Word: dock
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...shock enough to learn of the conspiracy to overthrow the government of Nigeria by violence, for Nigeria has been one of the most stable of Africa's new nations. But it seemed almost incredible that the ringleader could have been the bespectacled chief prisoner in the dock of a Lagos courtroom last week-the respected Chief Obafemi Awolowo...
...ports in the world can match Brazil's as places where dock hands earn more and more for doing less and less. No matter how small the cargo handled, union rules in most Brazilian ports require a crew of at least 13 stevedores. For crates weighing more than a ton, dockmen get an extra 30% of their base pay; for deteriorated cargo, 50%; for cold-storage cargo, an extra 100%. They draw 30% extra when it rains, even if the rain stops before they start working. Dusty cargo is worth a 25% bonus; smelly cargo, 35%. And when...
...money they demand and pull down, Brazilian dockers get precious little work done. Along the Brazilian coast, a ship often needs several weeks to dock, unload, load and steam away again. At Santos recently, one ship was 60 days loading 16,000 tons of corn. By the time the ship finally weighed anchor, kernels of corn that had trickled into deck crevices had sprouted into vigorous plants. As port costs spiral, more and more foreign ships steam past Brazil's congested harbors, and dockworkers are now beginning to complain about lack of work. Their inevitable reaction: strikes for more...
Robertson plays Kennedy: a tough skipper with a soft shoulder; a good head ("he wrote a book, or sumpin'" a crewman remarks) but with a capacity for human error (he rams his boat into the dock, then gets it cut in half by a Japanese destroyer). Above all "the skinny, boyish lieutenant from Boston" is a fount of homely wisdom. One can sense the echo, if only dimly, of the famous Kennedy rhetoric: "They'll do a good job for us" he says of his crew, "if we do one for them...
Like few men or women who wind up in the prisoner's dock at the Old Bailey, Stephen Ward was educated, charming and gifted. What destroyed him, and turned a merely sordid morals case into the trial of the decade, was none of the conventional or even unconventional deadly sins. It was a compulsive, consuming snobbery...