The oldest, Mahabub, 40, spent two weeks as a cutter’s helper before witnessing a man burn to death when his torch sparked a pocket of gas belowdecks. In one home I meet a family whose four sons worked in the yards. “Chittagong tattoos,” one man called them. In the sprawling shantytowns that have grown up around the yards, I met dozens of the workers about whom Shahin is most concerned: the men who cut the steel and haul it off the beaches. Why is it OK for poor workers to risk their lives to dispose of your unwanted ships here?” “In the West you don’t let people pollute your countries by breaking up ships on your beaches. His criticism isn’t reserved just for Bangladeshi ship-breakers. “But it must be done cleaner and safer with better treatment for the workers.” “I do not say shipbreaking must stop entirely,” he says. Shahin insists he’s not blind to his country’s desperate need for the jobs shipbreaking creates. The industry, he says, is controlled by a few powerful Chittagong families who also hold stakes in the ancillary businesses, including the steel rerolling mills. “Until you’ve met the widows of young men who were crushed by falling pieces of steel or suffocated inside a ship.” At 37 Shahin has been working for more than 11 years to raise awareness about the plight of the men who toil in these yards. “It sounds like a good business until you consider the poison that is soaking into our land,” says Muhammed Ali Shahin, an activist with the NGO Shipbreaking Platform. Muhammed Ali Shahin explains the dangers of shipbreaking in Bangladesh. Just beyond the line of ships, fishermen were casting their nets for schools of tiny ricefish, a local delicacy. Making our way around one hull, we heard laughter and came upon a group of naked boys who had swum out to a half-submerged piece of wreckage and were using it as a diving platform. The air hung heavy with the odor of brine and diesel fuel.

Nearly all the demolition crews had left work for the day, and the ships stood silent, except for the gurgling in their bowels and the occasional echo of metal clanking. Now their value was contained mostly in their steel bodies. But the rising cost to insure and maintain aging vessels makes them unprofitable to operate. The life span of such ships is roughly 25 to 30 years, so most of these likely had been launched during the 1980s. I wondered about cargoes they had carried, ports where they had called, and crews that had sailed them. I read off names and flags painted on the sterns: Front Breaker (Comoros), V Europe (Marshall Islands), Glory B (Panama). We drifted alongside barnacle-encrusted hulls and beneath the blades of massive propellers. Others had been reduced to skeletons, the steel skin cut away to reveal their cavernous black holds. Some vessels remained intact, as if they had just arrived.

At high tide the sea engulfed the rows of beached oil tankers and containerships, and we slipped in and out of the deep shadows cast by their towering smokestacks and superstructures. So late one afternoon I hired a fisherman to take me on a water tour of the yards. Right: Oblivious to the risk of lung cancer, workers fend off the nighttime chill by burning a pipe gasket likely containing asbestos.

Endless sky ships keep blowing up