“We are not allowed to even be ill! We just have to die.” “What do we get in return?” he shouted into the camera. “We are spending our lives here on board to bring the goods to your house,” said the Newmax’s captain, Tymur Rudov, in a YouTube video. When a Chinese officer aboard the Newmax bulk carrier collapsed, vomiting blood, Chinese port officials allowed him ashore briefly in an ambulance before returning him to the ship with some pills. There currently are four seafarers’ bodies stuck aboard cargo ships, the International Maritime Organization says-as well as 36 urgent cases involving medical or humanitarian emergencies.Īn Indian sailor sick with severe Covid-19 was denied entry to Singapore, Malaysia and several other Asian ports before being ferried back to India and put on a ventilator. And when an Italian cargo-ship captain died off Indonesia, his body stayed in a storeroom for six weeks, for lack of cold-storage large enough, decaying in the tropical air. The corpse of a Syrian cook who died off the coast of Venezuela was trapped aboard for four months. After Chinese authorities refused to take his body, the ship traveled for nearly two months and more than 5,000 miles, to Vancouver, where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police agreed to help repatriate his body. In September, a 23-year-old seaman from Ukraine died aboard a Swiss-flagged bulk carrier anchored at China’s southeastern port of Rizhao, an apparent suicide. That leaves corpses stuck for months on the world’s cargo ships, stored in freezers meant for food. Though the pandemic has eased somewhat, the restrictions remain, leaving ships like the Vantage Wave to cross oceans in search of a port to offload a fallen crew member. Strict and uneven rules governing the world’s ports prevent the unloading of bodies suspected of being infected with the coronavirus. “All we wanted was to get our father home,” said his son, Andrei Sandu, also a ship captain. Sandu, a 68-year-old born near the Black Sea, who decorated his home with mementos from a life on the ocean, had become a diplomatic incident. It was the 13th country the Vantage Wave petitioned. For six months, it had traveled thousands of miles lying near the crew’s meat and vegetables. Captain Sandu was dead and his body was in the ship’s walk-in freezer. Last month, the ship, by then floating off the United Arab Emirates, sent what had become a familiar plea. “Don’t worry,” he typed in what would be a final email to his wife in April. Six Months Later, His Body Was Still in the Freezer":īUCHAREST-After 40 years at sea, on his last voyage before retirement, Captain Dan Sandu slipped into his cabin on the MV Vantage Wave, a cargo ship sailing away from India, feeling unwell. Not just bizarre but the ultimate cruelty.Īt WSJ, " The Ship’s Captain Died at Sea.
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