Young man to oceanographer as they look out over the ocean: “Awful lot of water out there.”

Oceanographer: “Yes, and that’s only the top of it.”

It is mostly the surface of the sea that we know, because that’s where we sail or fish. Only submarines and shipwrecks have the opportunity to visit the depths. The Outlaw Sea is about ships, mostly old, and all dangerous, and what happens to them when things go bad on the surface. Chaos comes as Kristal, a 560ft (170m)ship that should have been retired years before, is broken in half by monster waves in a February storm in the North Atlantic and sinks, taking 11 of her 30-man crew down with her. Then comes crime, as modern pirates near the Strait of Malacca board and capture the Alondra Rainbow, a freighter with a $10 million cargo of aluminum ingots, tie up and blindfold the crew for a week, then turn them loose in a lifeboat in the middle of nowhere, and disappear with the ship.

The chaotic centerpiece of the book, however, is the story of the 1994 sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia as she was crossing the Baltic from the Estonian capital of Tallinn to Stockholm. In a powerful storm, something goes wrong with the forward car ramps, and instead of sealing the bow against the incoming waves, they break open. “And after that,” writes Langewiesche, “the ship kept sailing ahead with its mouth wide open, gulping up the sea.”

She gulped enough to sink her, and of the 989 passengers and crew, 852 died (casualties in the Titanic disaster numbered approximately 1,500). By the end of the descriptions of the Estonia passengers screaming, fighting, jumping, and dying, you feel as if you’re drowning in words and water — which was probably the author’s intention.

A superb reporter, Langewiesche wasn’t aboard the Kristal or the Alondra Rainbow, but he did interview the survivors, and, like Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm, describes in painfully vivid detail what happens when a ship sinks. Reading the book makes you seasick — and very frightened. When it was published last year in the US, the book was entitled The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime. Although there is chaos and crime aplenty, I didn’t find much evidence of freedom. Perhaps it refers to the free market that dominates much of the shipping industry, where ships are free to fly whatever flag is convenient, largely to avoid inspections and regulations that would be applied in their home countries; or maybe it is the freedom to die in a shipwreck or have your shoreline covered in crude oil. (Or maybe Americans just like books with the word “freedom” in the title.)

But even without freedom, reading The Outlaw Sea is a humbling experience, like being on a small ship in the middle of a very big ocean. You begin to understand how feeble are the works of man to withstand the awesome, uncontrollable power of the sea.

Richard Ellis is the author of the forthcoming Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine

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