36, you can see packages of frozen shrimp; in those of bay 58, Kenwood bookshelf stereo systems. Perhaps most impressive of all are the photos of bay 59, which show a smorgasbord of consumer goods—stainless steel pots, bouquets of plastic flowers, white sneakers, gray trousers from the Gap, all intermingled and strewn about. One pair of white sneakers hangs from a rail by its tied laces, like shoes thrown over a telephone wire. “Whatever Americans were consuming at that time, there it was,” another longshoreman, Dan McKisson, told me. “There was Christmas, laying on the deck.”
Salvaging this wreckage was slow, dangerous work, like playing pick-up sticks with thirty-ton sticks. While a pair of cranes lifted stevedores up in man baskets, another crane swung four steel hooks out to them. The stevedores would catch the hooks, latch them one by one into a container’s corner castings, the man basket would swing clear, and up and away the snared container would go.
At least that’s how it was supposed to work. Sometimes to reach the corner castings, a stevedore would have to climb out of the man basket onto a tipped container. Sometimes when a crane lifted one container, those leaning against it would topple. Sometimes when the hooks rose, the container would sunder, spilling cargo onto the decks and docks. There was melting seafood everywhere, and after a couple of days the smell was so bad that Austin started swiping spilled air fresheners and rubbing the fragrance onto his mustache. “Other guys put earplugs in their nostrils,” he recalls. Dan McKisson remembers that as one container rose into the air, its contents suddenly shifted. There was a crash. Then the steel wall of the container gave way at one end, opening like a hatch. Down came “a rain shower” of cardboard boxes, some of which tore open when they hit the decks. Inside? Bicycles. The people at Schwinn could stop wondering.
Austin and McKisson had seen cargo losses before. Almost every winter at least one container ship turns up in Seattle with containers damaged or missing. But they’d never seen devastation like this. Neither had their foreman, Don Minnekan, and Minnekan was nearing retirement. Neither had any other longshoreman, ever. What the longshoremen bore witness to that November morning was, in monetary terms, the worst shipping disaster in maritime history. Of the 1,300 containers the China had been carrying when it departed Taiwan for Seattle eleven days before, 407 had been lost at sea. Of those remaining onboard, another few hundred had been damaged or destroyed.
“I’ve been out at sea on tugboats and fishing boats. When it’s snotty out, it’s no fun,” Austin told me. “But I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in something that would do that much damage to a ship like that.”
By the time I made my pilgrimage to the toy factory in Dongguan, I’d gone to sea several times—on the Malaspina, the Opus, the Alguita. And yet I could no more imagine what it would be like to ride a container ship through snotty weather than Rich Austin could. Nor could I imagine what it would take to make containers tumble overboard. The accident that had set the toys adrift remained to me mysterious. By process of elimination, after contacting the Port of Tacoma and consulting old shipping schedules in the Journal of Commerce, I managed to identify the ship—the Evergreen Ever Laurel—from which the toys I was chasing had fallen. But there was no mention of the accident anywhere in the public record, not in Lloyd’s