Chapter One
The Shape of a Working Sea
From a small boat, a large ship does not look like a figure in a report. It looks like a wall that moves. Its bow appears before the rest of it, then the stacked cargo and the place where the crew live. If you are crossing the water nearby, you wait for its wake to pass. If you are on the ship, the small boat is a mark of how many different journeys share one sea. Neither craft owns the horizon.
This opening scene is imagined. The two scales of vessel are real enough. One follows a long route between oceans. The other may move between a village and a fishing ground, or carry supplies along the shore. A global map draws an arrow through both lives and gives the arrow the name Strait of Malacca. The useful question is what the name covers.
The strait runs between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. At its northern end it opens toward the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean. To the south, the route continues through the waters around Singapore toward the South China Sea. The International Maritime Organization describes the Strait of Malacca as about 930 kilometres long and notes a narrower bottleneck where it meets the Singapore Strait. These are geographic descriptions, not a promise that every point along the route has the same depth, width or traffic. A voyage is a sequence of changing waters.
