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| Hazelwood Avoids a Deserved Noose |
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| The Law of the Sea Is More Just |
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This is Dark Cloud on Tuesday, March 27, 1990. The distinction between justice and law is well known and need not be revived in debate here, but we need to view the trial of Captain Joseph Hazelwood, late of the Exxon Valdez. Except for the conviction on releasing oil illegally, Hazleton got off scott free. This will be seen as a complete whitewash of the horror in Prince William sound, a demonstration of the power of the corporations to block the march of justice. It is much worse than that. It violates the oldest tradition of the sea that the captain is utterly responsible, no matter what. Contrary to revisionist history, a vocation that flourishes in Boulder, the captain of a ship throughout the ages was not a living testament to a patriachal system but to the utter necessity of there being a quick-thinker in charge. A captain exercised plenepotentiary powers aboard his ship, could legally marry couples, could, at certain times, have people put to death. It was a dream come true for psychotics, but more often than not, the system worked. Only those of us who have been in a sail boat out of sight of land for any length of time can appreciate its benefits and dangers. The down side to this fiefdom was that the captain was held utterly responsible for the safety of ship, crew and cargo, not always in that order. The reason captains went down with their ships, and they did, was the only surety they could give to owners that they had done the best they could and hope the owners would provide for the family. Mutiny, failure, unpleasant incidents were not looked upon favorably in the board rooms of ship owners. And here we have a case where a captain ruins ship, cargo, and the reputation of the owners, and possibly the safety of the crew, and gets off scott free. It does not matter if he was drinking, doing ice, smoking dope. Whether his hand was on the tiller or not, tradition argues that Hazelwood should boil. To blame the third mate and not the captain is horrid precedent. If the third mate was not skilled to manuver one of the world's biggest ships through the sound of Prince William, who put him at the helm? You do not have to be environmentally concerned to detest the verdict in this trial. If the responsibility of a ship's structural integrity can be absorbed in the spongy fibre of legal niceties these days, I - for one - vote to bring back the old days, when a captain stood tall and took the punches along with the status. The sea teaches many lessons, and they are clearly not taught in corporate board rooms or law school. |
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