Consider the Suez captain

Consider the captain of the Ever Given, the ship that blocked the Suez Canal. There may have been a few Amazon forest dwellers who didn’t know of his blunder but the rest of the world feasted on it. His excuse, apparently, for running a

200,000-tonne vessel aground was that it was a bit windy.

Having run aground there was nothing for him to do all day but wave in sheepish apology to the billion tonnes of shipping fore and aft. Meanwhile, a voice in his head kept whispering that he’d just defined his life. Whatever he did in years to come would be only a footnote to this one spectacular error.

And there was no consolation to be found ashore. In all directions the sands of Egypt stretched with never a pub in sight in which to seek oblivion. He should have run aground off Lyttelton.

The Ever Given’s owned in Japan but operated by a Taiwanese outfit that painted the company name in colossal letters on both sides of the ship. Now Evergreen’s the most notorious shipping company in the world. Though there will have been some relief in Taiwan that it was the Ever Given that ran aground and not its sister ship – and I am not making this up – the Ever Genius.

The Ever Given hasn’t been to New Zealand because there’s nowhere here for it to park. The beast is a quarter of a mile long. That’s three and a half rugby paddocks, including in-goal areas. It’s one of a new breed of ultra large vessels designed to carry shipping containers in remarkable quantities. The Ever Given carries

20,000.

The best poker player in my class at school was a small and ruthless child called Cosh. He knew the odds of everything and never bet against them. When he left school he looked around with the same clear eye and went into the business of marine insurance.

In his 30s he got divorced. I was still teaching then and was impressed by the terms of the settlement. Cosh agreed to pay his ex-wife, for the rest of her life, more money per week than I earned in a month. And he immediately remarried. There’s money in shipping.

The Ever Given collected its cargo from ports on China’s eastern seaboard, including Shanghai. The container port at Shanghai is an island 32 kilometres out to sea, linked to the mainland by a six-lane bridge. It has berths for 50 Ever Givens at a time.

Inside the containers on the Ever Given will be everything from T-shirts to tea cups, via car parts, condoms and artificial kidneys, all of them made in China, bound for Europe, and, thanks to a single man, marooned for a week in Egypt.

But every disaster is an opportunity. What scope the captain had to become a prophet for our times. With the television cameras focused on his ship he could have clambered to the top of his cargo, a speck of flesh on a mountain of metal, and preached.

‘‘Behold,’’ he could have said, ‘‘the reality of global trade. Behold the tankers full of the oil that warms the climate and keeps the vile House of Saud in power. Behold the trillion tonnes of cheap consumer goods, from the factories of Asia to the landfills of Europe. Just look at it all. It cannot be sustainable. And how easily we could wean ourselves off it. Ladies and gentlemen, it is not too late.’’

But did he? Of course not. He’s just the bloke who blocked the Suez Canal.