Robert Frump

The author of this book, Robert Frump, served as an investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper in the early 1980's, was one of the journalists called into action when the aged collier SS Marine Electric capsized and sank in a nor'easter off the Delmarva Peninsula in February 1983. Frump led the effort to investigate the disaster that claimed the lives of 31 of the ship's crew of 34 that resulted in a series of articles that focused on the ship, its crew, and the shipping industry that doomed the vessel. Some years after the loss of the ship and now distanced from the newspaper staff, Frump performed more research and interviews to put "Until the Sea Shall Free Them" together, initially published by Doubleday in 2002.

The U.S. Naval Institute published a paperback version in its Bluejacket Books series in 2007. In my USNI version, the book has 341 pages divided into three parts, 30 chapters, an epilogue, and a notes and acknowledgments page. The book follows what I would call a journalistic style in that the story's timeline moves back and forth to suit the point the author is trying to make. Part One (Chapters One through Ten) covers the incident voyage, relying to a great extent on the experience of the ship's three survivors. Part Two (Chapters Eleven through Twenty-two) discusses the aftermath of the ship's sinking with the Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation acting as the focal point. Frump details the Board's inquiry into the ship's loss, with a close look at the interaction of survivors, expert witnesses, and lawyers for survivors and the ship owner/operator. Part Three (Chapters Twenty-three through Thirty) ties up the loose ends speaking of the consequences for the survivors, victims' families, and the ship's owner, the attention here being on the surviving Chief Mate of the Marine Electric, Bob Cusick. Frump chose Cusick as the focal point for this book, as he appears frequently in all three parts of the book.

"Until the Sea Shall Free Them" is a logical outgrowth of Frump's original work for the Inquirer on the ship's loss and the responsibilities of the ship's owners. While his background work on the original news story educated Frump a great deal about America's merchant marine, it is still quite clear from the language of the book that one is dealing with a landlubber. The books reads well and Frump's journalistic chops makes the book difficult to put down as one works through the pages. I was disappointed by one aspect of Frump's work; there's not a peep about the legislation that enabled the Marine Electric tragedy--the Jones Act. Responsible for a number of evils--high costs of living in Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii; a source of corruption among American shipping companies; and an indirect cause for marine disasters like the Marine Electric and 2015's SS El Faro--I feel that Frump should have included the Jones Act in his otherwise complete coverage. With this one exception, I think Frump's examination of the spirit of the American merchant sailor is a most noteworthy read.… (mehr)

Fascinating book.

A very conservative estimate (1%) places the number of Mozambican refugees eaten by lions at about 13,000. Even if you half that number, the result is astonishing. Refugees walk across the Kruger National Park from Mozambique in attempts to reach South Africa. A well kept secret is that in addition to the normal dangers of heat, thirst, and human predators, they are being preyed upon by lions, an inversion of the food chain.

Bits of bloody clothes found in the middle of nowhere. A lone suitcase, filled, abandoned in the bush. A single shoe. A full water bottle. Footprints that trekked on, then just ended. Everyone knew what was happening. Kruger was the one best way for poor Mozambicans to enter South Africa with its supply of jobs and relative safety. Kruger presented the longest South African border with Mozambique and the cover the Mozambicans needed to sneak in. Kruger also had more than two thousand lions, few with any reason to fear humans. Of course, some see this as a natural form of border control.

The horrible economic and political situation in Mozambique turned the Kruger park into a veritable highway of refugees. (The park forms a boundary along almost the entire border.) It is estimated more than a million trekked across into South Africa seeking some semblance of order and relative peace. The risk posed by lions, crocodiles (they had to swim the Crocodile River) was an acceptable risk. Many became a meal. A good sized lion can reach 550 lbs. and a length of ten feet. They are also social predators. A lion in front of you means probably two behind you. (Never run. The accepted best practice is to stand stock still and not trigger any response from the lion(s). You can’t outrun a lion.)

“The other moral is simply this: Eden kills. Kruger is not a zoo, deer park, or exhibit, however placid it may seem. It is nature, or close to nature, because in the state of nature, organisms kill. Put a warthog, a mere cat, and a lion together in a Disney cartoon and you have a great song and dance routine. Do it in Kruger, and you have a well-fed lion. Mammals, insects, reptiles, and raptors are killed and kill every day of the year at Kruger. Otherwise, Kruger would not be Kruger; it would not be wild and natural. All the creatures of Kruger seemed in their own way aware of these rules, save one: humans.” Rangers are deadly serious about the dangers. On one occasion the author got out of the car to “water a bush.” “[B]oth Steve and Neville post themselves on watch at opposite ends of the compass. They are looking earnestly for any dangers. Once we are outside the cars, we are exposed. There is no joking here, and my one attempt falls flat; they do not drop their eyes from surveillance, and they do not laugh or speak. They are deadly serious, and the dangers are real.”

The author uses these events and individual anecdotes to review the history of the park and the evolution in the way we think of animals and how they should be treated as part of the human eco-system. One of the major problems now is that people raised on “Born Free” and the Disney version of lions, want to treat them as cuddly little playthings. Even when lions wander through subdivisions, people want them left alone. The inevitable tragedy will reverse this notion, which, in turn, will again raise calls for the extermination of the lions.

“The tendency of a green-leaning public is to treat lions as friends and forget they are wild carnivores. Of particular concern to Gerrie is the community of Marloth Park, the suburban like development just south of Kruger and home to Izinyoni Lodge. Some of the other residents, not Paddy Buckmaster, show a dangerous tendency to treat lions casually—as if they were squirrels or raccoons or finches at a bird feeder . His fear is that the Marloth residents are unintentionally creating a new breed of man-eating lions. The affluent white homeowners who cherish the lions in their backyards during the daytime are well meaning, and their dedication to nature seems sincere. . . .The greens, in short, often have as much poor information now about lions as the bubba-rancher set did a century ago. They are both wrong about lion behavior, at one-hundred-eighty-degree opposites of the political compass.”

Man-eating lions are nothing new. “ In Tanganyika, in the 1930s and 1940s, three generations of a lion pride hunted men, women, and children so systematically that they treated villages like pantries. When hungry, the pride would enter a village, select a hut, tear through the roof, and eat the inhabitants as casually as we might open and eat a tin of nuts. George Rushby, the famous white hunter who eventually killed most of the lions, found the animals to be in their prime, with luxuriant, silky coats. The lions had so “selected” humans as the preferred species that a lion would charge through a herd of cattle—and kill only the herdsman.” “ “you are on a thin edge” when around lions. He repeats that phrase—thin edge—wherever he goes. Always, it must be kept in mind, he says, that the lion is two animals. Man is diurnal and sees the lion in its daytime passive mode. The night belongs to the lion, though, and there the lion is a fearsome predator. It is not evil. It is an opportunistic carnivore that walks the bush in highly organized hunting parties looking for protein. At night, it is a biological bot, a near-perfect killing machine. Quickly, if there is a new form of easy prey, it will learn to kill it.”

Close to being exterminated, it was ecotourism and the Kruger Park that saved them They now thrive, but until political conditions are resolved people will continue to die

Another book worth reading is John Henry Patterson’s memoir, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. Patterson was a renowned bridge builder who was hired to build a bridge across the Tsavo river. His efforts were hindered as workers, imported from India as the Africans wouldn’t work for the British, disappeared and the rest became terrified. Patterson finally had to hunt the two lions, nicknamed Ghost and Darkness. It took him a year. William Goldman wrote the screenplay for a movie about Patterson, Ghost and the Darkness. It’s good.… (mehr)

The Marine Electric was a very old ship, originally a WW II tanker which had been converted to carrying coal up the east coast. Trains would deliver it to the ship and then the ship would haul it to Boston. The coal would be carefully loaded to prevent "hogging" (too much weight fore and aft) and "sagging" (too much weight in the center. Both conditions could be quite dangerous at sea. Every trip the mate noted a few more cracks in the hatch covers. The owners were a good company but they were building a brand new replacement and no one wanted to spend a lot on the old lady.

The crew had even warned the Coast Guard but the inspectors were careful not to trip over the defects while failing to mention them on their reports. The crew scrapped and painted but sometimes scrapping through the rust revealed daylight.

The inevitable happened. A huge winter storm, a magnificent blizzard with high winds and awful conditions caused water to ship over the bow and then into the hold through a cracked hatch cover. Soon the bow was down, and the ship developed a list. Inevitability the crew were forced to abandon ship, but the ship capsized so quickly all the engine room crew could not escape quickly enough to escape and went down with the ship. Most of the others were thrown into the 33-degree seas, Then to make things worse, they were pushed under the deckhouse as the ship rolled over. In this situation, life jackets made things worse because then pushed the sailor toward the surface against the deckhouse.

Lifeboats such a reassuring word: life-boat. Regretfully, the little known truth about them is that once in a lifeboat, it's extremely difficult to get people out, especially if conditions are not ideal (and why get into one if conditions are good?) They bash up against hulls of larger ships attempting rescue, they are often hard to launch, even the new ones can turn turtle, making them prone to sink, altogether not a really good experience for anyone.

There was a truism in the Merchant Marine: "First the Coast Guard heroically rescues officers from sinking ships. Then they line up the officers in front of Marine Boards of Investigation. And summarily shoot them." Only three people survived the sinking of the Marine Electric. Someone had to take the fall, and by golly, it wouldn't be the company that owned the ship. The case of the Smith Voyager is illustrative. She was carrying grain and fitted only with plywood dividers and loaded beyond the Plimpson level contrary to the master's orders. The owners insisted. The ship began taking on water during a storm and the grain then shifted causing a further list. The courts ruled against the owners, but the Coast Guard overruled the court and charged everything against the master's responsibility.

"...unsteady ships were being sent to sea under great pressure from the owners, . . .yet it was not the owners who were blamed or the old, inform ships themselves. The operational managers--the officers-- were blamed for the sins of the system. system. Years later, Dr. Charles Perrow, a Yale University professor of sociology, would write a book entitled [b:Normal Accidents|192408|Normal Accidents Living with High-Risk Technologies|Charles Perrow|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172579673s/192408.jpg|186047] and find that this behavior was typical in the maritime system, a system that alone among major industrial bureaucracies was actually organized to induce errors, not correct them.An enterprising Perrow student, Leo Tasca, had painstakingly examined four Marine Board of Investigation cases and their findings. Then he took the same cases and analyzed how they came out in courts of law. In each case, the owners and operators were found clearly liable and paid handsome sums. Yet the heart of each case was essentially ignored by the marine boards. The results were so clear-cut, said Perrow, who previously had viewed the Coast Guard as above reproach, that he could only conclude the Coast Guard was “highly biased” toward owners.

The editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had a special interest in following maritime stories or the story of the Marine Electric probably would never have been covered at all. He was also the best editor for the story, one who supported the reporters with whatever they needed and let them go deep into the story. They soon discovered that the class of ships the Marine Electric was part of, had been know as "sinkers," having been built of "dirty" steel and the age of the ship had not made it any cleaner. Now the iron was "tired", too. There were three survivors and soon the battle lines were drawn. "The law was clear. The company was liable if the company knew unseaworthy conditions existed. But if the officers knew and did not communicate that to the company, well, case law was clear there, too. If the company paid at all, the sum was millions less. They had no “privity” of the knowledge that the ship was unseaworthy."

When the Maritime Board began its hearing, there was one hero present, Commander Calicchio, a man who would probably never be promoted to Captain in the Coast Guard because he had a tendency to do things the right way because they were the right thing to do, not because they were expedient or political. When in charge of the Florida ports, he had forced cruise ship owners to increase the number of lifeboats with a simple demonstration of how the regulations had been designed by formulas for the average person under average conditions. The story of how he did it is worth the price of the book. He knew the problem was the system: "Mostly, he thought, the proliferation of rules was designed to cover the ass of the brass and then assign blame to people who weren’t really to blame at all. A thousand passengers died because they couldn’t get to the lifeboats soon enough? They would call a Marine Board and cruise through a buffet of regulations to see whom they could blame. You could bet the captain and the officers would go down on something like that. You could bet there would be more rules and regulations, when the simple fact was right in front of you: There weren’t enough lifeboats."

I won't do any more spoiling by detailing the hearing board and its decision.

This is a really good book: lots of maritime history, personal anecdotes, a trial, stormy seas, a couple of heroes, explanation of a system fraught with problems, and nicely put together. Terrific read.
… (mehr)