But elsewhere, the pandemic was revealing just how vulnerable the entire shipping industry might be. The cook worried that they’d run out of gas for the stove.
After the fruits and vegetables were gone, the crew ate short rations. The ship zigzagged for weeks, and supplies dwindled. “We were going around in circles, taking the sails down and up again because of the squalls,” De Beukelaer told me. In the Gulf of Mexico, they rediscovered the difficult realities of wind-powered transport. What was once the dream of a few enterprising idealists has become a business opportunity that startups and sprawling multinationals alike are chasing. As the climate crisis has escalated, and the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global supply chains, the movement to decarbonize shipping has spread. It could carry only about a hundred tons of cargo-a tiny amount compared with the more than twenty thousand tons that a container ship can carry-but customers hired Timbercoast to deliver coffee, cocoa, rum, and olive oil.īockermann’s company is one of several founded on a provocative idea: What if shipping’s history could inspire its future? For centuries, the cargo industry ran on clean wind power-and it could again. After having the Avontuur restored, he captained the ship, hired a small crew, recruited some volunteer shipmates, and put the vessel back to work. The shipping industry, he knew, was one of the dirtiest on the planet, spewing roughly three per cent of the world’s climate pollution-as much as the aviation industry. Bockermann had witnessed the harms of diesel ships on the high seas, beyond the reach of most environmental regulations, the descendants of the Selandia burn millions of gallons of thick sludge left over from the oil-refining process. His mission was to eliminate pollution caused by cargo shipping. Two years later, Cornelius Bockermann, a German sea captain who had worked with oil companies, bought the Avontuur and made it the flagship of a company called Timbercoast.
Humans had the power to avert these crises-but only if they took rapid action to end their dependence on fossil fuels. But that year a United Nations climate report warned that the planet was careening toward an era of extreme weather and disasters, in which escalating heat waves, fires, and storms could become the norm. By 2012, the Avontuur was ferrying passengers on the Dutch coast at more than ninety years old, it probably seemed destined for a maritime museum or a scrap heap. In 1920, a Dutch shipbuilder fashioned a sailing schooner named the Avontuur and put it to work carrying cargo, which it did for the rest of the century. The shipping industry created a mind-bending supply chain in which an apple from halfway around the world often costs less than one from a nearby orchard.ĭiesel ships never entirely stamped out the sailing ships that once reigned supreme, however. So-called devil ships inaugurated a new age of petroleum on the high seas by the twenty-first century, nearly ninety per cent of the world’s products spent time on diesel-powered vessels. The Selandia, a Danish vessel that measured three hundred and seventy feet, was one of the first oceangoing ships to run on diesel power. Winston Churchill, then the minister in charge of the British Royal Navy, declared it “the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the twentieth century.” But, as the Selandia continued its journey around the world, some onlookers were so spooked that they called it the Devil Ship. In February, 1912, Londoners packed a dock on the River Thames to gawk at the Selandia, a ship that could race through the water without any sails or smokestacks.
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