Free Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare

Taiwanese Yang Ming company: ship and crew were on charter to Maersk. On 12 March 1996 they were approximately where we are now, fifty miles off Cape Trafalgar, on their regular run from Algeciras to Halifax, Nova Scotia, when the three stowaways were discovered. The men’s pleas for their lives seem to have had no effect on the Taiwanese officers of the
Maersk Dubai
, Captain Cheng-Shiou, First Officer Wu Chung-Chih, Second Officer Kuo Chin-Chiu, Radio Operator Jang Che-Min, Chief Cook Wang Ko-Lung and Chief Engineer Ni Yung-Lai.
    The ship was heading north-west into the deep ocean when Sangeorzan and Danciu were found. They had crept aboard in Algeciras in the hope of a passage to Canada. A third would-be stowaway who failed to board had watched the ship leave with the two men on it. One of the ship’s Filipino crew, Rudolfo Miguel, told CBC Radio in Canada what happened when the stowaways were caught.
    â€˜They have a passport, and picture for their family and children. The master, he said, “throw overboard”. And now these people: “No, no, no – please, please, please, please captain, no, no, please.” Crying. They understand that they will throw overboard . . .’
    Another Filipino member of the crew, Juanito Ilagan, said, ‘One of them are kneeling on the floor, I think begging for somebody to spare their lives. And he’s kissing one of the boots of the crew.’
    Ilagan said the captain had ‘devil’s eyes, fuming mad’.
    Captain Cheng-Shiou was adamant that the two Romanians should be thrown off the ship. The Filipinos asked to be allowed to construct a raft for them. The first they made broke up on hitting the water; a second held together. Taiwanese officers then forced the two men down the pilot ladder. When Sangeorzan and Danciu were last seen, one had climbed on to the raft and the other was in the sea. They had no means of propulsion, no food or water, and no one was looking for them.
    Extraordinarily, the same ship, carrying the same crew and controlled by the same officers, was making the same run two months later when the same thing happened. On 18 May the
Maersk Dubai
was a night and a morning’s journey out of Algeciras, well into the eastern Atlantic, when Gheorghe Mihoc was discovered. Rudolfo Miguel told CBC: ‘I saw the captain, the chief officer, the second mate, chief engineer, the chief cook holding knife grab this person.’
    â€˜The second cook, who is a Filipino, knocked on my door when I was having a nap,’ Juanito Ilagan recalled, ‘and he said they’re gonna get rid of him. I said I don’t think they’ll kill him. He said they were carrying knives. I said who – who was carrying knives. Well, them, the Taiwanese officers.’
    Miguel heard screaming – ‘No, he said, no’ – and watched from a hatchway as Mihoc was forced over the side at knife point. When the crew discovered a fourth stowaway, Nicolae Pasca, they hid him and fed him. In Halifax the ship was stormed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, alerted by a letter the crew had sent to a port chaplain in Houston, Texas, in which they detailed the first incident. Arrests and court cases followed.
    The upshot, years later, says much about the lawlessness of the sea. Four Filipinos, including Ilagan and Miguel, agreed to remain in Canada to testify. They were accused by the officers’ defence lawyers of inventing the whole story in order to emigrate to Canada. Their families in the Philippines were threatened. It took two years before they were allowed to work minimum wage jobs in Canada, the sea forever closed to them. (Manning agencies and shipowners continue to deny the existence of blacklists, but the the men had no illusions about their chances of new contracts.)
    The court ruled that Canada could not extradite the accused for trial. They were returned to Taiwan. Captain Cheng-Shiou was tried there for negligence,