13
THE SHIPMASTER
CHIMBOTE, PERU, NOVEMBER 2014
As the Thunder sailed toward the Antarctic in November, a stocky 47-year-old with a broad, thickset face and a wild, mane of black hair boarded the bus that would carry him from his home city of Chimbote to Lima, the capital of Peru. There was nothing to disclose his identity as a ship’s officer on a vessel that for years had been fishing in secret in the Antarctic. In his breast pocket he had a plane ticket and a reference from the ship agent in Malaysia.
“It is hereby confirmed that Mr. Alberto Zavaleta Salas is employed by F.C.S. Trading & Fishery. He will travel to Hang Nadim, Batam to sign on with the vessel MV Kunlun.”
When the bus started moving and turned out onto the barren desert plains encircling the Pan American Highway, Alberto Zavaleta Salas left one catastrophe behind to travel into another.1
Chimbote was once a sleepy fishing village with an inviting harbour and a good selection of hotels for seaside holiday-makers. At dusk the fleet of brightly coloured fishing boats sailed out into one of the world’s most productive banks to fish the Peruvian anchovy. On one of these ships, Alberto Zavaleta Salas used to accompany his grandfather and later his father, both captains. He was born into the world’s largest fishery enterprise, the Peruvian “anchovy boom”, which would transform the slumbering Chimbote into Peru’s most powerful fishing port. When the fishing was industrialized and the news spread of the enormous fortunes that accompanied the catches, droves of restless men found their way to the city. They came from the slum districts of Lima and the impoverished villages at the foot of the Andes mountains in search of a wage and a new life in the protein bonanza.
The whores and fortune hunters followed and the slum districts grew on the mountainsides and the perimeters of the desert. In the city, which formerly was blessed with a single traffic light and only one paved street, lorries now thundered past loaded down with anchovies on the way to the more than 50 factories where the fish was boiled down into fishmeal. At its peak the anchovy was “the most heavily exploited fish in world history”.2
A penetrating stench of rotten fish hung over the city. It came seeping out along with the greyish-black smoke from the smokestacks of the fishmeal factories, and forced its way into every corner of Chimbote. It was said that even the steaks there smelled and tasted of fish.
Wastewater and fish blood were pumped straight into the ocean. Allergies and skin diseases spread through the neighbourhoods closest to the factories, protests were countered with imprisonments and some of the more prominent environmentalists were even accused of belonging to terrorist organizations.
One tragedy would follow on the heels the other. When El Niño came barrelling in across the coast of Peru, the current of warm, oligotrophic water led to the collapse of the already severely decimated anchovy stock. One after another the fishmeal factories shut down. In the end the destitution and unemployment was so extensive that assistance organizations had to distribute food to thousands of fishermen and port and factory workers in Chimbote.3 Alberto Zavaleta Salas continued sailing ships that fished close to his home city. There was fish to be found, but the largest ship owners were awarded the quotas and Zavaleta Salas would sometimes be out at sea for a week and then remain inactive on land for a month. Although he was a shipmaster, in the end it was not even possible to be hired as part of the ordinary crew.
It is difficult to say whether what happened next was a blessing or a curse for Alberto Zavaleta Salas. After having subsisted on random odd jobs, he was hired as a captain on the Kenyan-flagged fishing vessel the Sakoba, which operated off the coast of East Africa. When he was home on shore leave in Peru, the Sakoba was boarded by Somali pirates and sailed towards Harardhere, 300 kilometres northeast of Mogdadishu – the dusty fishing village that had been given the nickname “the piracy capital of the world”.
At a loss, out of work and with unending money disputes with his ex-wife, Zavaleta Salas once again found himself wandering around Chimbote. In the spring of 2012 he came across an advert from the Panama registered company Red Line Ventures, which needed crew for a fishing vessel. When he contacted the ship agent, he learned that the ship the Huang He 22 was going to the Antarctic. That was an opportunity he did not want to miss out on.
The Huang He 22 would later be known as the pirate ship Kunlun wanted by Interpol – one of “The Bandit 6”, a ship observed several times in the vicinity of the Thunder.
Alberto Zavaleta Salas is one of the few pirate captains ever who have dared to come forward with their story.
Late in the evening on one of the last days of November in 2014, Alberto Zavaleta Salas lands at the airport in Batam. A dinghy takes him out to the Kunlun’s anchoring site, a one-and-a-half-hour journey from the coast. As he climbs up the ladder, he notices that the name of the ship is no longer the Kunlun, but instead the Taishan.
Although on paper he is a shipmaster, he is assigned an ordinary cabin that he must share with a taciturn and melancholy chief engineer from Ribeira, Spain.
It is Zavaleta Sala’s fifth expedition to the Antarctic, and this time he notices that there is an uneasy atmosphere on the ship. They have problems procuring enough fuel, there is a mix-up in the order for provisions and just hours before
