Stand on the Marin Headlands and look down on the Golden Gate, preferably in the late afternoon when the sun is arcing toward the Farallones, and San Francisco Bay and its encompassing cities are cast in a honey-colored light. Gulls and pelicans are wheeling, and container ships and tankers are moving in and out of the estuary. At such a moment, only an obsessive landlubber will not feel the pull of the ocean and of the ships that traverse it. The romance of the sea remains--though more for the recreational sailor or dreamer, perhaps, than for the professional seaman. For those who actually work at sea, life is onerous and the difficulties very real: pirates, typhoons, and the ennui of a life defined by blue water, gritty ports, and little else. Most ships entering U.S. ports fly foreign flags. The crews are often overworked and underpaid, and even the minimal pleasures once afforded by port calls are typically denied them. When a ship docks at Los Angeles or Long Beach, the crew seldom if ever gets to visit Malibu or Hollywood; instead they stay on board for the hours or days it takes to unload their vessel.

Roughly 90,000 commercial ships now ply the world’s oceans, accounting for 90 percent of the goods imported and exported in international trade. Fully 95 percent of the products imported to the United States come by ship, and about 80 percent of those goods arrive through West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, collectively the busiest port in the United States and the fifth largest in the world. The three major West Coast ports--Los Angeles/Long Beach, Oakland, and Seattle--handle close to $500 billion in trade goods annually.

Big ships are needed to transport this kind of tonnage, and big equipment is needed to unload them. Indeed, everything about shipping has become Brobdingnagian. As of this writing, one of the largest container ships afloat is the Danish vessel Emma Maersk. It is 398 meters long, has a beam of 56.5 meters, and its carrying capacity is 15,200 TEU--that is, it can haul up to 15,200 20-foot-long containers of cargo, depending on their weight. The cranes required to unload these leviathans now push 400 feet in height, can reach outward almost 250 feet, and draw between two and seven megawatts of power at maximum load, enough electricity to supply 1,600 to 5,600 homes for one year.

Meanwhile, the manpower needs of the shipping industry have declined drastically. Technology and economy of scale have aided the business of shipping, but not the workers. The massive Emma Maersk is operated by a crew of 13.

"The ships got bigger, but they needed fewer and fewer men to run them," said Carl Nolte, who has covered maritime issues for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1961. "One guy on a crane can now do what it took 100 longshoremen to do 50 years ago. Ships used to take days to unload; now they do it in hours."

The culture of shipping may be moribund, even dead, but the business of shipping has boomed with the explosion of global trade. It has to be that way; there is no alternative way to move large quantities of goods across the oceans in a cost-effective manner. Air transport, the only other option, is exponentially more expensive, and the world’s airplane fleet can handle only a fraction of trade demand.

Although the volume of goods shipped is down in the current recession, most finished goods consumed in North America still come by ship. Just as during the Age of Discovery, ships remain the most economical means available for moving goods in quantity for long distances.