Donovan Hohn - Moby-Duck: 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

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Table of Contents

DONOVAN HOHN

VIKING

For Beth,
and for my father,
and for my sons.

Facing west from Californias 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. Id 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 fools 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 Arctics 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 Chinas Pearl River Delta, where, inside the Po Sing plastic factory, I would witness yellow pellets of polyethylene resin transmogrify into icons of childhood.

Id never given the plight of the Laysan albatross a moments thought. Having never taken organic chemistry, I didnt know and therefore didnt 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 oceans surface, or that they bioaccumulate as they move up the food chain. Honestly, I didnt know what pelagic or adsorb meant, and if asked to use lipophilic and hydrophobic in a sentence Id 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 freedomdelicious phrase!are what naval architects call the six different motions floating vessels make. Now, not only can I name and define them, Ive experienced them firsthand. One night, sleep-deprived and nearly broken, in thirty-five-knot winds and twelve-foot seas, I would overindulge all sixrolling, pitching, yawing, heaving, swaying, and surging like a drunken libertineand, 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 Id 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, Ive 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 youre way out at sea, no land in sight, dog-paddling around in mysteries four miles deep. Youre wondering when and why yellow ducks became icons of childhood. You want to know what its like inside the toy factories of Guangdong. Youre marveling at the scale of humanitys impact on this terraqueous globe and at the oceanic magnitude of your own ignorance. Youre giving the plight of the Laysan albatross many moments of thought.

The next thing you know, its the middle of the night and youre 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. Its 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. Youd 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 steelor for that matter aluminumcontainers fall. Or youre learning how to tie a bowline knot and say thank you in both Inuktitut and Cantonese.

Or youre spending three days and nights in a shabby hotel room in Pusan, South Korea, waiting for your ship to come in, and youre wondering what you could possibly have been thinking when you embarked on this harebrained journey, this wild duckie chase, and youre 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 youre remembering the scene near the end of

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