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That's the story, anyway. Fact or fable, Marco Polo's travels gave the West a new way of imagining the East, and helped ignite trade with peoples who had seemed impossibly strange and distant. Seven hundred years and one jet age later, we depend upon the sea even more than in Marco Polo's time—we just don't know it. Modern maritime trade is hidden. Ports have retreated to ultra-efficient spaces behind barbed-wire fences and security checks. The ships, computer-driven monsters with skeleton crews, load and unload their cargo quickly and vanish on the open oceans. The biggest vessels can carry 9,000 containers, offering economies of scale that seem to bend logic. Take Australian ice cream, which Japanese love. Due to the frequency of sailings, the quickest way to get it from Fremantle to Tokyo is via Singapore—a detour of several thousand miles.
Every ship—advanced or ancient—docking in Singapore is tracked by PSA's computers, along with the quantity and destination of its 20-foot-long shipping containers, the basic, unregarded unit of international trade. One vessel is a 38-tonne barge called Marco Polo 78, the name just visible on its rusting bow. Moving at three knots and crewed by barefoot sailors, it has chugged across the Strait from the Indonesian island of Batam with a cargo of coconuts and pineapples. To get an inkling of what Polo might have seen and experienced, I will make Batam my first stop on a voyage up the Sumatran side of the Strait, a lesser-traveled coastline of forgotten islands and mangrove-choked inlets, and the historical haunt of pirates who still torment passing vessels.
Last year Lloyd's of London, which insures most shipping, designated the Malacca Strait a "war-risk zone," and several Singapore companies now offer private armed escorts. Alex Duperouzel is managing director of Background Asia Risk Solutions (BARS), whose company motto—"You Are Not Alone"—was inspired by a ship's master. "I never sleep when I'm in the Malacca Strait," he told Duperouzel. "I feel so alone out there."
Apart from Duperouzel, who is an accountant ("I can't shoot," he confesses), BARS staff are all ex-military and include, says Duperouzel, "one or two Brits and Americans." But the Strait of Malacca is not the Strait of Hormuz, where the threat of suicide attacks means "you literally need to be able to blow boats out of the water," he says. "We've had to be visible many times but never had to fire a shot." Last year BARS escorted a 12,000-tonne cable-laying ship worth tens of millions of dollars. A fishing boat with 17 armed men approached, saw Duperouzel's men brandishing automatic weapons, and left in a hurry.
About 300 ships ply the 900-km Strait at any time, along with just a handful of patrol vessels from Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia. There were no acts of piracy this year until early July, which saw three attacks in as many days. But is the Strait really a war zone? There is a crime problem, admits Duperouzel, "but active law enforcement brings that problem down periodically." Growing cooperation between the police and military of the three littoral states helps keep piracy down. And due mainly to the logistical challenge of launching seaborne attacks—a speedboat loaded with explosives has a comparatively short range—there has never been a terrorist incident in the Strait. Says Duperouzel: "It's easier to park a truck outside a nightclub than it is to hijack a supertanker."
Or a ferry packed with day-tripping families, like the one I took to Batam that Saturday. The boat hugged Singapore's coast, cruising past the thin yellow beaches of Sentosa Island, then picked up speed and darted across the Strait. We were dwarfed by container ships and supertankers, but their ranks dwindled as we crossed the invisible sea border into Indonesia and approached Batam, its waters plied by wooden boats from another century. As we docked, the Singapore skyline—far away and dreamlike beneath gathering storm clouds—disappeared behind the headland.
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