Moby-Duck Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  GOING OVERBOARD

  THE FIRST CHASE

  THE SECOND CHASE

  THE THIRD CHASE

  THE FOURTH CHASE

  THE FIFTH CHASE

  THE LAST CHASE, PART ONE

  THE LAST CHASE, PART TWO

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  DONOVAN HOHN

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Donovan Hohn, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this book first appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside.

  Map illustrations by David Cain

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Hohn, Donovan.

  Moby-duck : an accidental odyssey : the true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea and of the beachcombers, oceanographers, environmentalists, and fools, including the author, who went in search of them / Donovan Hohn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47596-6

  1. Ocean currents. 2. Marine debris. 3. Plastic toys. 4. Hohn, Donovan—Anecdotes. I. Title.

  GC231.2.H65 2010

  551.46’2—dc2 2010033608

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Beth,

  and for my father,

  and for my sons.

  Facing west from California’s shores,

  Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

  I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,

  the land of migrations, look afar . . .

  —Walt Whitman

  There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice.

  —Henry D. Thoreau

  PROLOGUE

  At the outset, I felt no need to acquaint myself with the six degrees of freedom. I’d never heard of the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. I liked my job and loved my wife and was inclined to agree with Emerson that travel is a fool’s paradise. I just wanted to learn what had really happened, where the toys had drifted and why. I loved the part about containers falling off a ship, the part about the oceanographers tracking the castaways with the help of far-flung beachcombers. I especially loved the part about the rubber duckies crossing the Arctic, going cheerfully where explorers had gone boldly and disastrously before.

  At the outset, I had no intention of doing what I eventually did: quit my job, kiss my wife farewell, and ramble about the Northern Hemisphere aboard all manner of watercraft. I certainly never expected to join the crew of a fifty-one-foot catamaran captained by a charismatic environmentalist, the Ahab of plastic hunters, who had the charming habit of exterminating the fruit flies clouding around his stash of organic fruit by hoovering them out of the air with a vacuum cleaner.

  Certainly I never expected to transit the Northwest Passage aboard a Canadian icebreaker in the company of scientists investigating the Arctic’s changing climate and polar bears lunching on seals. Or to cross the Graveyard of the Pacific on a container ship at the height of the winter storm season. Or to ride a high-speed ferry through the smoggy, industrial backwaters of China’s Pearl River Delta, where, inside the Po Sing plastic factory, I would witness yellow pellets of polyethylene resin transmogrify into icons of childhood.

  I’d never given the plight of the Laysan albatross a moment’s thought. Having never taken organic chemistry, I didn’t know and therefore didn’t care that pelagic plastic has the peculiar propensity to adsorb hydrophobic, lipophilic, polysyllabic toxins such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (a.k.a. DDT) and polychlorinated biphenyls (a.k.a. PCBs). Nor did I know or care that such toxins are surprisingly abundant at the ocean’s surface, or that they bioaccumulate as they move up the food chain. Honestly, I didn’t know what “pelagic” or “adsorb” meant, and if asked to use “lipophilic” and “hydrophobic” in a sentence I’d have applied them to someone with a weight problem and a debilitating fear of drowning.

  If asked to define the “six degrees of freedom,” I would have assumed they had something to do with existential philosophy or constitutional law. Now, years later, I know: the six degrees of freedom—delicious phrase!—are what naval architects call the six different motions floating vessels make. Now, not only can I name and define them, I’ve experienced them firsthand. One night, sleep-deprived and nearly broken, in thirty-five-knot winds and twelve-foot seas, I would overindulge all six—rolling, pitching, yawing, heaving, swaying, and surging like a drunken libertine—and, after buckling myself into an emergency harness and helping to lower the mainsail, I would sway and surge and pitch as if drunkenly into the head, where, heaving, I would liberate my dinner into a bucket.

  At the outset, I figured I’d interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, read up on ocean currents and Arctic geography, and then write an account of the incredible journey of the bath toys lost at sea, an account more detailed and whimsical than the tantalizingly brief summaries that had previously appeared in news stories. And all this I would do, I hoped, without leaving my desk, so that I could be sure to be present at the birth of my first child.

  But questions, I’ve learned since, can be like ocean currents. Wade in a little too far and they can carry you away. Follow one line of inquiry and it will lead you to another, and another. Spot a yellow duck dropped atop the seaweed at the tide line, ask yourself where it came from, and the next thing you know you’re way out at sea, no land in sight, dog-paddling around in mysteries four miles deep. You’re wondering when and why yellow ducks became icons of childhood. You want to know what it’s like inside the toy factories of Guangdong. You’re marveling at the scale of humanity’s impact on this terraqueous globe and at the oceanic magnitude of your own ignorance. You’re giving the plight of the Laysan albatross many moments of thought.

  The next thing you know, it�
�s the middle of the night and you’re on the outer decks of a post-Panamax freighter due south of the Aleutian island where, in 1741, shipwrecked, Vitus Bering perished from scurvy and hunger. The winds are gale force. The water is deep and black, and so is the sky. It’s snowing. The decks are slick. Your ears ache, your fingers are numb. Solitary, nocturnal circumambulations of the outer decks by supernumerary passengers are strictly forbidden, for good reason. Fall overboard and no one would miss you. You’d inhale the ocean and go down, alone. Nevertheless, there you are, not a goner yet, gazing up at the shipping containers stacked six-high overhead, and from them cataracts of snowmelt and rain are spattering on your head. There you are, listening to the stacked containers strain against their lashings, creaking and groaning and cataracting with every roll, and with every roll you are wondering what in the name of Neptune it would take to make stacks of steel—or for that matter aluminum—containers fall. Or you’re learning how to tie a bowline knot and say thank you in both Inuktitut and Cantonese.

  Or you’re spending three days and nights in a shabby hotel room in Pusan, South Korea, waiting for your ship to come in, and you’re wondering what you could possibly have been thinking when you embarked on this harebrained journey, this wild duckie chase, and you’re drinking Scotch, and looking sentimentally at photos of your wife and son on your laptop, your wife and son who, on the other side of the planet, on the far side of the international date line, are doing and feeling and drinking God knows what. Probably not Scotch. And you’re remembering the scene near the end of Moby-Dick when Starbuck, family man, first officer of the Pequod, tries in vain to convince mad Ahab to abandon his doomed hunt. “Away with me!” Starbuck pleads, “let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!”

  And you’re dreaming nostalgically of your former life of chalkboards and Emily Dickinson and parent-teacher conferences, and wishing you could go back to it, wishing you’d never contacted the heavyset Dr. E., or learned of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or met the Ahab of plastic hunters, or the heartsick conservationist or the foulmouthed beachcomber or the blind oceanographer, any of them. You’re wishing you’d never given Big Poppa the chance to write about Luck Duck, because if you hadn’t you’d never have heard the fable of the rubber ducks lost at sea. You’d still be teaching Moby-Dick to American teenagers. But that’s the thing about strong currents: there’s no swimming against them.

  The next thing you know years have passed, and you’re still adrift, still waiting to see where the questions take you. At least that’s what happens if you’re a nearsighted, school-teaching, would-be archaeologist of the ordinary, with an indulgent, long-suffering wife and a juvenile imagination, and you receive in the mail a manila envelope, and inside this envelope you find a dozen back issues of a cheaply produced newsletter, and in one of those newsletters you discover a wonderful map—if, in other words, you’re me.

  GOING OVERBOARD

  [T]he great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  A RIDDLE ON THE SAND

  We know where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers, who are, on the whole, less poetic than mariners of the age of sail, call the subarctic front. We know the date—January 10, 1992—but not the hour.

  For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the Journal of Commerce and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this particular riddle: the ship was the Evergreen Ever Laurel, owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation, whose fir-green containers, with the company’s curiously sylvan name emblazoned across them in white block letters, can be seen around harbors all over the world. No spools of microfiche have preserved the identities of the officers and crew, however, let alone their memories of what happened that stormy day or night, and if the logbook from the voyage still exists, it has been secreted away to some corporate archive, consigned, for all intents and purposes, to oblivion.

  We know that the ship departed Hong Kong on January 6, that it arrived in the Port of Tacoma on January 16, a day behind schedule, and that the likely cause for this delay was rough weather. How rough exactly remains unclear. Although it did so on other days, on January 10, the Ever Laurel did not fax a weather report to the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., but the following morning a ship in its vicinity did, describing hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet high. If the Ever Laurel had encountered similarly tempestuous conditions, we can imagine, if only vaguely, what might have transpired: despite its grandeur, rocked by waves as tall as brownstones, the colossal vessel—a floating warehouse weighing 28,904 deadweight tons and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn—would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.

  At some point, on a steep roll, two columns of containers stacked six high above deck snapped loose from their steel lashings and tumbled overboard. We can safely assume that the subsequent splash was terrific, like the splash a train would make were you to drive it off a seaside cliff. We know that each of the twelve containers measured eight feet wide and either twenty or forty feet long, and that at least one of them—perhaps when it careened into another container, perhaps when it struck the ship’s rails—burst or buckled open as it fell.

  We know that as the water gushed in and the container sank, dozens of cardboard boxes would have come bobbing to the surface; that one by one, they too would have come apart, discharging thousands of little packages onto the sea; that every package comprised a plastic shell and a cardboard back; that every shell housed four hollow plastic animals—a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, and a yellow duck—each about three inches long; and that printed on the cardboard in colorful letters in a bubbly, childlike font were the following words: THE FIRST YEARS. FLOATEES. THEY FLOAT IN TUB OR POOL. PLAY & DISCOVER. MADE IN CHINA. DISHWASHER SAFE.

  From a low-flying plane on a clear day, the packages would have looked like confetti, a great drift of colorful squares, exploding in slow motion across the waves. Within twenty-four hours, the water would have dissolved the glue. The action of the waves would have separated the plastic shell from the cardboard back. There, in seas almost four miles deep, more than five hundred miles south of Attu Island at the western tip of the Aleutian tail, more than a thousand miles east of Hokkaido, the northern extreme of Japan, and more than two thousand miles west of the insular Alaskan city of Sitka, 28,800 plastic animals produced in Chinese factories for the bathtubs of America—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—hatched from their plastic shells and drifted free.

  Eleven years later, ten thousand circuitous miles to the east, a beachcomber named Bethe Hagens and her boyfriend, Waynn Welton, spotted something small and bright perched atop the seaweed at the southwest end of Gooch’s Beach near the entrance to Kennebunk Harbor in Maine. Its body was approximately the size and shape of a bar of soap, its head the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Welton bent down and picked it up. A brand name, The First Years, was embossed on its belly. The plastic was “white, incredibly weathered, and very worn,” Hagens would later recall. Welton remembered it differently. The duck had been, he insisted, still yellow. “Parts of it had started to fade,” he says. “But not a great deal. Whatever they’d used for the dye of the plastic had held up pretty well.”

  Much depends on this disagreement. If white, the duck Hagens and Welton saw could well have been one of the 7,200 let loose on the North Pacific. If yellow, it was nothing but a figment, a phantom, a will-o’-thewisp. To complicate matters, The First Years had by then discontinued the Floatees, replacing them with a single yellow Floaty Ducky that also bore the company’s logo. Yellow or white, the thing did loo
k as though it had crossed the ocean; on that Hagens and Welton agreed. It was fun to imagine: a lone duck, drifting across the Atlantic, like something out of a fairy tale or a children’s book—fun but also preposterous. “There were still kids playing on the beach,” Welton remembered. “I thought, okay, some kid lost his toy and would come back for it.” Sensibly, he and Hagens left the toy where they found it and walked on.

  METAMORPHOSIS

  The classified ads in the July 14, 1993, edition of the Daily Sitka Sentinel do not make for exciting reading, though they do convey something of what summertime in Alaska’s maritime provinces is like. That week, the Tenakee Tavern, “in Tenakee,” was accepting applications “for cheerful bartenders.” The Baranof Berry Patch was buying berries—“huckleberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries.” The National Marine Fisheries Service hereby gave notice that the winners of the 1992 Sablefish Tag Recovery Drawing, an annual event held to encourage the reporting of tagged sablefish, would be selected at 1 P.M. on July 19 at the Auke Bay Laboratory. “Tired of shaving, tweezing, waxing?!” asked Jolene Gerard, R.N., R.E., enticing the hirsute citizens of the Alaska Panhandle (a region known to the people who live there as “Southeast”) with the promise of “Permanent hair removel [sic].” Then, under the catchall heading of “Announcements,” between “Business Services” and “Boats for Sale,” an unusual listing appeared.

  ANYONE WHO has found plastic toy animals on beaches in Southeast please call the Sentinel at 747-3219.