January 19, Late, 38^°14'N, 134^°41'E STEAMING EAST THROUGH the snowy Sea of Japan, birthplace of storms. When I woke up this morning, I sensed from the motion of the ship and the tremorous throb of the engine that we had departed. I rushed outside and up three flights of stairs to the bridge deck, where I was hit by a cold blast of headwind. It wasn't all that windy; mostly it was the ship's speed—24 knots—that knocked me back. On the bridge, sleep-deprived but nattily attired in a navy sweater with black-and-gold epaulets, the captain was doing his paperwork. His name is Uwe Jakubowski. A West German of Russian descent, he's a big-shouldered, soft-voiced, white-haired man with a gap between his front teeth and a beaky wedge of a nose.

Jakubowski has been a merchant mariner for 44 years, since the age of 18, when, against his parents' wishes, he shipped out on a Baltic Sea breakbulk freighter. I asked whether he'd ever lost containers overboard. "Never," he said, but he'd come close. Once, near the Azores, the ship he was commanding was struck by a wave 66 feet tall; and on this very trip, westbound from Seattle, the Ottawa had rolled 20 degrees to starboard, 26 to port. "Here, you can still see." He pointed above the helm, to the clinometer, which had yet to be reset. We were under way in calm seas, rolling just a few degrees, so little you'd hardly notice it.

Like Europe-bound flights that arc north over Greenland, a container ship from Asia usually describes an arc—the Great Circle route—toward the Aleutians, passing through waters known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Because of the stormy forecast, the weather-routing service has recommended we take a northerly detour, straying from the Great Circle route and into the Bering Sea, seeking shelter in the lee of the Aleutians. "Will we see any ice?" I asked, hopefully.

"We want to get close to it," the captain said, "but not that close."

Tonight when I entered the bridge, Chief Officer Hermann Josef Bollig was standing watch, as he always does between 8 P.M. and midnight. A bearded German giant, Bollig scares me a little. He seemed to scowl when he saw who it was.

Like all six officers and most of the 16-member crew, Bollig speaks English. He has to: A modern container ship is a polyglot place. With the exception of the ship's German mechanic, Klaus, the Ottawa has an entirely Filipino crew. With the exception of the Filipino third mate, Ricardo Salva, one Finn, and one Pole, the officers are German. You'll hear Filipino deckhands speaking Tagalog or officers speaking German, but the lingua franca is English.

At night, to maximize visibility, the bridge is kept dark. As the ship goes autopiloting along, Bollig sits there, his face lit by the lunar glow of computer screens, surveying the seas for fishing boats. If a small one should stray into our path, the Ottawa would plow right over it, leaving behind little but a trail of flotsam and sticks. Fully loaded, the Ottawa weighs more than 140 million pounds. At 24 knots, the forward momentum of that much weight through water is almost planetary, and difficult to stop, even with the engine in reverse.

If I've read the charts right, in three days, right near the international date line, we'll come within a few hundred miles of the site of the China disaster.