S1 E3: Slavery At Sea

When I

arrived at the sea, I was panicking.

I sat down and sobbed.

A Thai man turned up and asked, why do you cry? I said I wanted to go back home, see my mother.

I thought I would die when I went out to sea.

I was so scared.

But I followed the others onto the

boat.

I said, we could not do this.

This was dangerous.

He told me that I'm just a worker, and he was the boss.

I work and I didn't get paid.

The board captain said if anyone couldn't work he would throw the man into the water or he would shoot him to death.

I'd gone to Songkhla, Thailand, because it's a place where there were a lot of these bigger ships that tend to go further from shore.

And my hope was to get out far from shore to see this reality, this type of boat, the sea slave vessel, of which there were said to be hundreds, if not thousands, in the South China Sea.

We are looking for the perfect boat from which to tell the story about sea slaves.

And at this point, I was actually pretty worn down.

We had spent five weeks trying to get to this space, to find this kind of boat, and we had many unsuccessful efforts, you know.

There was a lot of attention on Thailand in general and the fishing fleet in particular.

And so the fishing industry, already an insular, skeptical industry, was even more guarded.

You don't walk up to a Thai fishing captain and ask them would they provide transport out to a sea-slate vessel.

That doesn't even make sense to them.

The term sea slavery is not one they would use.

So you have to kind of describe the type of vessel you're looking for in a very careful, different way so that they understand what you're looking for and they're not scared away from helping you do it.

I quickly realized no captain would be willing to take us the full 200, 300 miles.