Late last February, when four Filipino sailors—a boatswain, an able-bodied seaman, an oiler, and an engineer—first met in an Indian port to join their new ship, the Maersk Dubai, there was no indication that they had signed up for anything out of the ordinary. None of the four knew any of the other Filipino members of the Maersk Dubai’s crew, but that was to be expected; merchant seamen change ships all the time. It was also no surprise to them that all the chief officers on the ship were Taiwanese. This sort of segregation has become common on merchant ships. Often a barely functional English is the only shared language on board, and many sailors will refer to officers, and even to each other, by job title rather than by name. As experienced seamen, the four Filipino sailors joining the freighter knew that the chain of command is all that holds such an intimate yet distrustful community together. They did not know that their reluctance to violate that chain of command on the Maersk Dubai could have fatal consequences.
As the Dubai sailed west, another itinerant group gathered in the Spanish port of Algeciras, near Gibraltar. These men were Romanians, mostly farm boys from Transylvania. Some had known each other back home, but most had met pe drum—“on the road,” as the Romanians say—travelling in the shadows of the law. They wanted to come to the New World, and they planned to accomplish this by stowing away aboard a ship—preferably one bound for Canada, which is rightly believed to be less harsh toward illegal immigrants than is the United States. When the Dubai arrived at Algeciras, in early March, the Romanians were waiting.
On March 11th, at least four men attempted to board the ship by the simple method of walking up a staircase that had been lowered to the dock. When the ship cast off, just after midnight, two of them—almost certainly Petre Sângeorzan and Radu Danciu—were hiding somewhere on board. It was Rodolfo Miguel, the boatswain, who discovered them while making his rounds the next morning. “I am the one who found these two stowaways,” he told me, months later. “They were hiding in the forward part of the ship”—near a catwalk, on the port side.
Miguel is forty-two but looks younger. His hair—dark, with new bits of gray—flops onto his forehead when he gestures, as he does often; tall for a Filipino, and big, he speaks percussively and tends to act out his stories. He looks accustomed to ordering men about. He wasn’t especially afraid of the stowaways, nor did they seem fearful of him. They addressed him as “señor” and held cupped palms to their mouths. “I brought them to the crew mess. Then I asked the second cook to bring them some bread and coffee, as they were hungry at that time. Then I called the duty officer.”
There was nothing unusual in any of this. Over the past six years, port-security improvements have pushed European would-be stowaways to the slacker Mediterranean harbors. Algeciras enjoys a popularity among such stowaways not only because of its loose security but also because a number of the ships that dock there sail on to North America. It is normal practice among stowaways to find out where a ship is going, sneak aboard, and hide for two days or so—long enough to get beyond the convenient reach of the port nation’s coast guard. After this period, stowaways generally declare themselves to the crew and are then put to work performing some disagreeable job, like scraping off rust. Just prior to the next port of call, the stowaways are often locked up, as a demonstration of the ship’s diligence. Then they are turned over to port police. Some countries, among them Canada, levy fines against ships for carrying stowaways. But the fines are not prohibitive, and the better-run or more affluent shipping companies—such as Taiwan’s Yangming Marine Transport Corporation, the fifteenth-largest freight company in the world, which owns the Dubai—have stowaway insurance. On most ships, carrying stowaways is not a big deal.
For reasons that may never become clear, it was a big deal on the Dubai. Captain Shiou Cheng was only thirty-four, the youngest ship’s captain with the Yangming line. A handsome, slightly built, somewhat tentative man (one sailor has described him as “demure”), he is far from the conventional image of a sea captain. His father had spent his working life at sea, first in the Taiwanese Navy, from which he retired as a commander, then as an officer in the merchant marine. Shiou Cheng, an only son, obeyed the tradition of filial piety and brought his aging parents to live with him, his wife, and their young child in Taipei.
Shiou Cheng has been dependent on and loyal to the Yangming Corporation since he was eighteen. At sixteen, he began a five-year training program at Taipei’s China Junior College of Marine Technology, and Yangming helped fund the last three years of his schooling in exchange for a three-year work commitment after graduation. He has spent his entire career with the company. He signed up for every training and promotional program as soon as he was qualified. He was rarely home; the company rewarded him with a rapid rise. When he took over the Dubai, in January, 1996, he had only four months’ experience as a captain, and relied heavily on his somewhat leathery chief officer, Chung-chih Wu, who, at forty-eight, was the second-oldest man aboard. But on a ship, of course, final authority and responsibility lie exclusively with the captain. At sea, that is the basis of order.
Petre Sângeorzan and Radu Danciu were from a very different part of the world. Both came from the remote Transylvanian district of Bistrita-Nasaud, a hilly region of farming villages northeast of the beautiful ancient city of Cluj. The farmers of Bistrita-Nasaud favor large families and walled domestic courtyards; they guard their Austro-Hungarian heritage against their lowland countrymen to the south and east, whom they consider rather louche; and, even in the worst times, such as the long reign of Nicolae Ceaușescu, they have managed to send their young men abroad to work for a few years. Sângeorzan and Danciu had come from Transylvania through France to Algeciras—and, evidently, to the Dubai.
Miguel brought the two stowaways to the bridge. The officers there were not pleased to see them. Moments later, the captain arrived. Usually, Miguel said, the captain’s face was “just like a boy’s,” but, he went on, “when they noticed there were strangers on the ship, you would never see that baby face the same way again. Even the chief officer—Oh, my God, it is not normal.” The captain and the chief officer began to argue in Chinese. A sailor was summoned who, like the stowaways, knew some Spanish, and he conveyed the officers’ questions. The stowaways handed their passports and photographs of their families to Miguel, and he showed them to the captain. The stowaways explained that they knew the Dubai was plying the route between Europe and North America. This statement seemed to upset the captain greatly. “Bring them down,” he ordered, and he made a gesture of throwing them. This was when Miguel realized that the captain had decided to put the two men overboard.
The chief officer took the stowaways to an empty cabin. Shortly afterward, Miguel went below, where he encountered the second officer assembling life vests from plastic foam. Miguel didn’t think that the vests were sufficient to support men of the stowaways’ size, but, he told me, “I didn’t want to be in an argument with him,” and he added, “I could not express myself.” Miguel did not know how to communicate with the officers any further. They were so angry, he said, that he “could not talk to them in a nice way.” So Miguel went to the crew mess for a break and a cup of coffee. “I just calmed myself,” he said, “because I could not explain at that time my feelings.”
Next, Miguel saw to the improvising of a raft, because, as he remembers saying to the captain, “it will be a big problem if we can’t give them life vests or anything like that.” A raft was built and lowered into the water, but the rope holding it broke, and “it was gone, because the current is very strong.” Miguel and his men then worked on a second raft, which consisted of two empty oil drums and some pieces of wood, all fastened together with rope. He couldn’t think what else to do, especially since the chief officer had warned him not to interfere. “I was helpless at that time, but God knows about my heart,” he told me. “I did my best.”
Officers and crewmen gathered around the two stowaways at the port-side pilot ladder. Miguel and others later reported that the officers were forcing the stowaways down the ladder to the raft. Most of the witnesses recalled seeing one of the stowaways on his knees, begging. However much some accounts may differ in detail, no one seems to dispute that somewhere west of Algeciras two men were compelled to board a jerry-built raft and were set adrift. This could have happened only with the consent of Captain Shiou Cheng, who, according to one witness, had shouted at the begging Romanian, “You don’t know the problem! I have a baby, I have a family!” The water was agitated and cold. Miguel looked away, not wanting to see what would happen.
The ship’s second cook, Ricardo Aquino, did not look away, and months later, when he was interviewed by Canadian police investigating the events on the Dubai, he described the scene:
According to Romanian investigators, the fathers of Petre Sângeorzan and Radu Danciu have not heard from their sons since.
As for Miguel, he went off by himself, “like a tired boxer,” as he puts it. “I am sitting silently, thinking of what happened,” he told me. There was “an emotion on that ship that has never happened before”—something that Miguel, in his rough English, later called simply “the pressure.” Worrying the arms of a chair in a dimly lighted living room in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Miguel tried to convey what had changed aboard the Dubai. “The pressure,” he said, “is already inside the ship.” The pressure stayed inside the ship, and did not lessen with time.
A ship is a particularly rule-bound place. One does not upset its order lightly. Each sailor or officer depends on his shipmates to do their jobs, for if one man fails to do his job it can endanger the lives of all the others. When Miguel tried to explain to me what had happened on the Dubai, he kept mentioning rules. He emphasized that throwing someone overboard is against a seaman’s training, and that the captain was ignoring maritime rules. But, of course, sailors do not enforce the rules at sea; the captain does. The only aspect of life at sea that is not effectively regulated is crimes committed by officers.
This can put witnesses to officers’ crimes in an awkward legal position: there is no higher authority to turn to. Twentieth-century treaties agree that a crime committed on a ship at sea should be tried in the courts of the nation whose flag the ship flies. But this rule is, as sailors know, of doubtful value, because more and more ships are sailing under flags of convenience. It seems safe to assume that no high-seas crime, of whatever magnitude, will soon be tried in the courts of Liberia, say, no matter how many ships are registered there. In the meantime, the anecdotal impression among sailors and stowaways is that stowaways’ lives are becoming cheaper.
Besides, the ethnic structure of many merchant vessels means that one’s advancement from the lower caste requires a certain kind of betrayal of one’s fellow-sailors, and this makes it difficult for crewmen to trust one another. Increasingly, the officers on merchant ships are from a nation that is doing well in the world, whereas their crews are drawn from poorer countries—notably, the Philippines. Even within the officer caste, ethnicity can trump social class. One of two Filipino officers on the Dubai, Ariel Broas, the third engineer, told me that the Taiwanese “look at the Filipino same like a flea,” and that in the officers’ mess the Taiwanese spoke among themselves in Chinese. I gathered that in weeks at sea Broas, a witty and educated man, had never had a mealtime conversation with his Taiwanese superiors.
Other strong disincentives exist for the reporting of officers’ crimes. In the ports where sailors are hired—Manila, for example—the business is controlled by recruiting agents, who usually work for the big shipping companies. The sailors alternate between submission to two absolute powers—the captain and the recruiting agent. To oppose either is to lose one’s livelihood. To oppose a captain’s will could be considered mutinous. Nobody on the Dubai in mid-March of last year was willing to risk a mutiny for the sake of two strangers. A sense of guilt for not having taken such a risk would come later; at the time, the crewmen just followed orders. They didn’t force anyone overboard, but neither did they oppose those who did.
And so two men were set adrift somewhere west of Algeciras, and no one talked about it. (The stowaways have been identified only because other Romanians in Algeciras saw them get on the ship.) The Maersk Dubai continued to sail westward, and the sailors went about their duties. Yet the new emotion that Miguel felt, the “pressure” inside the ship, would not go away. The purpose of a rigid shipboard hierarchy is to insure safety on an unpredictable sea, but the captain’s decision to put two men overboard had made some of the seamen deeply uneasy. This was a terrible reversal of the natural order: the captain himself had made their life at sea unpredictable. Miguel later said that from that time forward the men became wary of one another, fearful of what might happen next. “Probably all of us are afraid,” the ship’s oiler, Juanito Ilagan, Jr., told me. “We pretend we didn’t see anything.” Not very communicative to begin with, the crew ceased talking altogether.
About a week and a half later, after several stops on the Eastern Seaboard, the Dubai reached Houston. There nine Filipino sailors from the freighter dropped by the Lou Lawler Seafarers’ Center. Three Taiwanese officers—the captain and his first and second mates—went to the center, too. Father Randy Albano, the center’s pastor, tried to chat with the captain. “I remember telling him, ‘You are the youngest captain I’ve ever met,’ ” the priest told me. “I still remember him. He looks very young.” The captain ignored him and continued talking with his officers. Father Albano, who is from the Philippines, spoke instead with the Filipino sailors, notably Miguel, Broas, Ilagan, and Esmeraldo Esteban, an able-bodied seaman. These four had slowly become friends, and that friendship would soon have an unexpected impact on the lives of Captain Cheng and his officers. To the four sailors, who were all religious men, Father Albano represented an authority greater than the captain’s, and they needed a new authority.
The Dubai soon left Houston and, after returning to India, passed through the Suez Canal and put in at Algeciras for the second time. Between Houston and Algeciras, the sailors had decided they could trust Albano, and one another, so two of them wrote him a letter. It was dated May 15th, some two months after the stowaway incident, and began, “Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus. This letter intends to inform you about our situation on board M/V Maersk Dubai.” The sailors mentioned several minor grievances against their superiors, then started a new paragraph: “The worst thing they did was the violation of Human Rights, when they discharged two stow aways who came from Algeciras, Spain. . . . As far as we all know, human lives must be preserved and save at all cost. . . . We are now begging you to please assist us with our problem.” It was signed simply “Crew of M/V Maersk Dubai,” but Father Albano thought he knew which men had sent it. He read the letter several times, then faxed it to an affiliated seamen’s center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which would be the ship’s next port of call.
The Dubai stayed in Algeciras only briefly, but long enough for at least four Romanians, once again, to discover the ship’s Canadian destination and try to board. And, once again, only two succeeded: Nicolae Pasca and, probably, Gheorghe Mihoc. Pasca had boarded with Sorin Radu, an acquaintance, but after an hour Radu left their hiding place and was caught and put ashore. Mihoc boarded with his brother, Vasile, but Vasile was also caught and put ashore. He waited around Algeciras for several days after the Dubai left, but his brother never showed up, so Vasile figured that he was off to Canada. Both Pasca and Mihoc came from Satu-Mare—a region, in the northwestern corner of Transylvania, that is something of a byword for backwardness. They had lived in villages fifteen kilometres apart but had not known each other, though they had friends in common. They discussed these connections after they did meet each other, in France, pe drum, and they subsequently knocked around Spain together. Mihoc was a teen-ager, just out of high school, but Pasca was in his twenties, and the young man looked after the boy. On the Dubai, they had hidden separately, however, and Pasca didn’t even know that his friend had made it aboard.
About two days out of Algeciras, the ship’s Taiwanese carpenter spotted a man who was presumably Gheorghe Mihoc. The carpenter asked Miguel to seize him. According to Miguel, he responded that he and his men would not help take the stowaway, “because I am not interested anymore in that, me and my fellow-Filipinos are not interested anymore.” Miguel retired to the mess. Soon Aquino, the second cook, came below and said that he’d seen several Taiwanese officers rushing toward the stowaway, and that the chief cook had a knife. Here is what Aquino later told police:
Miguel, meanwhile, had returned to the deck and concealed himself. “I saw the Romanian fighting for his life, and swinging his arms,” he said. The chief cook held a knife; the chief officer was holding the man’s right side; the captain and others were pushing at his back. Miguel slipped away to his cabin. “I was helpless, I could not do anything anymore,” he told me. “I couldn’t do something for these people. Because there was a pressure, there was already a pressure, on board.”
Aquino later returned to the laundry and saw the captain hosing down the deck where the struggle had taken place. Ships’ captains do not normally wash the deck. Aquino also noticed that the captain was wearing a particular pair of brown shoes. Shining the captain’s shoes was among the second cook’s duties, but Aquino did not see those shoes again for three days, and when he did see them they had been washed. “I also noticed that on that day”—the day he saw the captain with the fire hose—“the captain was wearing a green shirt, which I never saw again, although the captain was fond of that shirt.” Canadian investigators subsequently found numerous bloodstains on the section of deck indicated by the witnesses.
After about forty-five minutes, Miguel left his cabin and went for a walk on the starboard side of the deck. There he saw Nicolae Pasca, staggering toward him holding a Bible. “Immediately, I stopped,” Miguel told me, “and my heart got—takka-ta, takka-ta.” Pasca had been vomiting blood for nearly two days and had decided to give himself up. He had boarded the Dubai with no food except some chocolate. He was not a big man, but he was solid. Miguel was almost twice Pasca’s age, and taller, and as always he carried his boatswain’s knife on his hip. Both men had come a long way to find themselves facing each other on the deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic. Miguel, following regulations, had already given up two men to his officers—two stowaways whom he now presumed dead. And earlier that day he had seen a third struggling, and had done nothing to help him. Now he was facing yet another man—one holding a Bible.
Miguel put his arm around Pasca and led him back into the ship. Pasca was confused, because he had meant to give himself up, and now this Filipino, with whom he shared no language, was trying to hide him. Miguel attempted to explain. He made circles with his fingers, placed them around his eyes, and said “Filipino, no problema,” then made sideways “V”s with his fingers, put them over his eyes, and said, “Chinese.” Then he made the universal sign of throat-slitting.
That night, Miguel took Pasca to a new hiding place, deep inside the ship—a warm spot, near the engines—and gave him to understand that he must stay there. Pasca showed Miguel a photograph of his girlfriend, dressed in traditional Transylvanian costume. Miguel took Pasca’s Bible and directed him to Psalm 91, which begins, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” Miguel explained to me, “Those verses very strong. I said, ‘Read this every time when you sleep.’ ” Psalm 91 ends, “He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honor him. With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.”
Miguel had consulted with the other Filipinos he trusted—principally Ariel Broas, Esmeraldo Esteban, and Juanito Ilagan—and they agreed that he should take responsibility for Pasca, and, for safety’s sake, be the only person who knew where the Romanian was hidden. They gave Pasca a Tagalog code name—Ibon, which means “bird.” They would ask Miguel, “Have you fed the bird today?” And the men stayed in their rooms as much as possible, avoiding officers and those crewmen not in on the secret; they slept with knives under their pillows and with chairs propped against their doors; they talked little, and waited to reach land in Halifax.
Meanwhile, Father Albano’s letter concerning the first stowaway incident had reached the port police in Halifax, and they were ready for the Maersk Dubai: when it anchored, on May 24th, they boarded the ship and were able to escort Nicolae Pasca and the sailors who had hidden him onto land. At the Mission to Seamen, a collection of modest white trailers by the Halifax docks, television cameras recorded a riotous scene. There was Pasca, dazed and jubilant, bouncing among the sailors, who had tied bandannas around their faces, for they feared retribution from their employers. There were handshakes and claps on the back, and the cameras bobbing about in the crush. Back in the harbor, however, a standoff ensued. The remaining officers and crewmen refused to leave their ship. One officer, the radio operator—constitutionally a nervous man—finally leaped overboard and swam to a police boat. Cameramen captured him reaching up to the police, crying. After five days, the Romanian government filed an arrest warrant for the captain, the radio operator, and five other Taiwanese on charges of murder. According to a police source, Taiwan—which owns forty-eight per cent of the Yangming Corporation—had also been asked, through diplomatic channels, if it wanted to pursue the case, but it did not reply. Given the Romanian request and a go-ahead from the Canadian government, heavily armed police boarded the Dubai, removed the six other accused men, and brought them to jail to join the radio operator. The Dubai got new officers and a new crew, and sailed away.
In sending the letter to Father Albano in Texas, the Filipino sailors had thought that their predicament would soon be resolved, either in Halifax or in the United States. (The next scheduled port of call was Newark.) They had an easy faith in the probity and the power of Western legal systems: they expected to give evidence and then return to their normal lives. For Canada, however, the Maersk Dubai case was not an opportunity for juridical truth-seeking; it was a diplomatic mess. Taiwan, which is Canada’s tenth-largest trading partner, sought to have the trial—if there were to be one—held in its courts. Romania, whose trade dealings with Canada are negligible by comparison, also wanted to try the seven men, and pushed for extradition under an ancient treaty. But neither country had strong legal support for its position. Canada does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation, and it is difficult to extradite people to a country that doesn’t officially exist. And Romania’s legal claim is highly suspect, mainly because the alleged crimes did not occur on Romanian soil, but also because Romania, like Canada, is party to the treaty that stipulates that high-seas crimes should be tried in the ship’s flag state. Unfortunately, in this case the flag state is not quite a state.
Canada’s position was also awkward from a moral standpoint. Even if the defendants could be extradited to Taiwan or to Romania, no one honestly believed that a fair trial would be likely in either country. Canada itself had no jurisdiction to try the case, because no crime had occurred in Canada, or had been committed against a Canadian. But something had clearly gone wrong on the Maersk Dubai, and Canada could not simply wash its hands of the business. The Canadian government’s solution, according to most observers of the case, was—and still is—to push for extradition to Romania, but not to push too hard.
And so, much to the sailors’ surprise, their public reception as heroes lasted only about three weeks. Canadian authorities explained to the seamen that anyone who wanted to testify would have to remain for the extradition hearing, which was set for September, and be cross-examined by the officers’ defense attorneys. Most of the Filipinos in Halifax took their back pay and transportation money from the shipping company and left. Four stayed: the third engineer, Broas; the oiler, Ilagan; the able-bodied seaman Esteban; and the boatswain, Miguel. They had no income. An immigration lawyer advised them to apply for refugee status, and, at first, that notion puzzled them: they weren’t refugees, they were witnesses. But as applicants for refugee status they would at least get the right to stay in Canada, and three hundred and ninety-nine Canadian dollars per month, which would enable them to stay long enough to testify. So the four sailors went on welfare, although back home in Manila they had houses and gardens, and even maids. Once the police completed their investigation, the four were placed in a grim hostel for transients, which they couldn’t stand; they moved into two adjoining basement apartments in a broken-down building. They spent their time looking for work. Nova Scotia, they soon discovered, has one of the highest unemployment rates in Canada. (After several months of searching, they found temporary employment in a lobster-processing plant.)
The seven Taiwanese, by contrast, had the full support of their employer. The Yangming Corporation hired the best lawyers it could find—one for each accused—and Taiwan retained for itself Edward Greenspan, of Toronto, who is reputed to be among Canada’s finest attorneys and is certainly one of its highest paid. In late June, the officers, now out on bail (ten thousand Canadian dollars apiece), moved into a pleasant block of suites in downtown Halifax. The company agreed to pay all their expenses, in addition to their full salaries, and to fly their wives over. The Taiwanese media came to ask gentle questions—whether the officers were liking Halifax, whether they were lonesome so far from Taiwan—which the officers gladly answered. To the non-Taiwanese media, they spoke only to declare their innocence. The Taipei papers featured articles on how expensive it is to feed stowaways and pay fines.
By midsummer, the four Filipino sailors were receiving disturbing reports from their families in Manila. Apparently, strange men were showing up at strange hours, and the wives had begun to get anonymous calls insisting that the husbands not testify. On August 27th, Esteban’s dog was run over, and his wife was told that this had been done as an example. The week before, Miguel’s wife had filed a police complaint, saying that two men had tried to abduct her. She wrote to Miguel, “Just be firm for the God that began His good works in you, He’ll be faithful and able to fulfill it.” One of Esteban’s sons wrote his father not to buy N.B.A. cards for him, because they would be an unnecessary expense, and he added, “There are again car roaming around here. In this mourning at 4:00 A.M. there someone knocking at the door. Our life here is so risky.” When the extradition hearing finally began, on September 3rd, the sailors announced that they couldn’t testify until they were sure that their families were safe—preferably in Canada.
They had thought that this dramatic gesture would bring dramatic results, but they were wrong. The officers’ attorneys immediately suggested that the sailors had simply wanted to emigrate all along—that they had made the charges against their officers in order to stimulate the sympathy of the Canadian state and attain a bright future for themselves in Canada. The sailors found this charge so incredible that they could barely register it. They didn’t even like Canada, but, having sought refugee status, they could hardly say so. Canada was all they had left. Canada’s Immigration Minister then denied their families’ visa requests, because the sailors had applied for refugee status and therefore Canada could not be confident that their families would return to Manila. At that point, the sailors realized that in fact they were not considered essential to the extradition hearing—that the hearing could proceed without them. But they also realized that, without their testimony, the officers would almost certainly go free.
When I visited the four one evening in September, in the living room of a Filipino friend of theirs, I was struck by their courtesy. Only Broas, the engineer, seemed at ease, however: he perched on the piano bench and told sly jokes. The others had trouble keeping still. Esteban was either smoking on the front porch or sunk into an armchair, his ribs showing through his striped pullover when he breathed deeply. He was on tranquilizers but said he still had trouble sleeping. He said he was spending hours looking over clippings on the Taiwanese economy, trying to make sense of what had happened to him. He told me, vacant-eyed, that the begging stowaway had kissed his boots. And Miguel—still bulky, though he said he had lost weight—would get up suddenly to act out events of months ago. He would be briefly animated by memories, then go calm. His voice would be loud then fall to a whisper. At one moment, he grabbed his chest and said, “What these Taiwanese officers did to my life!” His voice went quiet, and he added, “Everything they’ve done until now, I never expected it.” He said he thinks about the Romanians’ families and then about his own. “It’s like he said”—and he waved his arms at Broas, sitting quietly on the piano bench, who had earlier explained, in his cool, controlled way, “We are in a trap, between the families of the living and the families of the dead.”
As the four witnesses waited in vain for their families to be allowed into Canada, the extradition hearing proceeded in Judge J. Michael MacDonald’s windowless courtroom, in downtown Halifax, and a curious society developed there. In the public gallery, front and center, sat the seven detainees, tastefully dressed and appearing mild-mannered. Before them were their seven attorneys—a boisterous, expressive group, who formed a sort of high-spirited phalanx ever pressing down on the bent form of the Crown’s prosecutor, James Martin, in the front row. A highly regarded attorney who was here acting on behalf of Romania, Martin gave the strong impression of wishing he were elsewhere. (Unlike the defense team, he wouldn’t talk to the press.) Above and facing him sat the Judge, an unobtrusive, even hesitant man, rather new to the bench. Because this was an extradition hearing, there was no jury.
Once the fact-gathering is over, probably this month, the defense is likely to argue that the hearing should not have taken place at all. Taiwan’s attorney will argue that Taiwan has jurisdiction, and will somehow finesse the question of his client’s ethereal nationhood. Finally, Judge MacDonald will decide—perhaps in February—whether to recommend extradition of any of the officers. And so the case of the stowaways has not found its higher authority, as the four sailors on the Maersk Dubai once thought it would. Instead, the case is like a ship floating between countries, and it has drifted into MacDonald’s courtroom only by chance. Nearly everyone following the case knows this, and knows, too, that the Canadian government will have opportunities to cast it off once more.
The four sailors don’t want that to happen. It soon became clear to them that Canada would not let their families in, and that the defense, through the media, was successfully planting doubts about their own honor. The sailors had gambled and lost. Their challenge to MacDonald’s court had brought only contempt citations. So they arranged to hide their families, in Manila, as best they could. And, one by one, they agreed to tell their stories, upon which much of this account is based.
Juanito Ilagan, bright and cheerfully composed—he’d had a small career as a pop singer before going to sea—testified first. The defense attorneys saw that he couldn’t be rattled, and kept their cross-examinations brief. Esmeraldo Esteban, with his shrunken frame and dark eyes, was a different story. The attorneys went on the offensive, unimpeded by the Crown’s prosecutor, who generally left these four witnesses to fend for themselves. The defense would ask Esteban leading or sarcastic questions and scoff at the answers, muttering to one another contemptuously. Esteban responded with frank scorn, asking his cross-examiners why they kept repeating their questions and whether they wanted him to lie. He had no idea that talking back to attorneys during cross-examination is a serious breach of decorum. He later told me he thought he had done well in battle against a powerful foe in hostile territory, but he had mainly succeeded in alienating the court.
By the end of Esteban’s testimony, the four witnesses—through what seemed almost like a series of accidents—had completed their journey from being treated like heroes to being treated like defendants. But the grilling that Esteban had received in court did not discourage Miguel. He still believed, as he told me, that he should testify, because then God might “release me,” and because “I have a son, and maybe he will plan to be a good seaman,” and because life at sea has to have rules. He continued, “If this happens all the time, there are so many ships, so many ships. I want to stop this, whatever happens, whatever the cost. I want to stop this, because this is the worst thing that ever happened in my life.”
Miguel took the stand on October 23rd. On direct examination by the Crown, he repeated the story he had told since arriving in Halifax. When it came time for cross-examination, the defense insisted that Miguel testify largely in English—a language he does not know well. The Judge found this to be fair, as long as a Tagalog-speaking interpreter was present if needed. Before beginning, Miguel addressed the Judge. “I’m here not to prove something,” he said. “I’m not here to lie. I’m here to stand and to stop the things that happened.” He was, he said, “very much very coöperated.”
The defense began in the person of Kevin Burke, a tall, gaunt man with a single expression—of mingled gravity and derision—and a mumbling delivery surpassed in its incomprehensibility only by Rodolfo Miguel’s bad English. Burke was capable of acid phrasings, such as “If it were a mistake, Mr. Miguel, could you admit it?” He was not above badgering the witness, but his main technique was to state a series of events rapidly and then stop and stare at the witness as if a question had been asked which demanded a simple yes or no. One could see Miguel trying to follow the attorney’s line of thought, trying to figure out which event in the series was the one his opponent really had in mind—that is, which one would later come to haunt him if he answered simply yes or no. Miguel knew that he was no match for Burke, just as he knew that Burke was hoping to fluster him into contradicting himself. To avoid this, Miguel would let the attorney finish whatever he was saying, and then, with apologies, give his own version of events. Miguel and the court were communicating in much the way a Third World sailor might communicate with a First World officer—in cobbled English and with a surplus of distrust. They only appeared to be speaking the same language.
The absurdity of this profound miscommunication—combined with the jocularity of the defense team, which Judge MacDonald did nothing to restrain—lent the courtroom a hysterical quality. It reached a climax late one afternoon after an exhausting day of cross-examination. Burke was trying to discredit Miguel’s claim that he had ordered the building of the raft that carried off the first two stowaways; Burke sought to show—as some seamen had told the police in Halifax—that the captain or his chief officer had ordered it, thus proving that the officers did not intend to kill the two men. The attorney ran through a confusing series of events—Miguel coming onto the deck, seeing the stowaways and the seamen gathered by the pilot ladder—and asked Miguel to confirm their sequence.
Instead, Miguel described the scene in his own words: “When I came out to port-side main deck, I saw my officers, the three officers, the chief officer and the second mate and the radio operator, continuously push this first stowaway. . . . I’m only see my chief officer, my second mate, and my radio operator continuous pushing, kicking this first stowaway.” This was the scene that Miguel desperately wanted to impress upon the Court, the scene that he had relived so many times since March.
The attorney returned to his own version of events, with some shades of difference, and Miguel gave the same reply. The attorney tried again, with the same result; and again, and this time Miguel said that he saw the sailors by the pilot ladder and “at that moment my chief officer and my second officer, my radio operator, kicking and pushing this person over the port side.”
By this point, the six other defense attorneys were laughing. The accused Taiwanese, the captain’s wife, a visiting Taiwanese prosecutor, and a supporter from the local Chinese community were all smiling.
The attorney tried a fifth time. Neither the prosecutor nor the Judge objected. Why were the able-bodied seamen already by the pilot ladder? “I don’t know, sir,” Miguel said. “Only I know they are already there. And my officers, chief officer and second officer and the radio operator continuously” (the attorney nodded, shook his head, said “Pushing”) “pushing and kicking” (the attorney, dismissively, “All right”) “this first stowaway over to the port-side pilot ladder.”
By now, almost everyone in the courtroom was shaking with amusement—even the journalists were smiling. Miguel sat hunched in the witness stand, looking stricken. It was chilling in that moment to think that this hearing was the most objective, rigorous, and thoughtful examination the Dubai case would ever have.
The next morning, the defense again returned to the story of the raft, but this time Miguel, when he spoke of kicking and pushing and shoving, began to weep. The defense moved on to another contention—that Miguel, far from being a hero, had helped force the stowaways onto the raft. This claim rested mainly on the statement of the third officer—the highest-ranking Filipino on the Maersk Dubai. He had told police that Miguel had threatened the stowaways by swinging an extension post and shouting. This time, the defense asked Miguel questions that could safely be answered by a yes or a no.
“Did you shout?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you push the stowaways?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you aim an extension post at the stowaways?”
“No, sir.”
The attorney quoted from the third officer’s deposition: “I saw the boatswain was forcing them to go down, and I know he is also following orders from the master. . . . Then this thing I saw again is the boatswain was holding this extension post and aiming to—because the older guy, he don’t want to go down.”
Miguel, his hands stuck deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, denied doing anything against the stowaways. He appeared calm. He patiently explained that the master—the captain—was on deck and that the second, older stowaway was begging him for his life. No one was smiling now in Judge MacDonald’s courtroom, not even the defense attorneys. The accused Taiwanese were not smiling. Maybe they had fixed on that phrase “He is also following orders.” Was this the best that their attorneys could do—argue that the captain had ordered a subordinate to force stowaways overboard, instead of doing it on his own?
In retrospect, I wonder whether Miguel wasn’t thinking of himself as well as of Nicolae Pasca when he picked out Psalm 91 that day aboard the Dubai. “I will deliver him, and honor him,” the passage reads. “With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.” Miguel, like everyone else on the ship, has his share of guilt to bear; certainly he was less of a hero than he would have wanted to be. Two men were put into the sea in March of last year. A third was probably killed in May. A fourth came along, giving every man on the Maersk Dubai a chance to redeem himself. Four sailors took that opportunity, and all that went with it, at the price of losing everything else in their lives. The rest did not.
“So many ships, so many ships,” Miguel had said to me—so many ships, and so many stowaways hoping to sail to a new country. As David Garon, of Canada’s shipping federation, remarked to me, “There are a hundred million people homeless in the world, and they have to get somewhere.” Industry representatives, customs and immigration officials, and the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization are trying both to make stowing away more difficult and to find a means of making criminal laws apply more readily at sea. The I.M.O. has been drafting a code that should make high-seas crimes easier to prosecute, and perhaps someday an adequate number of countries will ratify it and abide by it. In the meantime, sailors will have to weigh the risks of bearing witness for themselves.
After a day of Miguel’s testimony, Esmeraldo Esteban came by my hotel room. He looked worn out. He talked about his hopes of going to sea again. It’s a good job. There is nothing else he wants to do. We shared a beer and gazed out the window at the citadel that once defended Halifax.
I asked Esteban whether, knowing what he knew now, he would have agreed to testify. “No” was his reply. And if he were to witness another crime someday?
“I will look the other way.” ♦