"Explores the ocean world and the enterprises--licit and illicit--that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons. [The] forty-three thousand ships [that] ply the open ocean ... are the embodiment of modern global capital and the most independent objects on earth ... Here is free enterprise at its freest ... But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews, and the growth of ... piracy and ... stateless terrorism"--jacket.