Sea-Time: An Ethnographic Adventure

Helen Sampson

Routledge

£39.99

This book won the Maritime Foundation’s Best Book Award 2025. Professor Sampson joined the cargo ship Beluga at Panama, crossed the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, Ukraine, Russia before disembarking in Istanbul. Her focus was not on the ship’s itinerary but on its community. This was the final voyage of her academic career; earlier observations enrich this narrative and enable comparisons. She finds that conditions for professional seafarers have got worse over the last 25 years.

Things as simple as comfortable berths, better recreation facilities, meaningful shore-time, reliable family contact have become less, not more achievable while the increase in remote supervision has eroded professional autonomy and increased stress. This is not an easy read but it’s an important book.