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In October 2006, the capesize bulk carrier Ocean Victory was discharging iron ore at Kashima in Japan when weather deteriorated. A long swell combined with a northwesterly gale reaching Force 9 on the Beaufort scale. The master decided to leave the berth, lost control of the vessel in the Kashima fairway, and she was driven onto the breakwater and became a total loss. The vessel's hull insurers paid, took an assignment of the owners' and demise charterer's rights, and brought

A container ship catches fire in the Arabian Sea. Your cargo is in a hold that never burned, on a vessel you do not own, in a casualty you had nothing to do with. Weeks later you receive a demand for 54 percent of the value of your goods before anyone will release them. That is not a mistake and it is not extortion. It is general average, one of the oldest surviving principles in commercial law, and the demand is enforceable. For cargo interests it is the single most surprisi

For five months, the working assumption across the industry has been that the Strait of Hormuz crisis, however severe, was a single-chokepoint problem with a single-chokepoint solution. Cargo could move west. Saudi crude could reach the Red Sea overland and load at Yanbu. The Cape route was expensive and slow but it existed. Every contingency plan drafted since February rested on the premise that one door was closed and another remained open. As of last Monday, that premise n