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A couple of years ago,

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Harvard Business School chose

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the best business model of that year.

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It chose Somali piracy.

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Pretty much around the same time,

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I discovered that there were 544 seafarers

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being held hostage on ships,

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often anchored just off the Somali coast

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in plain sight.

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And I learned these two facts, and I thought,

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what's going on in shipping?

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And I thought, would that happen
in any other industry?

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Would we see 544 airline pilots

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held captive in their jumbo jets

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on a runway for months, or a year?

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Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers?

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It wouldn't happen.

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So I started to get intrigued.

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And I discovered another fact,

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which to me was more astonishing

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almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before

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the age of 42, 43.

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That is how fundamentally we still depend

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on shipping.

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Because perhaps the general public

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thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry,

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something brought by sailboat

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with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows.

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But shipping isn't that.

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Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been.

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Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade.

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Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970.

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We are more dependent on it now than ever.

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And yet, for such an enormous industry

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— there are a hundred thousand
working vessels on the sea —

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it's become pretty much invisible.

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Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that,

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because here shipping is so present

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that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel.

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(Laughter)

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But elsewhere in the world,

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if you ask the general public what they know

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about shipping and how much
trade is carried by sea,

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you will get essentially a blank face.

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You will ask someone on the street

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if they've heard of Microsoft.

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I should think they'll say yes,

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because they'll know that they make software

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that goes on computers,

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and occasionally works.

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But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk,

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I doubt you'd get the same response,

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even though Maersk,

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which is just one shipping company amongst many,

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has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft.

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[$60.2 billion]

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Now why is this?

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A few years ago,

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the First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty

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— he is called the First Sea Lord,

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although the chief of the army
is not called a landlord —

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he said that we, and he meant

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in the industrialized nations in the West,

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that we suffer from sea blindness.

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We are blind to the sea

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as a place of industry or of work.

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It's just something we fly over,

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a patch of blue on an airline map.

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Nothing to see, move along.

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So I wanted to open my own eyes

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to my own sea blindness,

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so I ran away to sea.

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A couple of years ago, I took a passage

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on the Maersk Kendal,

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a mid-sized container ship

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carrying nearly 7,000 boxes,

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and I departed from Felixstowe,

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on the south coast of England,

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and I ended up right here in Singapore

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five weeks later,

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considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now.

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And it was a revelation.

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We traveled through five seas,

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two oceans, nine ports,

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and I learned a lot about shipping.

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And one of the first things that surprised me

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when I got on board Kendal

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was, where are all the people?

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I have friends in the Navy who tell me

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they sail with a thousand sailors at a time,

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but on Kendal there were only 21 crew.

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Now that's because shipping is very efficient.

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Containerization has made it very efficient.

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Ships have automation now.

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They can operate with small crews.

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But it also means that, in the words

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of a port chaplain I once met,

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the average seafarer you're going to find

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on a container ship is either tired or exhausted,

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because the pace of modern shipping

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is quite punishing for what shipping calls

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its human element,

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a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize

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sounds a little bit inhuman.

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So most seafarers now working on container ships

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often have less than two hours in port at a time.

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They don't have time to relax.

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They're at sea for months at a time,

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and even when they're on board,

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they don't have access to what

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a five year old would take for granted, the internet.

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And another thing that surprised me

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when I got on board Kendal

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was who I was sitting next to.

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Not the queen.

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I can't imagine why they put me under her portrait.

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But around that dining table in the officer's saloon,

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I was sitting next to a Burmese guy,

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I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian.

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On the next time, it was a Chinese guy.

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And in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos.

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So that was a normal working ship.

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Now how is that possible?

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Because the biggest dramatic change

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in shipping over the last 60 years,

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when most of the general public stopped noticing it,

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was something called an open registry,

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or a flag of convenience.

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Ships can now fly the flag or any nation

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that provides a flag registry.

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You can get a flag from the land-locked nation

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of Bolivia, or Mongolia,

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or North Korea, though that's not very popular.

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(Laughter)

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So we have these very multinational,

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global, mobile crews on ships.

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And that was a surprise to me.

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And when we got to pirate waters,

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down the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait
and into the Indian Ocean,

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the ship changed.

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And that was also shocking, because suddenly,

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I realized, as the captain said to me,

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that I had been crazy to choose to go

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through pirate waters on a container ship.

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We were no longer allowed on deck.

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There were double pirate watches.

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And at that time, there were those 544 seafarers

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being held hostage,

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and some of them were held hostage for years

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because of the nature of shipping
and the flag of convenience.

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Not all of them, but some of them were,

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because for the minority
of unscrupulous ship owners,

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it can be easy to hide behind

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the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience.

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What else does our sea blindness mask?

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Well, if you go out to sea on a ship

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or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel,

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you'll see very black smoke.

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And that's because shipping

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has very tight margins,
and they want cheap fuel,

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so they use something called bunker fuel,

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which was described to me
by someone in the tanker industry

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as the dregs of the refinery,

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or just one step up from asphalt.

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And shipping is the greenest method of transport.

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In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile,

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it emits about a thousandth of aviation

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and about a tenth of trucking.

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But it's not benign, because there's so much of it.

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So shipping emissions are
about three to four percent,

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almost the same as aviation's.

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And if you put shipping emissions

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on a list of the countries' carbon emissions,

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it would come in about sixth,

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somewhere near Germany.

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It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships

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pollute in terms of particles and soot

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and noxious gases

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as much as all the cars in the world.

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And the good news is that

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people are now talking about sustainable shipping.

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There are interesting initiatives going on.

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But why has it taken so long?

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When are we going to start talking and thinking

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about shipping miles as well as air miles?

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I also traveled to Cape Cod to look

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at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale,

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because this to me was one
of the most surprising things

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about my time at sea,

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and what it made me think about.

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We know about man's impact on the ocean

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in terms of fishing and over-fishing,

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but we don't really know about what's happening

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underneath the water.

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And in fact, shipping has a role to play here,

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because shipping noise has contributed

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to damaging the acoustic
habitats of ocean creatures.

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Light doesn't penetrate beneath
the surface of the water,

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so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins

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and even 800 species of fish

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communicate by sound.

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And a North Atlantic right whale

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can transmit across hundreds of miles.

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A humpback can transmit a sound

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across a whole ocean.

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But a supertanker can also be heard

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coming across a whole ocean,

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and because the noise that
propellers make underwater

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is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use,

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then it can damage their acoustic habitat,

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and they need this for breeding,

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for finding feeding grounds,

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for finding mates.

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And the acoustic habitat of the
North Atlantic right whale

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has been reduced by up to 90 percent.

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But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution

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yet.

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And when I arrived in Singapore,

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and I apologize for this, but I didn't want

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to get off my ship.

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I'd really loved being on board Kendal.

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I'd been well-treated by the crew,

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I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain,

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and I would happily have signed up
for another five weeks,

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something that the captain also said

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I was crazy to think about.

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But I wasn't there for nine months at a time

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like the Filipino seafarers,

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who, when I asked them to describe their job to me,

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called it dollar for homesickness.

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They had good salaries,

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but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life

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in a dangerous and often difficult element.

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But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds,

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because I want to salute those seafarers

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who bring us 90 percent of everything

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and get very little thanks or recognition for it.

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I want to salute the hundred thousand ships

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that are at sea

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that are doing that work, coming in and out

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every day, bringing us what we need.

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But I also want to see shipping,

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and us the general public,
who knows so little about it,

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to have a bit more scrutiny,

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to be a bit more transparent,

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to have 90 percent transparency.

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Because I think we could all benefit

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from doing something very simple,

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which is learning to see the sea.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)