There Are More Slaves In Service Today, Than There Was in 1700's

The crew on the Thai fishing boat included two dozen Cambodian boys, some as young as 15.

Lang Long’s ordeal began in the back of a truck. After watching his younger siblings go hungry because their family’s rice patch in Cambodia could not provide for everyone, he accepted a trafficker’s offer to travel across the Thai border for a construction job.  It was his chance to start over. But when he arrived, Mr. Long was kept for days by armed men in a room near the port at Samut Prakan, more than a dozen miles southeast of Bangkok. He was then herded with six other migrants up a gangway onto a shoddy wooden ship. It was the start of three brutal years in captivity at sea.  “I cried,” said Mr. Long, 30, recounting how he was resold twice between fishing boats. After repeated escape attempts, one captain shackled him by the neck whenever other boats neared

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When they are not fishing, the Cambodians, most of whom were recruited by traffickers, sort their catch and fix the nets, which are prone to ripping. One 17-year-old boy proudly showed a hand missing two fingers — severed by a nylon line that had coiled around a spinning crank. The migrants’ hands, which are virtually never fully dry, have open wounds, slit from fish scales and torn from the nets’ friction. “Fish is inside us,” one of the boys said. They stitch closed the deeper cuts themselves. Infections are constant.

Thailand’s commercial fishing fleet consists predominantly of bottom trawlers, called the strip-miners of the sea because they use nets weighted to sink to the ocean floor and ensnare almost everything in their path. But purse seine boats, like the one where these Cambodians work, are common too. They use circular nets to target fish closer to the water’s surface. After the nets are hauled upward, they are pinched at the top, like old-style coin purses.

Before arriving on the ship, most of the Cambodians had never seen a body of water larger than a lake. The few who could swim were responsible for diving into the inky sea to ensure that the 50-foot mouth of the nets closed properly. If one of them were to get tangled in the mesh and yanked underwater, it is likely that no one would notice right away. The work is frenzied and loud, as the boys chant in unison while pulling the nets.

Meals on board consist of a once-daily bowl of rice, flecked with boiled squid or other throwaway fish. In the galley, the wheel room and elsewhere, countertops crawl with roaches. The toilet is a removable wooden floorboard on deck. At night, vermin clean the boys’ unwashed plates. The ship’s mangy dog barely lifts her head when rats, which roam all over the ship, eat from her bowl.

Crew members tend to sleep in two-hour snatches, packed into an intensely hot crawl space. Too many bodies share the same air, with fishing-net hammocks hanging from a ceiling that is less than five feet above the floor. Deafening, the engine turbines throb incessantly, shaking the ship’s wooden deck. Every so often, the engine coughs a black cloud of acrid fumes into the sleeping quarters.

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Men who have fled servitude on fishing boats recount beatings and worse as nets are cast for the catch that will become pet food and livestock feed.