IN EARLY 1979, STAN MOONEYHAM WAS MAKING preparations for the Cal Loader to set sail again in search of refugees adrift in the South China Sea. He was committed to the work of Operation Seasweep, but he knew that to improve upon the previous year’s efforts there were two problems he would have to solve. The first was the ship itself: the Cal Loader was sufficiently large but too light to operate safely in anything but calm seas. The second problem was the bigger one: after witnessing two refugee boats sink without warning the year before, Stan knew it was no longer enough just to resupply them and send them on their way—for all he knew, the three boats that the Cal Loader had only resupplied last year could have sunk the very next day. The only way he could guarantee the safety of the boat people was to rescue them, and to do that Stan would have to find a way to get some country to agree to resettle any refugees he managed to pluck from the sea.
That was not going to be easy. He had already experienced blunt and sometimes hostile rejection from half a dozen countries when he first presented his plan, including his own United States. But two things had happened since then that were about to change everything.
First, World Vision’s efforts were becoming internationally known. Refugees who were fleeing Vietnam and safely arriving in other countries were beginning to report that they had heard about Operation Seasweep on radio broadcasts from the BBC, Radio Australia, and the Voice of America prior to leaving Vietnam and that World Vision’s compassionate efforts had given them courage and hope.
The second thing that happened was more subtle but even more important. Operation Seasweep was helping draw international attention to the boat people crisis itself, and when the rest of the world saw that a small handful of dedicated people were willing to risk their own lives to rescue another country’s refugees, they were shamed into changing their policies and taking action themselves. In Washington, President Carter issued a presidential directive that any refugees picked up by a US-owned or US-registered vessel would be guaranteed resettlement in America if the refugees so desired.
That gave Stan an idea. World Vision didn’t have a US-owned ship—they had been chartering the Cal Loader from a company in Singapore. But what if they did? What if World Vision bought a ship of its own? President Carter’s directive was addressed to currently owned and registered vessels; would the presidential directive apply to ships that would be purchased in the future?
Stan immediately flew to Washington to seek a ruling from the State Department, and he was elated when the ruling came back: any ship owned by an American entity, including World Vision US, would fall under President Carter’s directive—and that included ships that would be purchased in the future.
Washington’s unexpected change in policy had just solved Stan’s biggest problem. Now all he needed was a ship, one big enough to handle the unpredictable weather in the South China Sea. A suitable ship was soon found—a fourteen-hundred-ton cargo freighter currently being used to haul coconut meat from the Solomon Islands to Singapore, where it was processed into coconut oil and copra cake to feed livestock. The Cal Loader had barely tipped the scales at 345 tons, but this ship had more than four times the bulk and a deep enough draft to allow it to stand up to the worst weather the region could throw at it. The ship was purchased for $200,000, and it took another $100,000 to completely overhaul it and make it ready for its new use.
The only detail that remained was to get the ship registered because every ship operating in international waters was required to fly the flag of some country. If it failed to do so, the ship could be considered derelict, and according to international maritime law, it could be seized and sold for salvage by anyone who wanted it. Even if Stan had been willing to take that risk, the port authorities in Singapore would never have allowed the ship to leave port without a flag, which meant that Operation Seasweep was on permanent hold until the ship could be registered.
The ship was too old to be registered in the United States. It would never have met US Coast Guard requirements, and it would have been too expensive and too time-consuming to try to bring it up to standards. Besides, a US-registered ship was required to employ a crew of all US citizens, and American salaries were astronomical compared to those in Southeast Asia at the time. No country in the region was willing to register the ship for fear that granting approval to the ship might be mistaken for granting approval to its mission, so it was eventually decided that the ship would sail under a “flag of convenience,” which essentially meant that some small country would be willing to ignore the ship’s poor condition in exchange for a hefty fee.
The ship was eventually registered in Honduras, and that made Operation Seasweep a truly international venture. It was an American-owned ship flying a Central American flag with an Indonesian captain, an Indian doctor, Chinese nurses, and an Asian crew—all they were lacking was a French chef.
The ship had to be given a name, and since Operation Seasweep was already achieving international recognition, it was decided to christen the ship with the same name: Seasweep.
But Seasweep had been purchased in Singapore and would dock and sail from Singapore Harbor, and that made the Singaporean authorities acutely aware of the ship’s mission and purpose. The United States had guaranteed resettlement to any refugee that Seasweep picked up, but that did not mean that Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, or any other nation of first asylum actually believed that promise. Those nations knew that even if America made good on her promise, it would still mean more refugees for them to deal with on a temporary basis, so to avoid that problem, they began to apply pressure to the Singapore-based members of Seasweep’s crew: the captain, doctor, nurses, and several crew members were privately warned that if Seasweep attempted to return to Singapore with any refugees aboard, the ship would be refused entrance to the harbor, which meant none of them would be allowed to return to their homes and families. Stan wasn’t sure if he would end up stranded in the South China Sea with a shipload of refugees that no one wanted, and his crew wasn’t sure if they would even be able to return home.
So it was with fear and trepidation that on the afternoon of July 6, 1979, Stan Mooneyham took a launch from Clifford Pier to join his crew aboard a converted cargo vessel named Seasweep, waiting at anchor in Singapore Harbor to begin their second year’s mission—this time not only to resupply the boat people but, he hoped, to rescue them.
No one knew exactly what to expect this year. It was not the best time to put to sea since they were leaving in July and the typhoon season had already begun. Seasweep was supposed to be large enough to handle a typhoon, but no one on board had actually experienced a typhoon, and no one particularly wanted to.
But it was an ideal time to go fishing for refugees with sixty-five thousand ethnic Chinese pouring out of Vietnam every month. Since the beginning of the year, the Malaysian government had towed more than fifty-five thousand refugees back out to sea, which meant Seasweep would be able to rescue boat people coming and going.
Seasweep left Singapore Harbor just before midnight on July 6, and once it passed Horsburgh Lighthouse, it turned to port and followed the Malaysian coastline, being careful to remain in international waters outside the twelve-mile limit. The crew stood watch in four-hour shifts around the clock because, unlike commercial vessels, the derelict refugee boats rarely carried lights and would be easy to miss in the darkness. Seasweep itself carried a bright flashing beacon atop its forward mast to make it easily visible to other ships and avoid collisions. Ted Agon, who was aboard that night and would eventually become Seasweep’s project chief, would have to climb that mainmast two weeks later to replace a burned-out bulb in the middle of Super Typhoon Hope, the worst typhoon to pass through the South China Sea in almost a decade. The typhoon’s waves were so enormous that they swallowed an entire boat carrying four hundred refugees off the coast of Macao, and no trace of the boat or the refugees was ever found. Seasweep was caught in violent seas on the western edge of that typhoon, and whenever the ship dropped into a trough, the surrounding water was taller than the mast and rendered the ship invisible. Because Seasweep operated near major shipping lanes, there was a very real danger that a massive container ship or tanker could cut Seasweep in half before anyone knew the ship was there. In that kind of weather it was absolutely imperative to have a working masthead light; but in the hurricane-force winds, Seasweep’s mast was whipping back and forth like a metronome, and no one in the crew was willing to climb the mast to replace the bulb. Ted Agon had to do it himself, and he will never forget clinging to the mast with one hand while he desperately tried to pry the beacon’s rusted lamp housing open with the other.
But the seas were much calmer on the night of July 6, and as Seasweep steamed northwest at a conservative eight knots, everyone on deck stared into the darkness and hoped to be the first one to spot a refugee boat—but no one did. From time to time Seasweep would turn aside to take a closer look at some small vessel that couldn’t be positively identified at a distance, but none of them turned out to be refugee boats.
The next day they continued to follow their course up the Malaysian coast, but even in the daylight there were no refugee boats to be found. Seasweep encountered all kinds of commercial vessels: container ships, cargo freighters, oil tankers, auto carriers, and fishing trawlers of every imaginable shape and size. Half of the world’s commercial shipping passes through the South China Sea, and it seemed incredible to the crew of Seasweep that so many ships would pass by dying refugees without stopping to help. But statistics confirmed it: with all the refugee boats leaving Vietnam during the first seven months of that year, only forty-seven boats had been rescued.
The following day brought similar results—commercial ships everywhere, but not a refugee boat in sight. It was discouraging to the crew that with so many refugee boats at sea, they had encountered none, and Stan began to wonder if Seasweep had journeyed so far up the Malaysian coast that it had moved out of the path most refugee boats followed from Vietnam to Malaysia. That night the skies were cloudy, and the stars were unavailable for navigation, so under cover of darkness Seasweep headed west toward Malaysian territorial waters to take a location bearing from the lighthouse near Kota Bharu. Just as he thought, Seasweep had traveled almost to the border between Malaysia and Thailand, so Stan gave the order for the ship to head northeast in the direction of Vietnam and pick up speed. That was a wise strategy since the Malaysian coastline was more than five hundred miles long, and a refugee boat could land anywhere along it. Five hundred miles was a lot of water for Seasweep to have to search, but its new course would allow it to focus on a much smaller area by intercepting refugee boats not long after they left Vietnam.
By dawn on July 9, Seasweep was directly south of the Mekong Delta and headed east across a strip of water that had come to be known as “refugee alley.”