This is the first 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.
In 1912, the largest man-made moving object in the world was the ill-fated luxury liner RMS Titanic. 70 years later, that title belonged to a Hong Kong-owned vessel: the Ultra Large Crude Carrier Seawise Giant.
The superlative scale of the Seawise Giant can be difficult to wrap your head around. At 458 metres in length, she was longer than the Sears Tower — then the world’s tallest skyscraper — was tall. Even today, she would dwarf Asia’s tallest buildings, standing above Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers and the top floor of Taipei 101. Planted vertically in Victoria Harbour, you would command a higher view from the ship’s bulbous bow than you would from the rooftop of the ICC. Its anchor alone, which forms the centrepiece of a new harbourfront plaza, weighs as much as three double-decker buses.
It could even be argued that Seawise Giant was too big. She was too wide to squeeze into the Suez or Panama canals. Her draught was so deep and her turning circle so unwieldy — it took at least three kilometres for the ship to alter course — that she could not navigate through the Strait of Malacca, nor sail through the English Channel or St. Lawrence Seaway. Fully loaded, she sat nearly 25 meters in the water, far deeper than even the world’s deepest-water ports could accommodate. Like the ghostly crew of the Flying Dutchman, the Seawise Giant was cursed by her sheer bulk, never to touch land again.
That begs an obvious question: why? Like all great ships of history, the story of the Seawise Giant is the story of the world she sailed in, one wrought by war and political upheaval amid the race to extract the planet’s most valuable resources. The part played by its Hong Kong owner, Tung Chao-yung, and his maritime empire reads like a palimpsest of the city’s prosperous yet tumultuous 20th century, and all the uncertainties leading up to its 1997 handover to China.
The Seawise Giant, later known as Nock Nevis and Jahre Viking, was the world’s biggest tanker, measuring 458 metres long. Image sourced from amazing.zone
A giant is born
On the morning of March 23, 2021, a sandstorm whipped around the container ship Ever Given as it punched north up the Suez Canal. With high winds hammering the hull, its helmsman attempted to correct its course. Instead, the ship swung sideways, its bow nosing into the eastern bank and its stern grinding along the west. For six agonising days, the 400-metre-long vessel lay wedged across the waterway, blocking all traffic until it could be freed. The obstruction is estimated to have cost the global economy an eye-watering US$54 billion.
So consider the panic that ensued when this critical artery between Europe and Asia was closed for eight years. That was the reality the world had to rapidly adapt to in 1967, after the start of the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. Israeli forces stormed through Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, stopping only at the east bank of the Suez Canal. With the waterway now a frontline in the war, Cairo closed it to trade and filled it with sea mines and scuttled vessels.
At the time, a huge amount of Europe’s oil passed through the canal: 60 percent of Italy’s, 39 percent of France’s and 25 percent of Britain’s. Overnight, this now had to be carried on the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope and up the length of Africa to reach European markets. The solution was bigger ships that could economise on these round-the-world journeys, transporting more oil in one go. The 1970s thus became the age of the supertanker, spawning the VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier), and then the Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC).
Seawise Giant was the tanker to outsize them all. She was ordered by Sumitomo Heavy Industries at the Oppama shipyard in Yokosuka in 1974. By the time her keel first touched the waters of Tokyo Bay five years later, the brief golden age of the supertanker was already ending. The oil crisis of 1973 had driven up crude prices and reduced global demand. The Suez Canal was cleared and reopened in 1975 after the end of the Yom Kippur War. European nations had also diversified their oil imports and discovered reservoirs beneath the North Sea. The 1979 Iranian revolution only underlined the need to diversify oil production away from a single volatile region.
That wasn’t the only inauspicious part of Seawise Giant’s beginnings. The maritime world, in which sailors daily confront an unknowable and unconquerable element capable of crushing even the mightiest ships, is fraught with superstition. For as long as humans have taken to the water, they have performed rituals at the launch of a new vessel, seeking reassurances that it — and all who sail in her — will have divine or supernatural protection. From Babylonian blood sacrifices to the modern tradition of breaking a bottle of champagne against the bow, the habit is both universal and timeless. If the naming and launching rituals are not performed correctly, however, disaster may loom just over the horizon. And for Seawise Giant, it was a turbulent start.
The Greek shipping magnate for whom the ship had originally been laid down refused to take delivery, citing severe steam turbine vibration problems during sea trials while the ship was going astern. At least, that is what he said – others speculated he could not foot the bill, or simply regretted the order. Either way, the result was a bad omen: the monster was launched without a name, then left to languish in the shipyard until another buyer could be found.
Tung’s decision to snap up the supertanker, in the middle of a global shipping slump that led the industry to idle or scrap millions of tonnes of tanker capacity, was something of a mystery at the time. Reporting on the ship’s relaunch in 1981, The New York Times noted that it was “entering service at a time when other shipowners have concluded that such mega-vessels are uneconomical.” The newspaper called the decision “a puzzling judgement call,” quoting an industry analyst who observed that “Tung is the only one still buying the big ones.” Before the Seawise Giant was delivered, Tung even demanded that the ship be lengthened by several more metres, a process known as “jumboisation.” Like others in his fleet, he affixed it with a homophone for his own name, “CY’s.”
Ultimately, it was a gamble. Independent shipowners like Tung were being squeezed out by the emergence of national fleets and the skyrocketing costs of building, maintaining, and operating vessels. Tung was betting big that, by aggressively expanding his fleet during lean times, he would emerge stronger than ever when — and if — a cyclical upturn took place.
It was a bet he lost.
Read Part II of this story, “Sea of Fire.”