This is the final story in a three-part series about the Seawise Giant, an ill-fated vessel that was once the world’s largest ship — a ship with a distinct connection to Hong Kong.
“Alang, Alang, Alang. This is Mont. We are ready to get underway and wait for the final course.”
“Mont, Alang. Captain, please make full maximum speed – repeat, full maximum speed.”
The master on board the supertanker Monte, known in a previous life as Seawise Giant, is betraying all his instincts as a captain. He is about to crash the ship under his command directly into the land. Guided by a port officer on the beach in the Indian state of Gujarat, he aims for one of the nearly two hundred breaking yards that line up, shoulder-to-shoulder, along the shore.
From four kilometres out in the Gulf of Khambhat, the target — a stretch of muddy sand barely as wide as the Seawise Giant itself — looks impossibly narrow. “Alang,” the captain anxiously radios, “it looks too small… too small.”
“Maintain present heading and speed,” the port officer reassures him. “Everything will be fine.” He is not wrong. After all, he has done this hundreds of times before. The Seawise Giant is just his latest and greatest quarry – a harvest of steel that will feed the ramshackle city of Alang for years to come. But right now, they need to seize the moment. The midday sun is hanging high in the sky, and they need to beach this rusting behemoth before the tide begins creeping out again.
What started out as a speck on the horizon is now coming closer and closer, towering over the hundreds of men waiting on the beach to tear her apart. They come from all over this immense country, lured by wages that start as low as 178 rupees (HK$15 or US$2) a day. They wade through toxic sands, breathe in noxious fumes, and face the threats of electrocution, falling debris and explosions of leftover gas. One in four of them will contract some form of cancer in their lifetime.
Ship breaking — or recycling, as its bosses now prefer — is an unwanted business. It is routinely left behind as countries work their way up the maritime value chain, advancing to shipbuilding and shipowning, and leaving less fortunate people to pick up their blowtorches. The trade’s shady nature is the reason Seawise Giant is sailing into her doom not as the Norwegian-flagged Knock Nevis but the Sierra Leone-flagged Mont. By selling her to breakers for the value of her scrap, her owners escaped responsibility for dealing with the decrepit ship according to European standards – and made a tidy profit, too.
Hong Kong, too, once served its time as the ship breaking capital of the world. The industry peaked in the post-war boom years when the colony had two resources in abundance: cheap labour, which poured over the border from wartorn China, and a harbour still littered with World War II shipwrecks that needed to be cleared from the depths. A 1961 issue of the Journal of the Geographical, Geological & Archaeological Society noted that, by 1959, “Hong Kong had the largest ship breaking industry of any port worldwide, and ships were being brought here faster than they could be dealt with.”
Great ships like the RMS Arundel Castle, another ocean liner turned British troop ship, met their ends on local breakers’ beaches. These were clustered around the shores of Gin Drinker’s Bay in Rambler Channel, where the remains of Seawise University are now entombed. An ignoble end, perhaps, for these beloved vessels, reduced to mere carcasses for scrap-metal vultures. But the breakers have also ensured that the likes of Arundel Castle and Seawise Giant live on. Rebar and H-beams salvaged from Hong Kong’s sunken ships forged the first skyscrapers that made our city famous. Scrap peeled off the ships at Alang provides 15 percent of India’s steel, and the industry in neighbouring Bangladesh claims to supply nearly 60% of the country’s steel demand.
Seawise Giant’s cabin doors likely became bunk beds for the men in Alang, who drift to sleep under aluminium sheets from its hull. The steel would have been carted off to smelters, turned into construction material and tools. Bidders would have vied for everything, including the galley sink. Nothing will have gone to waste. This is the inevitable end for any ship lucky enough not to sink.
One part of Seawise Giant that was not resold and repurposed, however, was her 36-tonne anchor, which was saved and donated to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum in 2010. For over a decade, it has been stored at a Hong Kong Government Dockyard building on Stonecutters Island, hidden from the public. But soon it will stand in the Museum’s Jockey Club Anchor Plaza, a free public space on the Central Harbourfront between Pier 9 and the Observation Wheel.
Even in 2025, this anchor does not just belong to the biggest ship built at the time, but what is still the biggest ship ever built. Seven years after Seawise Giant was broken up on the beach, a contender emerged: a hull longer, wider, and heavier rumbled down the slipway at the Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea. Shell’s Prelude, a floating LNG facility permanently moored off the coast of Western Australia, shattered our homegrown champion’s record as the biggest movable object produced by humanity. But despite its incomprehensible dimensions — or, rather, because of them — Prelude has no means of propulsion, relying on tugs to make headway. It is therefore considered a facility, and technically not a ship. Seawise Giant’s record as humankind’s largest self-propelled creation remains unbroken.
Given her history, which demonstrated the folly of building a ship of such enormous proportions, it is a record likely to loom for as long as its anchor shades our shores – a monument to human ingenuity and hubris, and a testament to Hong Kong’s often outsized role in global maritime history.
Image by Andra Ramanin