A ship operated by Evergreen Marine Corp., the company behind the vessel blocking the Suez Canal, once released 28,800 plastic toys into the Pacific Ocean by accident in the 1990s – and they were still washing up on shores around the world 15 years later.
The findings came from Donovan Hohn, who wrote Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea.
“For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the Journal of Commerce and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this riddle: the ship was the Evergreen Ever Laurel, owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corp,” Mr Hohn wrote in an extract of his book.
The toys have washed up on many far shores, travelling more than 27,360 kilometres by some estimates.
Oceanographers, Jim Ingraham and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, fed the coordinates of the plastic-toy sightings into their ocean-current surface simulator. They traced the drift patterns back to the North Pacific.
hey @britishmuseum give us your best duck
— The Museum of English Rural Life (@TheMERL) January 4, 2019
What is the Evergreen Marine Corporation?
Evergreen Marine Corporation operates the Ever Given on behalf of the ship’s owner Shoei Kisen.
Are spills from cargo ships common?
Spills from cargo ships are relatively common in stormy weather.