In 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote: “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Certainly being a sailor then was dangerous too, with privateering and piracy rife. But being a sailor in the Arabian Gulf in 2026 is, according to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that even Johnson could not expect.
No one knows what mental toll will be exacted by the enforced imprisonment of 20,000 seafarers on board 2,000 vessels trapped either side of the Strait of Hormuz for the past ten weeks. “I have seen Iranian drones and missiles flying at low altitude,” one stuck seafarer told the Seafarers’ Happiness Index, a project led by the Mission to Seafarers, an industry welfare association. “I also hear the sound of fighter jets, but we can’t identify which country they belong to.
