Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn Read Free Book Online

lenses of his glasses, which are large and square. Since Ebbesmeyer likes to wear Hawaiian shirts and a necklace of what appear to be roasted chestnuts but which are in fact sea beans, the waterborne seeds of tropical trees that ocean currents disseminate to distant shores, pictures of him often bring to mind cartoons of Santa Claus on vacation.
    He brewed us each a cup of coffee and suggested we adjourn to the backyard, which he refers to as his “office.” Passing through his basement, I saw many of the objects I’d read about in Beachcombers’ Alert! Piled high on a bookshelf were dozens of Nikes. Some of them had survived the 1990 container spill—the first Ebbesmeyer ever investigated—in which 80,000 shoes had gone adrift. Others came from later accidents: 18,000 Nike sneakers fell overboard in 1999; 33,000 more in December of 2002. In January of 2000, some 26,000 Nike sandals—along with 10,000 children’s shoes and 3,000 computer monitors, which float screen up and are popular with barnacles—plunged into the drink.
    Nike’s maritime fortunes are not unusually calamitous; thousands of containers spill from cargo ships every year, exactly how many no one knows, perhaps 2,000, perhaps as many as 10,000. No one knows because shipping lines and their lawyers, fearing bad publicity or liability, like to keep container spills hush-hush. But few commodities are both as seaworthy and as traceable as a pair of Air Jordans, each shoe of which conveniently comes with a numerical record of its provenance stitched to the underside of its tongue, and which—soles up, ankles down, laces aswirl—will drift for years. It helped, too, that Nike had thus far been cooperative. A lawyer gave Ebbesmeyer the serial numbers for all the shoes in the 1990 spill and then taught him how to “read the tongue.”
    Now, in his basement, Ebbesmeyer selected a high-top at random. “See the ID?” he asked. “ ‘021012.’ The ‘02’ is the year. ‘10’ is October. ‘12’ is December. Nike ordered these from Indonesia in October of ’02 for delivery in December.”
    Next he pulled down a black flip-flop, and then a matching one that he’d sliced in half. Inside the black rubber was a jagged yellow core resembling a lightning bolt—a perfect identifying characteristic. If Ebbesmeyer had discovered the coordinates of this particular spill, the sandals would have provided a windfall of data. Unfortunately, the shipping company had “stonewalled” him “like usual.” He didn’t really hold it against them, he said. For a container ship’s crew—an “Oriental” crew especially—a spill incurred a “loss of face” that could easily lead to a loss of job, a price the oceanographer considered too steep, no matter how precious the data.
    It took Ebbesmeyer a year of diplomacy and detective work to find out when and where the Floatees fell overboard. Initially, the shipping company stonewalled him like usual. Then one day he received a phone call. The container ship in question was at port in Tacoma. Ebbesmeyer was welcome to come aboard, on one condition: he had to swear to keep secret the names of both the ship and its owner.
    For four hours, Ebbesmeyer sat in the ship’s bridge interviewing the captain, a “very gracious” Chinese man who had a Ph.D. in meteorology and spoke fluent English. The day of the spill, the ship had encountered a severe winter storm and heavy seas, the captain said. The readings on the clinometer told the story best. When a ship is perfectly level in the water, its clinometer reads 0 degrees. If a ship were keeled on its side, the clinometer would read 90 degrees. When this particular spill occurred, the clinometer had registered a roll of 55 degrees to port, then a roll of 55 degrees to starboard. At that inclination, the stacks of containers, each one six