Rachel Slade - Into the Raging Sea

Shortly thereafter, because of the drug incident, he was out of a job.

Retribution against seamen for lodging safety complaints violated maritime law but that didn’t mean it never happened. And sometimes mariners fought back. A few years before Hearn’s firing, Captain John Loftus, a shipmaster with forty years of experience, was fired for calling out safety concerns aboard a vessel owned by TOTE’s competitor, Horizon Shipping. In 2014, Loftus won a million-dollar whistleblower case against the company. The federal judge assigned to the case agreed that Loftus’s concerns were warranted.

Shortly after TOTE fired Hearn, the coast guard inspected El Morro and concurred with the captain’s assessment: Much of the ship’s deck steel was wasted, which made her structurally unsound. Instead of paying for the expensive repairs required by the coast guard, TOTE scrapped her.

While Hearn was lobbying against El Morro , TOTE was building a case against the other officers to hold them accountable for the aging ship’s deterioration. The three seamen had spent decades overseeing the company’s aging vessels’ eternal battle against the sea: scraping, painting, and epoxying, washing down decks, cleaning out pumps, compiling repair lists, and hunting down parts no longer in production. Instead of a bonus, they received warning letters from TOTE claiming that they weren’t doing enough to maintain the ships. By the time the drugs were found on El Morro , TOTE had a paper trail pinning the ship’s condition on its senior officers. Termination letters followed.

Subsequent arbitration led to undisclosed settlements in favor of the mariners but that was scant comfort for those who had given so much of their lives to the sea.

TOTE put El Faro back into service on the Puerto Rican run, tag-teaming with her sister ship El Yunque . It was a temporary fix. TOTE had just ordered two new liquid natural gas–powered (LNG) ships to replace its two remaining elderly steamships. It would take several years before those new vessels were operational, so the old steamships continued chugging back and forth from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico, patched, painted, and duct-taped together.

El Faro and El Yunque were not only aging, they were taking on more cargo since the bankruptcy of competing shipping line Horizon, especially reefers—refrigerated containers that required constant tending to prevent the food inside from spoiling. It was pricey cargo, so it made money, but it strained the already thin crew.

As the ship’s air conditioning struggled against the day’s stultifying heat, Third Mate Jeremie let loose his frustration with the increasing workload. One of the reefers hadn’t gotten plugged in during loading the night before, he told Jack. Now a whole trailer full of food was spoiled.

A port mate once helped with loading in Jacksonville, he said, but that position hadn’t been filled since early September.

Jeremie was sick of the constant scrambling and lack of support. “You know what’s changed?” he said to Jack. “I could not fucking keep up with the loading. I had a goodie helping me”—a GUDE, general utility, deck, and engine unlicensed seaman trained in all areas of the ship—“He couldn't keep up. I was helping him plug in and I didn’t have time to get all the temps down.”

All the reefers got loaded on just before the ship left the dock, creating a shitstorm of problems. They had to scramble to get everything plugged in and secured to leave on time.

“We used to have a port mate and now we don’t. We had a longshoreman, now we don’t. Then we also lost our electrician. We used to have that system of checks where a guy would come down and make sure that every reefer was good. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

It was true. Lately, positions on the ships and onshore were being cut, and the remaining crew had to pick up the slack. Setting high standards was tough when the cast of characters was constantly changing.

“Your average union electrician wouldn’t even come on a ship like this,” Jack said. “It’s too much work for them. They’re not gonna work their way through jungles of lashing chains and dirt to get to a plug somewhere.”

“It’s insane down there in the holds,” agreed Jeremie. He guessed that the ship was carrying more than three dozen reefers, each one demanding someone’s time and attention during the short docking period between voyages. Second Mate Charlie Baird would lay out all the electrical cords neatly when the empty ship was heading back to Jacksonville, but his relief, Second Mate Danielle, didn’t do that.

“There’s just extension cords everywhere. It’s a mess down there. Everything is falling apart. I’m doing what I’ve always done, but it’s just not enough anymore.”

Jack nodded his head.

“I don’t think I could ever be captain here,” Jeremie said. “I’d lose my shit.”

Actually, Jack said, it’s good to be captain. “The captain and chief mate go down to their rooms and play video games,” he said.

“Right,” Jeremie said. “These guys got it all figured out.”

El Faro was poorly run, they agreed, but the unlicensed crew was okay, Jack said. He would know since he was unlicensed, too.

On the ships, officers and crew rarely talked to each other. The gulf between the two classes of mariners could be as stark as black and white. They had separate unions, separate sleeping quarters, separate mess halls, and separate lives. The officers on El Faro lived in New England or southern Florida. As members of the American Maritime Officers union, they could call their hall to get work instead of showing up in person and they usually signed long-term employment contracts.

The unlicensed crew on El Faro mostly came from tough Jacksonville neighborhoods where a seafaring job could save kids from a life in and out of prison, if they could resist becoming drug mules. Guys like LaShawn Rivera, thirty-two, who was working as a cook in the galley on El Faro on her final voyage.

Shipping had been the young man’s salvation. He’d been raised in Atlanta by his mother and stepfather, Robert Green, a bank manager who later joined the ministry. When Shawn was a teen, the family uprooted to Jacksonville. Away from his cousins and hometown, the boy got teased at school for being different, and he withdrew to the streets. Soon he started dealing drugs and spent time in juvie. Then he had a baby girl.

For a young troubled kid in Jacksonville, few job prospects lay ahead, but he was determined to take care of his child.

One day, an elder of the neighborhood told him about the merchant marine. It sounded like the way out—one of the few good jobs available to folks without a college degree. Shawn drove over to the Seafarers International Union hall and studied the job board. All those ships heading to exotic places around the world called to him. He spent all day every day at the hall until he landed a spot on a ship.

The first time he sailed abroad, he called his stepdad from London. “I’m never coming back,” he told him. Back, Pastor Green says, meant the Jacksonville streets.

In search of a specialty, Shawn took cooking courses through his union and eventually was certified to prepare food for the thirty-three men and women on El Faro , his dreadlocks loosely tied back. Working on the ships gave him a sense of pride and purpose, but it would never make him rich. He had a fiancée and then another little girl to support on his $80,000 a year salary. In his spare time, he consumed popular business and self-help books, trying to find a better way to care for his family. When he shipped out on El Faro in late September, Shawn left behind his older daughter, plus a one-year-old baby girl, his fiancée—pregnant with their second daughter—and a stack of books promising him a better future.