Temporalities at sea: Fast time and slow time onboard ocean-going merchant vessels

Introduction

Temporalities are an aspect largely overlooked in most social science studies in relation to life onboard ocean-going merchant vessels. This is surprising because seafarers’ life onboard is replete with temporal concepts – duty hours, time of inspection, length of contract, Estimated Time of Departure, Estimated Time of Arrival, days in anchorage/navigation, hours it takes to come alongside, number of hours of loading and unloading, hours of channelling, overtime, time for shore leave, watchkeeping duties, etc. Much of what we know in relation to temporalities concerns life ashore: everyday realities in villages, suburbs, detention centres, cities, at home and in offices (Colley et al., 2012; Gherardi, 2013; Hauge, 2016; Rotter, 2016). As a consequence, claims about intensification of activities and speeding up in everyday life are solely based on life ashore. What this entails is the homogenisation of temporal experience for everyone, perhaps unintended, regardless of their placement in space.

The experiencing of social acceleration has become an everyday unavoidable fixture of contemporary life, and because of this we lose sight of the cogent fact that for others it is also a question of hard life and survival. We need to widen our ethnographic rendering of experiencing time under the vestiges of contemporary capitalism to learn more about how some social groups are more vulnerable to the negative impact of social acceleration than others. As Massey (1991, 1994, cited in Boersma, 2016) puts it, time-space compression – and related concepts and symptoms – may work out differently for different social groups. It is for this reason that we should consider the cultural experiences and social understandings of time as dynamic, multiple and heterogeneous (Thrift and May, 2001).

Everyday temporalities onboard ocean-going merchant vessels need further elucidation to shed light on how seafarers experience a different and more precarious sense of time within their constrained working and living environments, especially their experience of fast and slow time. Most commonly conceived as an example of a total institution (Aubert, 1965; Goffman, 1961; Perry, 1974; Theotokas and Lagoudis, 2014; Tracy, 2000; Zurcher, 1965), where people’s place of work and residence is the same, and where they are cut off from the wider community for extended periods of time, ships provide us with a good opportunity to reflect on how temporalities, as we experience them, are a contested terrain, that forces shaping them are oftentimes beyond our control, and more profoundly so for certain social groups like seafarers.

This article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between place and its resources, and power relations between actors in place and the resulting temporal experiences. I wish to demonstrate the importance of focusing on specific industries like shipping ‘as complex timescapes that generate affects and effects’ (Bear, 2014: 73) to capture the more sobering ethos and impact of contemporary capitalism to the ‘invisible’ workforce of the global economy. Furthermore, this article attempts to illuminate issues around contemporary work arrangements and how certain industries like shipping are more prone to creating temporalities that are dangerous and conflicted for workers. By looking at a specific sector of the global economy, this article puts emphasis on theoretical claims surrounding the uneven realities of temporal experiencing in the age of global homogeneities (Massey, 1991, 1994; Thrift and May, 2001) and calls for marginal lives to take the centre stage of our global imaginaries (Burawoy et al., 2000; O’Neill, 2017; Sachs and Alston, 2010; Tsing, 2005).

Temporalities in today’s world

In recent years, a host of sociological studies have shown how neoliberal economic change has transformed our ways of living, most cogently in how we experience time (Adam, 1994, 1995, 1998; Bermann, 1992; Hauge, 2016; Nowotny, 1992; Subrt, 2001; Tenhouten, 2005; Urry, 2009). Amongst many areas that cover the whole panoply of studies that bridge the relationship between time and the neoliberal economic reforms of recent years, areas of discussion focus on the acceleration of social life (Boersma, 2016; Eriksen, 2001; Harvey, 1991, Nockolds, 2016; Paiva et al., 2017; Pocock et al., 2012; Rosa, 2013; Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009; Southerton, 2006) and the creation of feelings of inertia and limbo (Appadurai, 2002; Bayart, 2007; Katz, 2004; O’Neill, 2017), amongst others.

In many aspects of daily life, as pointed out many years ago by Thompson (1967), there have been dramatic changes in the inward apprehension of time for working people. There was a shift in our perception of time, where speeding up becomes essential in order to keep up with the demands of work, family and leisure (Paiva et al., 2017: 29). This led, on the other hand, to social movements and ways of life that value slow time to counter the negative effects of fast time to social relationships and individual lives (Ballard and Webster, 2008, Thomas, 2008).

Fast time has become a daily feature of contemporary life for many of us, especially those who work and live in urban areas where the pace of life is felt to be faster compared to rural areas. However, based on several factors and circumstances, people experience different variants of fast time at different times. Some could be more prone to feelings of time shortage and time pressure, whilst others could be more susceptible to having less and constrained time for social activities. However, regardless of the ways we experience fast time and slow time, there are two salient features of contemporary life that serve as anchors in their realisation: our placement in place and space and its resources and power relations in that place; or, in some sense, who wields power over our time in the place that we occupy. As Paiva et al. (2017) observe, (the experiencing of) time is deeply rooted in place and the power relations that exist in place. This would have an impact on how time is experienced in various ways.

The importance of place and its resources in determining the ways in which fast time and slow time are experienced is shown by Paiva et al. (2017) in their study of a suburb in Lisbon. Their argument revolves around the notion that ‘local resources play a vital role in an individual’s ability to speed up or slow down’ (pp. 28–29). It is for this reason that people who rely less on public transport experience less fast time compared to people who use public transport regularly. In addition, for many people, important resources like middle schools and family-oriented services, such as day-care centres, help them coordinate time with their children’s free time and as such mitigate the experience of fast time in the process. Conversely, the availability of parks and other areas of recreation allows people to relax and experience down time.

However, as some studies show, the experiencing of fast time and slow time does not just depend on the availability of local resources but rather hinges on people’s subordinate position in the employer–employee equation, or the power relations in place. For instance, looking at the temporal experiences of Filipino domestic helpers in Hong Kong, Boersma (2016) explains how the everyday temporalities of Filipino domestic helpers are structured around the daily activities of their employers. Mornings and evenings are all about fast time as they look after the needs of their employers and children, whilst in between, depending on the instructions and tasks given by their employers in their absence, Filipino domestic helpers find down time for themselves. When alone they are able to watch movies or have conversations with their families in the Philippines.

The impact of social acceleration on people varies however, and recently focus has shifted to the realisation that some people struggle with their experience of social acceleration. The pressure of time can create a sense of powerlessness and stress for professionals, as the pace of work is intensified its rhythms are fragmented, and orientations of work are re-ordered (Colley et al., 2012: 376). Time pressures and structural changes in modern working life hold negative characteristics and may harm and stress working individuals […] (Hauge, 2016: 197). Katz (2004), for instance, has looked at temporal anxiety amongst young people in Sudan marooned by modernity and the disintegrative effects of development, whilst Mains showed us the temporal anguish amongst the young and unemployed in Ethiopia as they ‘spoke about time as an overabundant and potentially dangerous quantity’ (2007: 659). Heuze (1996), on the other hand, examined unemployed young people in India haunted by a sense of limbo and waiting as they look for jobs, in what they thought to be a fast-phased life, marked by long periods of unemployment.

All these ‘temporal anxieties’, ‘anguish’ and ‘sense of limbo and waiting’ tell us much about the impact of the changes in our experiencing of time in contemporary life. However, we need to explore a bit further, to the sea in fact, to find more variegated and albeit more sobering realities that contemporary experiencing of temporalities present to life. By looking at how seafarers experience time onboard merchant ships, perhaps we will be able to broaden our insights into the temporal dimensions of contemporary capitalism (Mains, 2007). In places which are both spatially constrained and constraining, where resources are limited and where people have less control over their time, how do temporalities unfold, and what is the impact to people who inhabit them?

Looking at temporal dimensions onboard vessels, amongst other possible factors, will help us understand better why seafaring is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world (Allen et al., 2007; Bloor, 2011; Bloor et al., 2000; Dahlgren et al., 2006; Ellis, 2005; Ellis et al., 2011). In the UK, for instance, during the period between 2003 and 2012, the fatality rate in shipping (14.5 per 100,000) was 21 times that of the general British workforce, 4.7 times that of the construction industry and 13 times that of manufacturing (Roberts et al., 2014). Corollary with this, one aspect of shipboard life which has become a concern in the industry is fatigue. The impact of fatigue in the shipping industry is more hazardous than elsewhere due to the exclusive aspects that seafaring presents (Xhelilaj and Lapa, 2010: 25, see also Allen et al., 2007; Ugurlu, 2016). This is especially relevant for ships carrying dangerous goods such as chemical and oil tankers as shown to us by the case of Exxon Valdez (National Transportation Safety Board, 1990).

Therefore, by understanding the temporal experiences of seafarers onboard, we extend and deepen our understanding of the temporal dimensions of contemporary life and its impact on people. By highlighting seafarers’ placement in time, we contribute to the debate about the salience of place and space in the construction of daily temporalities. By focusing on the constrained and constraining placement of seafarers onboard vessels, and its impact on their experiencing of time, we continue to be reminded that place still matters in the face of constant assertion by some sectors in the academe that time has conquered place and space. However, it is also imperative to recognise that it is not just culture that sits in places (Escobar, 2001), time does too.

Research methods

I sailed onboard four merchant vessels in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018. All of these were occasioned by two separate research projects that required me to sail with seafarers for an extended period, averaging six weeks per voyage.

The original purpose for my research voyages was not to study the temporal experiences of seafarers. However, during my second week onboard my first vessel, as I started exploring and asking questions about my research topic (my first week was spent establishing rapport with the crew and learning the ropes of life onboard), I realised how central time was in the everyday life of seafarers. They would oftentimes compare their life onboard to spending time in prison (Baum-Talmor, 2014), how time passes by quickly or on other occasions would lament that time is so slow that they could hear the clock ticking. Seafarers were almost always conscious of their time onboard.

As well as recording notes of what I saw and heard (Muswazi and Nhamo, 2013) onboard in relation to the original purpose of my fieldwork, as I became intrigued by seafarers’ preoccupation with time, I started paying attention to concepts and activities that I thought were relevant to the experiencing of time onboard. I had no specific research agenda then in relation to temporalities onboard, thus initially I had a haphazard collection of data relating to time at sea. In a way, my first ship, a reefer container, was a discovery phase and at the same time a conscious effort to look for patterns (Martin, 2002) about the experiencing of time as I grappled with my own temporal experience onboard and heard stories of fast time and slow time amongst the seafarers that I sailed with.

My second and third ship, an oil tanker and a bulk carrier, provided the bulk of my data. On these ships, having already figured out the issues I wanted to explore and write about, I judiciously observed seafarers in their daily lives, making notes of conversations that I heard during coffee breaks in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening after dinner, when most would congregate in the lounge and play cards or watch movies. In this phase of my research, I attempted to have an intense relationship with my data (Wray et al., 2007) as I probed deeper into seafarers’ and my temporal experience at sea.

When things were not clear to me or I needed more stories of experiencing fast time and slow time, I usually asked seafarers to tell me their stories on the bridge at night, when some would spend time marvelling at the magnificent purity of the skies or just pass time, bored and bone tired of playing poker and seeing movies that they had watched several times before. My fourth ship, an LNG tanker, was focused on validating the data that I gathered from my previous ships and my own experiences and observations onboard.

I recorded my daily observations and experiences in a diary (alongside a separate diary for another project) (Burgess, 1981; Elliott, 1997; Ortlipp, 2008). Similar to previous research I had conducted with fishermen in the Philippines (Turgo, 2010), I avoided writing down things that interested me in front of seafarers as this would have a constraining effect on their behaviour in my presence. Once I had the chance, I would return to my cabin and write down in detail what I saw and heard. My conversations and interaction with seafarers took place in between working hours and after dinner. In pursuit of the concerns raised in this article, my questions were unstructured. On occasion I was fortunate to be invited to seafarers’ cabins for a round of drinks (usually on Saturday night as Sunday was no-work day for all except officers). In this informal setting, I was able to ask questions about their experiences of time at sea.

The seafarers cited in this article were from the Philippines, UK, Romania, Croatia, Sri Lanka, Panama, Latvia and China. All deck ratings were from the Philippines whilst the deck and engine officers were drawn from other countries mentioned. Only one female seafarer was interviewed for this article. This is not unusual as it is estimated that not more than 2% of the global population of seafarers are women (Bhirugnath-Bhookhun and Kitada, 2017).

Being a Filipino researcher onboard was a great help as the majority of the crew that I sailed with were from the Philippines. As I spoke Filipino, my native language, my daily interaction with the Filipino crew was freewheeling. They were willing and happy to confide their thoughts and experiences with me.

My first week on every ship that I sailed was always a period of adjustment and building of rapport, which at times was difficult because some would assume that I was sent by their company to spy on them. Seafarers just like any research participants in any research setting had different ways of constructing my identity as a ‘supernumerary’ onboard (see also Baum-Talmor, 2019; Hammond, 2004: 16–23; Turgo, 2012; Venkatesh, 2002). But as I spent more and more time with them and opened up myself to everyone (my role at the university and my life in the UK as an academic, also some details of my private life), they finally recognised me for who I was onboard: a researcher in their midst.

My relationship with foreign crew members (all of whom were officers) was uneven. On my first vessel, I hardly saw and interacted with the British captain as he spent most of his time in his office and cabin. He would even have his meals delivered to his cabin. He seldom mingled with the crew even on Saturday nights. This severely limited my interaction with him though we had one lengthy conversation one night when he hosted a barbecue party for the crew (also as a way to welcome me onboard formally, he said). He was a very pleasant man, an old soul, a very traditional sailor in the British merchant tradition. The chief mate from Panama, on the other hand, was different. He was very sociable and helpful. On the rest of my voyages, my interaction with foreign seafarers was sporadic with some whilst engaged and sustained with others. To spend more time with foreign seafarers, I made an effort to be on the bridge between 12–4 pm and 8 pm–12 am to converse with officers on watchkeeping duties. On occasion non-Filipino chief engineers on three voyages would visit the bridge for a quick chat with whoever was on watchkeeping duty, and I exploited this opportunity to strike up a conversation with them.

To supplement the data I gathered from all four voyages, I also conducted informal interviews with seafarers in the Philippines and at some UK ports where I was conducting fieldwork for other projects. The interviews were short and only conducted to validate the observations that I gathered during my fieldwork onboard.

The experiencing of fast time and slow time: The case of seafarers

As an occupational group, seafarers occupy an important role in the global economy. The international shipping industry is responsible for the carriage of around 90% of world trade. It is estimated that there are currently 1,647,500 seafarers serving on 50,000 internationally trading merchant vessels. The operation of merchant ships generates an estimated annual income of over half a trillion US dollars in freight rates (International Chamber of Shipping, 2019).

Seafarers come from many countries though the largest suppliers to the global fleet are the Philippines, China and Indonesia (Kumar, 2018). As per Maritime Labour Convention 2006 regulation, seafarers’ maximum continuous period of employment onboard ocean-going merchant vessels without leave is 11 months, depending on nationality and rank though some seafarers may work onboard for only 10 weeks per contract. On the other hand, junior officers from developing economies like the Philippines have the option to work between four and nine months per contract whilst ratings, in general, work for nine months onboard (see also Sampson, 2013). On my fourth vessel, the captain’s (Swedish) contract was for 10 weeks, whereas the second mate’s (Filipino) was for 9 months (and subsequently extended to 10 months as per his request to his crewing agency in Manila).

Working and living arrangements onboard are governed by rules set forth by the International Maritime Organisation and other relevant international bodies. For instance, seafarers work eight hours a day, under normal circumstances, with one rest day, usually Sunday. On the four vessels that I sailed on, seafarers worked half a day on Saturday. They are permitted to work for a maximum of 14 h in any 24-h period and a maximum of 72 h in any seven-day period. Rest periods should not be less than 10 h in any 24-h period, and 77 h in any seven-day period. To monitor compliance, vessels are required by international regulations to maintain records of the number of work and rest hours completed by seafarers. They are checked by Port State Control officers and other parties of interest like the local International Transport Workers’ Federation inspectors when vessels call into port. However, as many seafarers would attest, in most cases, compliance is mainly on paper as seafarers tend to work far longer hours as they are always on call, anytime of the day (Bhatia, 2019; Bloor et al., 2004; Kahveci and Nichols, 2006; Smith, 2006).

Seafarers have a structured and repetitive life onboard. In general, whilst under navigation, by 8 am, everyone is at work apart from the galley (kitchen) staff who start no later than 5 am. Work breaks last for 30 min, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Lunch is at 12 noon and work resumes at 1 pm until 5 pm. By 6 pm, dinner is served and by 7 pm everyone heads to their cabins or the lounge (there are separate lounges for officers and ratings) for some recreation before retiring to bed. Frequently seafarers watch movies, play cards or do some personal work like laundry. Saturday is usually half days although some vessels conduct their safety drills on Saturday afternoons to avoid interference with work duties.

Onboard deck officers are in charge of safety, planning and navigation and therefore spend their time on the bridge, on deck for routine inspection of ratings’ work or in the vessel’s office completing paperwork. Deck ratings work on the deck and in the accommodation area, undertaking tasks assigned by the bosun who in turn receives his tasks from the chief mate. In the engine room, officers undertake supervisory work, overseeing engine ratings’ daily work. The chief engineer and the second engineer will also be completing paperwork in their office. For a seafarer on a nine- month contract, this will be the regular routine for the duration of the contract, though changes to work patterns take place when the vessel is in port (see also Sampson, 2013).

Although there may be wi-fi or internet available, seafarers only use it during their free time, for health and safety reasons. Their time online during break periods and after work is very limited as they need to conserve their monthly data allowance where available. On some vessels seafarers are required to buy data allowance from their company, which at times is scandalously expensive (I once met a seafarer who told me that his company charges 20 dollars for 200 MB data!).

Breaks to the daily routine onboard happen if the captain decides to hold a social once a month providing food and drinks (depending on the alcohol policy of vessels). Being in port can also be a break from the daily routine as seafarers may be permitted time to take shore leave. However, their time ashore is limited as they have still work to do onboard whilst the vessel is in port.

It is amongst these working routines and daily temporalities onboard that seafarers experience fast time and slow time.

Rush hours in port

For the past several decades or so, the maritime industry has seen an increase in the implementation of regulations that relate to health and safety onboard and the security of ports from external threats (Akamangwa, 2016; Vandeskog, 2015; Walters, 2005). In 2004, as a response to the 9/11 carnage, the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code was introduced. It mandates state authorities (including port personnel), shipping companies and shipboard staff to implement ways to ‘detect security threats and take preventive measures against security incidents affecting vessels or port facilities used in international trade’ (International Ship and Port Facility Security Code, 2004). Prior to this, in 1998, the International Safety Management (ISM) Code was introduced which brought in self-regulation to the maritime industry. This piece of regulation required managers of each organisation assume a greater responsibility to manage occupational health and safety on their ships (Bhattacharya, 2012: 528). These codes concomitant regulations, however, as some studies have shown, have the unintended consequence of increasing paperwork onboard (Danish Maritime Authority, 2013; Georgoulis and Nikitakos, 2019; Knudsen, 2009). For instance, in the case of the ISM Code, Bhattacharya wrote:

More commonly featuring criticisms reflect bureaucratic nature of the Code. They highlight that the ISM Code compels seafarers to fill an array of forms and checklists. Such paperwork, […] does not contribute to shipboard safety but in fact takes a significant amount of seafarers’ time and focus away from working safely (2012: 528).

Whilst some official documents can be accomplished easily, others are more cumbersome, and therefore demand more time. For example, in some countries, customs declaration can be a very straightforward affair, detailing only the most valuable personal belongings of seafarers like laptops, mobile phones, cameras and jewellery. However, in others, this could mean declaring everything that seafarers have onboard, from the number of items of underwear, to the number of pens that seafarers keep in their cabins. Even the ship’s effects, such as furniture and office supplies, must also be properly accounted for.

The inundation of paperwork creates fast time for seafarers like this observation of the chief mate on my second vessel:

You see, I manage my time well. If it’s a long voyage, a few days before we hit the port, all documents are prepared, accomplished. But then every country would have their own regulations and sometimes, they just add this and that bit of requirement … and some agents will only inform us of changes or additions two days or a day before our arrival. I would spend most of my time working on the requirements […]. I need to make it sure that we’ve got all things right; we don’t want wrong numbers to be put in. And when I am done with them, I would ask myself, where did the time go? […]

As we were nearing our port in a South American country, the port authorities were sent numerous documents. When port officials came onboard they quickly pounced on the discrepancies that they found on the submitted forms and demanded money from the captain in return for turning a blind eye to the vessel’s supposed deficiencies. The vessel management company opted instead to pursue the case in court as the error in declaration was an honest mistake committed by one of the officers. When I spoke to the concerned officer, he was visibly upset and blamed it on the endless paperwork that he had to process prior to berthing.

In the examples cited above, seafarers have no control over their time. They need to fit into the structured temporal rhythm onboard and succumb to the temporal demands of those ashore. Their subordinate position in power geometry (Massey, 1999) between shipboard and shoreside personnel necessitates their submission to the latter, and, consequently, their loss of autonomy over how their temporal life is managed onboard. Excessive temporal demands on seafarers could lead to mental health problems as stress mounts and opportunities for rest become less and less. The second officer on my first vessel spoke of his ill health during the last months of his contract on his previous vessel as successive port of calls drastically reduced his rest hours whilst increasing his paperwork. He felt that time was never on his side, fast time was always upon him, and as such, he had no time to recuperate, chasing time and feeling time poor all the time.

‘Short’ leave ashore

Quite surprisingly, for many seafarers, shore leave can also instantiate the experiencing of fast time.

Shore leave occurs when a vessel is in port and seafarers are permitted to leave the vessel for a short period for rest and recreation. Ashore for some hours, seafarers are free from any temporal demands; they can do whatever they want within their leave period which includes enjoying free Wi-Fi services at seafarer centres, eating and drinking in local restaurants, shopping in malls and in some cases (depending on the port that they are in), visiting brothels.

However, depending on the type of vessel seafarers are on, they do not always have the time to enjoy shore leave. For example, since most container vessels spend less than 24 h in ports, many seafarers do not have the time to go ashore. Seafarers on Very Large Crude Carriers and Super Large Crude Carriers, in most cases, do not enjoy shore leave as these vessels are oftentimes anchored far from ports because of their size. The chief mate on my fourth vessel, for instance, told me that on his last vessel, a Very Large Crude Carrier, he was not able to go ashore for the entire duration of his contract which lasted four months.

Other types of vessel though sometimes stay in port for many days (like bulk carriers) and seafarers can enjoy shore leave on a daily basis. However, some vessels do not stay for long and as a result, shore leave is curtailed. With limited time ashore, temporal experiencing takes on the form of fast time. Time ashore feels limited, shortened and constrained.

On my second vessel, after two weeks of navigation, we took shore leave in a port in Brazil. As the vessel was leaving the following day, we only had one opportunity to go ashore. There was no seafarer centre at the port so we headed to a mall to avail of free Wi-Fi (there was free internet onboard but the connection was always patchy and there were only two computer terminals for 21 crew). Consequently there was no time to explore the town. In my fieldnotes, I wrote:

There was a restaurant in the basement of the mall and the four of us immediately looked for a spot where wi-fi signal was strong enough. Once connected, we ordered food, ate, and all of us soon became very busy checking our social media accounts and video conferencing with our loved ones ….

The slowness of time in long navigation

Slow time for seafarers is different from slow time as we know it ashore. Where slow time ashore is time for recuperative moments, a means to counter the effect of fast time, for some seafarers, slow time oftentimes results in boredom and stress. Slow time is a drag, a source of discomfort and irritation; it tires seafarers. In many ways, slow time could have the same impact as fast time. Fast time and slow time onboard are the two sides of the same coin, and it is during long navigations that slow time kicks in.

Long navigation frees seafarers from the hectic temporal rhythm of life onboard. In the first several days of long navigation which could last from two weeks to two months, depending on the port of destination, seafarers enjoy a leisurely pace of life onboard, a dramatic change from their frenzied busy life when in port. Everything goes back to normal. Ratings go to work at 8 am and stop working at 5 pm, and the officers resume their watchkeeping duties on the bridge.

It is during these long voyages that seafarers experience slow time and consequently, the emergence of boredom and restlessness. Long navigation therefore produces a different kind of slow time, the kind that bores seafarers, tires them and makes them feel restless.

On my fourth vessel (no internet/Wi-Fi onboard), one night, as we were nearing our third week of voyage in the open sea, it must have been around 11:30 pm when I found a seafarer in the lounge, watching a movie. He was alone. ‘Not sleeping yet’, I said as I sat down beside him. He looked at me and said: ‘I can’t sleep. I feel so bored. I don’t know what to do. Time feels like it has frozen’. ‘Stop looking at your watch’, I said, laughing. I looked at him and there was a sense of pained resignation in his eyes. ‘Don’t worry’, I said, ‘we’re on the same boat. I also feel so bored’. It was his turn to laugh.

Slow time experientially is, just like waiting, painful (Schwartz, 1975, cited in Turnbull, 2016: 62) and ‘conceptualised as a passive state in which people lack agency’ (Rotter, 2016: 86). Hauge’s informants in her study of cancer patients refer to waiting time as ‘something that provokes the unpleasant experience of inner time’ (2016: 200). Furthermore, experiencing slow time during long navigation makes seafarers feel, more than any other time at sea, like they are in prison. Thus, onboard, it is normal for seafarers to often allude to their stay onboard as their period of incarceration. The only difference they say is that they get a monthly salary, decent food (but not always) and regular parole (shore leave).

Seafarers interviewed for this article have cited a number of reasons that contributed to their experiencing of slow time onboard. Internet or Wi-Fi facilities, which many seafarers claim help them feel less isolated and far from home, are not specifically required by the Maritime Labour Convention. Vessels are only required to provide seafarers with adequate communication facilities onboard like satellite phones or email. Socials like monthly barbecue parties have also disappeared on many vessels (on the four vessels that I was on, it was only my first vessel which hosted a monthly barbecue party for the crew). Some shipping companies prohibit the holding of basketball tournaments onboard for health and safety reasons (seafarers could get injured whilst playing basketball, reducing the number of manpower onboard).

However, similar to what has been revealed by O’Neill (2017) in his study of homelessness in Bucharest, the feeling of boredom onboard does not result in depression amongst seafarers. On the four vessels that I had been on, nobody spoke of feeling depressed. Having said so, nonetheless, boredom abounds onboard when seafarers have very few social activities and recreational facilities to enjoy whilst at sea. In addition, the very space that seafarers inhabit onboard contributes to the feeling of boredom. Seafarers have nowhere to go, literally, as they only have their cabin, the lounge, and crew mess and oftentimes the bridge to go to in their free time. Outside, it is water all around them. In addition, seeing the same people on a daily basis does not help in mitigating boredom. As they are working and living together for months, seafarers often lament (rather jokingly) that they are already tired of each other. In these rather dire spatial and social contexts, tomorrow does not bring anything new to seafarers (aside from new job orders in other parts of the vessel perhaps). They have nothing to look forward to the next day but a similar work routine, similar faces and similar circumstances. Tomorrow has no promise of a new day. It is similar to yesterday, the day before yesterday and today.

The experience of some seafarers with regard to slow time onboard can be likened to what Hauge (2016) refers to as waiting time that cancer patients experience, an inner time representing chaos, being unlimited and without structure (p. 200). It is also very similar to what Jeffrey has discovered amongst unemployed young people in India: ‘Many students therefore complained of an overabundance of time; they imagined time as something that needed to be “passed” or “killed”’ (Jeffrey, 2010: 470).

It is for this reason that slow time poses a different challenge for some seafarers. They do not will it. It comes to them automatically and when it does, it leaves them bored, exhausted and restless, not good for people who, weeks later, will face the spectre of fast time as they come to port for a visit.

With no shore leave slow time abounds

Slow time does not just take place when vessels are on long navigation. It is also experienced by seafarers when they are in port and are not permitted to take shore leave.

International Maritime Organisation’s Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic (FAL Convention) states that all seafarers are entitled to shore leave regardless of nationality, race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion or social origin. In many ports of the world, taking shore leave is not a problem for seafarers; however, in a number of countries, for security reasons, shore leave is a restricted affair.

In the United States, for instance, having a C-1/D visa is required for shore leave. Whilst most vessels would require their crew to have this type of visa prior to boarding vessels that call into US ports, in a number of cases, some seafarers do not have this US visa or their visas have already expired prior to their vessel coming to the US. In 2018, the Seamen’s Church Institute Centre for Seafarers’ Rights published a report of a shore leave survey in US ports and found out that 90.9% of those surveyed were permitted shore leave. For those who were able to take shore leave, all well and good, but for those who were refused and had to stay onboard for the entire duration of their stay in port (which could last for days for some types of vessel like bulk carriers), the experiencing of slow time could be very difficult.

A seafarer on my second vessel told me this story from many years ago. One of the vessels that he was on was not scheduled to call at a US port, but problems with a vessel from the same management company that was about to go to the US to collect cargo had instructed them to divert to the US. They were the closest same type of vessel as the one intended to visit the US and a good number of the crew, including senior officers, had valid US visas. However, eight of the ratings did not hold valid visas. As a result of this, those who did not have the requisite US visa were unable to go on shore leave for weeks at all the US ports that they visited. The vessel had travelled to US ports for a month and the seafarers who were refused shore leave, including the seafarer that shared this story with me, felt a sense of despair. The seafarer said:

It’s funny when we’re already in the US and yet could not leave the vessel and visit places. We were told by the authorities that if we leave the vessel and plant our feet on the US soil we would be arrested and spend time in jail for breaking immigrations laws … We spent our free time looking at what’s out there from the bridge. It was so boring.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, I have revealed how vessels are not just places for work, they are places where seafarers also experience daily the vagaries of contemporary life – fast time and slow time, which in many ways is quite different from what people experience ashore. Vessels are a place where temporal dimensions reveal much about the fate of some groups of people in the margins, how some of us experience more precarities with our daily temporalities than others. Life at sea tells us much about how some people have very limited freedom to master and craft their time as they wish. More than others, they are time-bound, chained to their place where time elements are structured to be repetitive and predictable. However, seafarers’ experiencing of fast time and slow time onboard differs across rank and nationality. In general, seafarers from developing economies are more exposed to fast time and slow time as they have longer contracts onboard than their counterparts from Oganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Officers also experience longer bouts of fast time compared to ratings as the former are the ones tasked do paperwork. Seafarers from OECD countries are also mostly employed on vessels which offer better communication and recreational facilities onboard (like free Wi-Fi, sauna, swimming pool, library of books and DVDs and gym). This mitigates and lessens the occurrence of slow time onboard.

Regardless of these hard truths, seafarers are perceived to enjoy a privileged life. They enjoy wages much higher than those received by workers ashore with similar qualifications and years of training. In the Philippines, for instance, seafarers are looked up to; they are breadwinners and providers, they are respected in their communities (Acejo, 2012). In addition, being well travelled and exposed to different cultures, seafarers are deemed to show the habits and perspective of being cosmopolitans (Borovnik, 2005; Sampson, 2003). However, as much as seafarers are a beneficiary of improved standards in the industry over the years which come in the form of better living conditions and safer working environments, as demonstrated in this article, they face many challenges onboard, not least the temporal dimensions of their everyday life. It is not just therefore the homeless and those who are in downward mobility (O’Neill, 2017) whose temporal experiences are fraught with challenges and difficulties, but also those who are very much employed and upwardly mobile like seafarers.

There have been efforts by many shipping companies to improve the working and living conditions of seafarers, however, more needs to be done. For example, though an increasing number of shipping companies are now providing free Wi-Fi and better working and living conditions for their crew (Sampson et al., 2018), there are still segments of the industry that fail to do their part. Shipping companies which provide better working and living conditions onboard have surely recognised the benefits of their investment on the health and well-being of seafarers. However, there are still shipping companies which continue to neglect the provision of well-rounded welfare for seafarers. As a consequence, with inadequate recreational facilities onboard, seafarers are more prone to experience slow time onboard.

The current procedural configurations onboard as dictated by international and port state regulations continue to promote endless production of paperwork all in the name of health and safety (both for seafarers and the marine environment). Commercial imperatives, on the other hand, require unhampered and real-time communication between shipboard and shore personnel, exposing the former to uncontrolled temporal demands from the latter (Sampson et al., 2016). When cargo needs to be loaded and unloaded without delay, shore personnel need all the data they could get from those working onboard, pushing seafarers to work overtime. On the other hand, as vessels spend shorter periods of time in ports because of their need to be in constant movement to make profits (more time in port means spending more money for berthing dues and other associated port expenses), seafarers spend less and less time ashore, making their shore visits a race against time.

In all this, the importance of place continues to resonate in how seafarers experience fast time and slow time onboard. Seafarers work and live in an environment that keeps mobility and sociality to the barest minimum. Whilst the vessel is in constant movement, from port to port, seafarers’ mobility onboard is confined to the four corners of the vessel. As vessels become larger and larger, accommodation quarters and recreational spaces for seafarers to use and enjoy have become more restricted. This has an impact on how they experience time onboard. The vessel itself, as a container of time, determines how its occupants experience and make sense of the temporal dimensions onboard. Seafarers are trapped in the same space for months though at the same time they travel a great deal. Their place of employment makes their experiencing of fast time and slow time different from what people ashore experience.

In addition, seafarers are also at the receiving end of the power relations that exist between them and their employers, shoreside personnel and state agents (Sampson et al., 2016). The power geometry of managing and choosing temporalities onboard is not on the side of seafarers. In general, seafarers do not have a say on what vessel they will be assigned to. Onboard, they need to adapt themselves to what is available to them, say, in terms of recreational facilities. Even if it is rest time, and shoreside personnel need something from them, they need to respond immediately if asked, including calls at unsociable hours. They cannot complain. If they do, and demand better facilities or changes to the way shoreside personnel interact with them, they run the risk of their employment contract not being renewed. In ports, in most cases, they are at the beck and call of visiting port personnel. Seafarers do not have the power to manage their time as they wish. Amongst this, we are reminded that institutional arrangements and the time of others play an important role in the construction, meaning and experiences of time (Sharma, 2014, cited in Boersma, 2016: 122).

Having explicated at some length the experiencing of fast time and slow time by seafarers onboard merchant vessels and its impact on seafarers’ health and well-being, I reiterate Boersma’s (2016) contention that there is a need to understand the impacts of a ‘globalised temporal order’ on different social groups, not only as a conceptual point, but also as a moral point about inequality and justice (Adam, 2002). Seafarers spend most of their time away from their families. They toil onboard even in adverse weather conditions just to deliver goods to their destination, thus keeping the life of people ashore safe and comfortable. Seafarers have a huge time deficit with their families and friends ashore, whilst onboard, their temporalities are lived on a routine spate of fast time and slow time which reveals to us the very conflicted time-space continuum they are in. Seafarers could well be compensated in other ways, but by all indications, they are time and space poor. It is little wonder therefore that when seafarers were asked about the things that made them happy onboard, leaving the vessel to go home was at the top of the list (98.8%) (Sampson, 2019).