A Short History of Open Registries

    As long as ships have existed, they have represented the wealth and power of nations. Used as tools of discovery, trade, and war, they have acted as the overreaching hands of countries across bodies of water. The flags hanging off their sterns indicated the interests of the ship’s owners, the laws it followed, and the country it represented.
    The exceptions to this rule for various reasons date back thousands of years. Greek sea-traders would operate on behalf of Roman merchants. English shipowners re-registered their ships with the Spanish flag in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to gain access to trading in the West Indies. American ships flew Portuguese flags during the War of 1812 to avoid conflicts with the British. During prohibition, bootleggers registered their ships outside the US so they could carry alcohol. And during World War II, the American Government re-registered ships with the neutral Panamanian flag to continue aiding European allies. The US-Panama relationship is mostly responsible for the modern flagging system.
    The war directly affected the size of domestic shipping vessels: They were now produced smaller so as to minimize loss in the event of a submarine attack. Unfortunately, this left the entire market with small and unsustainable ships after the war, and the American shipping industry almost collapsed against the booming post-war truck industry. The invention of the shipping container in 1957, possibly the greatest advancement ever in cargo-shipping, would require a new fleet of large ships to be profitable. So as the US shipping industry slowly grew in size, other open registries were created with the help of the US Government as a dumping ground for the older ships. Strong ties to the countries of Panama and Liberia meant that the United States could still call on ships registered there during heightened escalations with Russia, with those registries behaving like a foreign merchant marine.
    Meanwhile, labor laws in Great Britain and the rise of trans-Atlantic flight resulted in a quick end to the ocean liner industry. Throughout the 1960s, ocean liners were laid up and scrapped, sold, and abandoned. The companies that fought to survive rerouted their ships to the Caribbean for leisure cruises, but these were ships made for traversing great seas with deep drafts and fast speeds. Their engines weren’t efficient at slower speeds, and they hadn’t been designed for comfort. The design of cruise ships has slowly evolved to provide individual balconies, shallow drafts to fit into smaller ports, and more outdoor pools and sun decks. But just as essential as ship design was the implementation of cheap labor - no longer bound by unionized domestic crew, the companies could take advantage of the loose laws of foreign registries to hire a less expensive workforce. And so now, the majority of deckhands, cabin stewards, and other lower-paying positions of any given cruise ship are from the Philippines.

    Most modern cruise ships carry between two and six thousand passengers, and a third of that in crew. The economies of scale allow them to efficiently operate in Caribbean ports, quickly sailing out of Florida with mostly American tourists. The ships are divided between the hotel department (mostly upper decks) and the deck department (mostly lower decks). The public spaces and hallways have secondary exits leading to hidden crew stairways, all of which lead to the lifeboat deck.
    Carnival Corporation (Carnival, Costa, Princess, Holland America, Cunard, P&O, AIDA, Seabourn), Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, TUI, Pullmantur, Azamara), and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd (Norwegian, Oceania, Regent Seven Seas) control a combined total of nearly eighty percent of the global market share. The ships are built in European shipyards - STX in Finland, Chantiers de l'Atlantique in France, Meyer Werft in Germany, Fincantieri in Italy - and every few years the ships migrate back to Europe for drydock repairs and renovations. They are too large to fit in drydocks in the Americas, but instead are designed around the constraints of the Panama Canal.
    The old canal’s limiting dimensions were referred to as Panamax, but a new set of locks opened in 2016 with a much larger carrying capacity, known as the Neo-Panamax specifications. This new addition allows for some of the largest ships to easily transfer from their traditional Caribbean routes to Alaska, Australia, and Asia. Meanwhile, the Neo-Panamax canal is reshaping the shipping industry, with many recently-built Panamax ships being laid up for scrap in favor of larger ones.

    In 2016, the US Department of Justice fined Princess Cruises forty million dollars for eight years of illegal dumping and an attempted cover-up, after a whistleblower reported the incidents to the British and American Coast Guards. It was the largest criminal penalty ever charged for deliberate vessel pollution. Princess Cruises had previously been fined twenty million dollars for illegally dumping 66,000 gallons of pool water into Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 2011, and multiple Princess ships were fined for violating Alaskan air and water standards in 2018. Princess Cruises is just one of Carnival Corporation’s nine brands.

    The crew are housed below the passenger decks, and often below sea level. The hallways are narrow and winding, easy to get lost in. If the upper decks resemble a luxury hotel, the crew quarters are a warship. Watertight and splash-tight doors guard the hallways and are remotely closed from the bridge; they can trap you just as easily as they can save you. Instructional videos prove their ability to take off an arm or a leg or a finger.
    The main amenities - cafeterias, bars, religious spaces, rec rooms, training facilities - are usually placed along the main crew corridor. On some ships the corridor is called the I-95, on others it’s called Burma Road (when soldiers were crammed into every conceivable space on requisitioned liners, it was so hot that it reminded them of Burma). Life as a crew member is driven by a few social events per week, nightly trips to the crew bar, and a deep realization of the mantra work hard, play harder. A smartphone app designed for crew members counts down the days left of a contract on a digital dial. The app is glanced at during breaks throughout the day, and occasionally before going to sleep at night.
    A severe social hierarchy exists within the ship’s company, confining groups by rank and nationality. The younger, lower-ranking officers especially seem to enjoy restricting the amenities of the staff and crew. Each department eats at their own table; the officers’ mess is separate from the staff mess, which is separate from the crew mess. The largest ships have the most cliques, but also provide more entertainment and resources for crew members.

^{Birds flying just above the South China Sea, spotted from the ship’s top deck. 2018.}