"FOR WHAT IS THE ARRAY of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars, and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the infinite," Joseph Conrad asks in The Mirror of the Sea, "but thistle stalks, cobwebs, and gossamer?"

Of course, a modern freighter like the China resembles a sailboat about as much as a 747 does a hang glider. Spars and canvas have given way to 70,000-horsepower engines that burn 200 metric tons of fuel per day. Wooden hulls have given way to steel, the astrolabe and sextant to gyrocompasses and satellites. And yet, today's cargo vessels also take riskier routes.

When trucking magnate Malcolm McLean perfected the humble intermodal shipping container in the early fifties, he revolutionized the stolid shipping industry. Containerization introduced efficiencies and economies of scale that made shipping fees plummet. The only way to make more money was to increase volume by making bigger vessels deliver more cargo faster. Hulls had to be enlarged—by 2006 they would exceed 1,300 feet in length, 340 feet longer than the QE2. Port times and transit times had to be shortened. Now, instead of keeping well away from winter storms, freighters travel between them, like cyclists riding the drafts of semis. And storms, like sleepy truckers, can sometimes take sudden, unforeseen turns.

This is one reason merchant seafaring is still, by some accounts, the world's second-most-dangerous occupation, after commercial fishing. According to Imperial College London, 200 supertankers and container ships have sunk in the past two decades due to weather. Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the European Space Agency, which studies sea conditions via satellite, estimates that two "large ships" sink every week on average. Most of these, he says, "simply get put down to ‘bad weather.' "

"The shipping industry is decades behind the airline industry" in its management of risk, says Geoffrey Gill, a maritime attorney. Why? "Because there are no passengers, and because most merchant mariners these days are Filipino. A lot of people don't seem to care if 25 Filipino sailors drown." And drown they do. How many, exactly? Nobody knows for sure, but the number of seafaring fatalities appears to exceed 1,000 lives per year, and the number-one cause of accidental death is believed to be drowning. Maritime losses—of cargo, vessels, digits, limbs, life—are enough to fill a few pages of the Lloyd's List weekly Casualty Report. There are accounts of collisions, of fires, of piracy. Most of the casualties can be attributed to mechanical failures, human nefariousness, or human error, but around 10 percent of shipping casualties are indeed ascribed to bad weather and left otherwise unexplained. And dozens of the most catastrophic weather-related mishaps to have befallen container ships—such as the 2003 Maersk Carolina disaster, the 2006 P&O Ned­lloyd Genoa disaster, and the 2006 CMA CGM Otello disaster—bear a mysterious resemblance to the China disaster.

There's no doubt that the China had encountered severe weather, as APL claimed, but severe weather at sea is routine during winter, when winds between Taiwan and Seattle often attain hurricane force, and waves routinely exceed 30 feet or, less routinely, 40 to 50 feet. Sometimes, under the worst conditions, waves as high as 70, 80, 90, even 100 feet can loom up out of nowhere, spelling catastrophe.

These great and sudden waves have seized the popular imagination, sinking a cruiser called the Poseidon in not one but two cheesy films. Their names make them sound as fabulous as the kraken—freak waves, rogue waves, extreme waves. My personal favorite is the German, monsterwellen.

Was it a monsterwelle that had ravaged the China? It sure looked that way to people like longshoreman Rich Austin. Still, even when a captain, with help from weather-routing services that recommend course changes via fax, can't avoid severe weather, the ship is supposed to survive it. If the cargo has been properly lashed and the hatch covers tightly battened, if the engines have not failed and the helmsman has time to take evasive action, not even 80-foot waves are supposed to send stacks of containers tumbling over the rails—certainly not 407 of them in a single night.

Even before the China entered Puget Sound, the speculating and finger pointing had begun. Except under extraordinary circumstances—if a law has been broken in American waters, for instance, or a hazardous substance has spilled—the U.S. Coast Guard does not investigate shipping accidents. An officer will inspect the damage and make sure it's repaired, but it's left to lawyers and insurance adjusters to assign blame, which doesn't always solve the mystery.

If small sums of money are involved, the ship's owners and underwriters will often accept liability and settle out of court. But in the case of the China, the damages claimed were too costly; 361 claimants represented by 25 lawyers would eventually file for damages of more than $100 million. APL had to find a way to limit liability by attributing the accident to a so-called act of God.

They appeared to have a strong case. Weather reports pointed to a prime superhuman suspect: Super Typhoon Babs. In late October 1998, when the China was at port in Taiwan, Babs was laying waste to villages in the Philippines. Early news reports assumed that Babs had laid waste to the China too. That's what longshoreman Dan McKisson heard; it was the obvious explanation. But as weather records reveal, the China and Babs had not crossed paths. Any reports to the contrary were wrong. The ship had departed Taiwan on October 21, six days before the remnants of Babs hit.

When lawyers questioned the officers in Seattle, what they heard strained credulity. The scuttlebutt at the longshoremen's union hall had been that the ship had lost power and gotten caught in the trough between waves. But the officers claimed that the engines had failed after they watched the container stacks fall. Before it ever lost power, the ship had rolled wildly, inexplicably, they said, despite attempts to take evasive action, and at the worst of it, they'd seen "green water" at bridge level. "Green water" is nauticalspeak for a wave tall enough to wash over the main deck. In calm seas, the main deck would be about four stories above waterline, and the bridge eight stories above that. Most of the lawyers listening to this tale took it to be a tall one, literally. After all, sailors always exaggerate, especially when trying to exonerate themselves, and such giant waves have long been the stuff of sailors' lore.