The Ship and the Route: The World's Oldest Journey

That's essentially a circumnavigation of the globe through commercial footprints.

Los portugueses aprenden a navegar muy bien.

The Portuguese learn to navigate very well.

El viento y el mar son sus maestros.

The wind and the sea are their teachers.

The wind patterns specifically.

The monsoon system of the Indian Ocean is what made this whole trade network possible in the first place.

Sailors figured out centuries before any formal science existed that the winds reverse direction twice a year.

You sail east in June, you sail west in December.

The whole calendar of Indian Ocean trade was built around the monsoon.

Hoy los barcos tienen motores.

Today ships have engines.

No necesitan el viento.

They don't need the wind.

Pueden ir siempre.

They can go at any time.

They can go at any time.

But they still follow roughly the same lanes.

You know what's striking?

If you overlay the medieval Indian Ocean trade routes onto a modern shipping density map, they're almost identical.

The geography hasn't changed.

The Strait of Hormuz is still the chokepoint it always was.

Ormuz es muy importante.

Hormuz is very important.

Mucho petróleo pasa por allí cada día.

A lot of oil passes through there every day.

About a fifth of all the oil traded in the world passes through that strait.

Twenty percent of the global supply, through a channel that at its narrowest point is about 33 kilometers wide.

And right now, with the war and the ceasefire violations and tankers being attacked, that tanker reaching South Korea safely is not nothing.

It's actually a significant piece of news.

Corea del Sur necesita el petróleo.

South Korea needs the oil.

No tiene mucho petróleo en su país.

It doesn't have much oil in its own country.

Almost none.

South Korea is one of the most energy-dependent economies on the planet.

They import around 70 percent of their energy, and the majority of that oil comes from the Middle East.

So when the Strait closes or gets dangerous, it's an economic emergency for Seoul, not just a diplomatic headache.

Japón también.

Japan too.

Japan también necesita el petróleo del Golfo.

Japan also needs the oil from the Gulf.

Japan even more so, in some ways.

There was actually a news item this week about Mitsui O.S.K.

Lines, the big Japanese shipping company, saying that three of their vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz last month and refused to pay the transit fees that Iran was demanding.

Which raises a question I find genuinely interesting.

When did nations start treating sea lanes as territory you could charge for?

En la historia, muchos países cobran por los barcos.

In history, many countries charge ships for passage.

Es una idea muy vieja.

It's a very old idea.

The Sound Dues.

Denmark charged ships for passing through the Øresund strait for four hundred years.

Every ship going into or out of the Baltic had to pay Copenhagen.

It funded the Danish state for centuries.

The principle that a coastal power can charge for the use of a narrow strait is, as you say, ancient.

Hoy hay una ley internacional del mar.

Today there's an international law of the sea.

Los barcos pueden pasar libremente.

Ships can pass freely.

UNCLOS.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Signed in 1982, came into force in 1994.

It guarantees what's called innocent passage through international straits.

Iran is a signatory.

Which means what Iran is doing right now, extracting fees under threat of military force, is a direct violation of the treaty it signed.

Los países firman tratados pero a veces no los respetan.

Countries sign treaties but sometimes don't respect them.

Esto pasa mucho.

This happens a lot.

It does.

And the honest answer is that international law only works when someone is willing to enforce it.

Right now that's the U.S.

Navy, which is both the enforcer and one of the combatants.

That's a strange situation.

The referee is also playing in the game.

Es difícil.

It's difficult.

Pero sin ese control, los barcos no pueden viajar.

But without that control, ships cannot travel.

Which brings me back to that tanker off South Korea.

The crew of that ship, whoever they are, they made a journey through one of the most militarized stretches of water on earth right now.

And the fact that the cargo arrived, the fact that they crossed safely, is quietly remarkable.

I spent some time with merchant sailors once, covering a piece about piracy off the Horn of Africa, and the thing that struck me was how ordinary the men were.

Regular guys from the Philippines and India and Sri Lanka, living in this completely extraordinary situation.

Los marineros viajan mucho pero no ven los países de verdad.

Sailors travel a lot but don't really see the countries.

Solo ven los puertos.

They only see the ports.

That's a melancholy truth.

You're technically in Busan or Singapore or Rotterdam, but your world is the dock and the ship and the sea.

Some of these guys are away from home for eight, nine months at a stretch.

That's a very particular kind of travel.

You cross the whole world and you miss it.

Antes los viajes son muy peligrosos.

In the past, journeys are very dangerous.

Ahora también, pero de otra manera.

Now too, but in a different way.

Different dangers, same fundamental uncertainty.

When a Phoenician trader left Tyre for India, he might be gone for three years.

His family had no way of knowing whether he was alive or dead.

Now you can call your wife from the middle of the Indian Ocean, but you can still get hit by a ballistic missile.

El progreso no quita todos los peligros.

Progress doesn't remove all dangers.

Solo cambia los peligros.

It only changes the dangers.

Well put.

I want to sit with that for a second, actually, because I think it applies to travel more broadly.

We've made long-distance travel so fast and cheap and routine that we forget it ever required courage.

A flight from Austin to Madrid used to be equivalent, in historical terms, to a voyage that would have made your grandmother weep and light candles.

Mi abuela nunca sale de su pueblo.

My grandmother never leaves her village.

Para ella, Madrid es muy lejos.

For her, Madrid is very far away.

My grandmother grew up in a town in Kentucky where she knew pretty much everyone who had ever lived there.

The idea of getting on a plane and being on the other side of the world in ten hours would have been, to her, a kind of magic.

And honestly, when I stop to think about it, it still is.

Yo pienso que viajar cambia a las personas.

I think travel changes people.

Ves otras culturas y entiendes más.

You see other cultures and you understand more.

I believe that, mostly.

Though I'll be honest, I've met travelers who crossed six continents and came back equally narrow-minded.

Travel can change you, but only if you let it.

The merchants on those old trade routes weren't all enlightened cosmopolitans.

Some of them just wanted to sell pepper and go home.

Sí, pero el contacto es importante.

Yes, but the contact matters.

Dos culturas se tocan y las dos cambian un poco.

Two cultures touch each other and both change a little.

That's the deeper truth of the trade routes, isn't it.

The cargo is the obvious thing, the oil or the pepper or the silk.

But the real transfer is invisible.

Words, cooking techniques, mathematical systems, religions.

Islam arrived in the Indonesian archipelago by ship, by the hands of traders who weren't missionaries.

They were just there, and their presence was enough.

Es verdad.

That's true.

Y el español llega a América también por barco.

And Spanish arrives in America also by ship.

No por camino.

Not by road.

Your language is itself the product of a sea journey.

I hadn't thought about it quite that bluntly before.

The Spanish that you're speaking right now, and that our listeners are learning, crossed an ocean.

It got here by ship.

Not by walking.

Los barcos llevan idiomas.

Ships carry languages.

El barco de Corea lleva petróleo, pero también lleva historia.

The Korea ship carries oil, but it also carries history.

That's a beautiful way to close the main argument.

But I want to stay with language for a moment, because you used a word earlier that I've been curious about.

You said viajar, to travel.

Where does that word actually come from?

Because it doesn't sound like the Latin I'd expect.

Viajar viene de viaje.

Viajar comes from viaje.

Y viaje viene del latín viaticum.

And viaje comes from the Latin viaticum.

Es interesante.

It's interesting.

Viaticum.

That word rings a bell from somewhere strange.

Wasn't that also the name for the last rites?

The final Communion given to someone who was dying?

Sí, exacto.

Yes, exactly.

Viaticum es la comida para el camino.

Viaticum is the food for the road.

Para el último camino.

For the final journey.

So every time a Spanish speaker says viaje, they're unknowingly echoing a word that once meant provisions for a journey into death.

Travel and mortality sharing the same root.

That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night in the best possible way.

El español tiene muchas palabras así.

Spanish has many words like that.

Con una historia muy larga dentro.

With a very long history inside them.

Languages are like those ships, then.

They carry more than what's on the manifest.

The word viaje arrived in modern Spanish through a chain of people who used it without knowing where it came from, the same way that tanker arrived in South Korea without most of us knowing the thousand-year history of the route it sailed.

I'll leave it there.

Thanks for the lesson, Octavio.

No es una lección.

It's not a lesson.

Es una conversación.

It's a conversation.

Eso es diferente.

That's different.