However, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Ian Urbina set out in 2015 to blow the walls on that narrow outlook, to convey to the global public that there’s a lot more going on out there on the high seas and that we’re all complicit in it. His multi-award-winning series of articles, entitled The Outlaw Ocean, put the lawlessness of the high seas into the public eye. His investigations turned into a four-year long endeavour, which led him from the Southern Ocean to Somalia.

When we pick up a can of tuna in the supermarket, we rarely question how this fish that was caught on the other side of the world manages to end up fresh on our shelves at such a cheap price. When customers do have concerns it is normally of the environmental impact. But the human cost is not often considered.

“That’s one of the things I hoped to address in the reporting,” says Urbina. “To try, as much as possible, to position the reporting at the intersection of the two different types of concerns and how they interact with each other. Quite often, starting with the humans and moving to the marine environment.”

Correlations between environmental crimes and human rights abuses came up time and time again during his reporting. Degradation of marine ecosystems and abuse of vulnerable workers go hand in hand all over the globe, from the Falkland Islands to the South China Sea. Urbina explains how large, industrial vessels, which are “over-efficient at pulling fish out of the water extract the resources to an unsustainable degree and at an unsustainable pace. Along those shores the fish stocks collapse and the local, artisanal, subsistence economies that depend on that for domestic consumption crater.” These factory ships force the smaller local vessels to go further and further from shore just to catch enough fish to break even. The cost of fuel is the biggest expenditure for these vessels, so these companies and captains start looking for other ways to save money. “They switch to migrant labour, to trafficked labour, they use manning agencies, these employment agencies that are really abusive but can save them a buck,” Urbina adds. The reckless and unfettered fishing practices that are deployed lead to broken ecosystems and diminished fish stocks which, in turn, leads to a proliferation of human rights abuses, trafficking and slavery.

In order to document the horrific conditions that occur on these fishing vessels Urbina had to endure some of the most dangerous and gruelling reporting. The journey took him to the South China Sea, one of the regions where trafficked labour and sea slavery is most rampant and on to transhipment vessels, which ply their trade hundreds of nautical miles from land and are notorious for labour abuses.

“These vessels don’t come back to shore,” Urbina explains. “They just keep fishing and a mothership comes out to supply them with more fuel, parts, men and food, and then the mothership brings the fish back to shore. But the fishing vessel stays out there for two, sometimes three years.” Initially, Urbina and his team planned to pay a captain to take them directly out to one of these boats but quickly discovered it was unviable, no one was willing to go that far out. Instead they ‘hopscotched’, travelling on one ship to go the first 40 miles, after which they would get on a different ship to go 40 more miles and so on, an endeavour, which took obscene amounts of time.