A shipwreck killed 41 crew and 5,900 cattle. The brutal business behind it goes on.

Captain Dante Addug must have been uneasy thinking about the 48 hours to come. It was Aug. 30, 2020, and his ship, the Gulf Livestock 1, was steaming into the path of Maysak, a Category 4 typhoon that was hurtling up the Philippine Sea with 130-mph winds and 20-foot waves. Even the sturdiest cargo ship would take a beating in such conditions, but for the Gulf, Maysak almost certainly promised catastrophe.

The Gulf was due to arrive at Tangshan, a massive port complex about 100 miles from Beijing, in four days. It was the height of pandemic gridlock in ports around the world, especially in China, where ships often waited more than two days to offload. For a vessel full of appliances, car parts or electronics, such a delay would be little more than an inconvenience, but for the Gulf, which carried a shifting, easily frightened cargo of 5,867 dairy cattle, every extra day at anchor heightened the risk of the animals becoming ill or dying—and of costing the exporter and ship owner money.

The Gulf was trying to make its way through the shipping lanes around Japan’s southern archipelago, the gateway between the Philippine Sea and the East China Sea. Almost every day, hundreds of cargo ships coming to or from China, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan pass through these lanes. By Aug. 31 virtually every other vessel in the region had rerouted around the storm or was doing so. The Gulf was alone in a swath of ocean that stretched hundreds of nautical miles.

A satellite image of Typhoon Maysak as it crosses Japan’s southernmost islands on September 1, 2020. Photo by EOSDIS via AP.

In a message, the ship’s Hamburg-based manager, MarConsult Schiffahrt GmbH, instructed Addug to “proceed on a safe passage to the destination.” After this delivery, the young captain was scheduled to return home to the Philippines to meet his 4-month-old son for the first time. He pressed on, following the scheduled route.

Around 8 p.m. on Sept. 1, the Gulf ’s engines failed. The ship began swinging broadside into the swell. Two crew, Australian William Mainprize and New Zealander Scott Harris, communicated the chaos to their families and friends on messaging apps. “At least two decks completely washed out,” Harris texted. Hundreds of cattle were likely already injured or dead. Soon water was rushing into the engine room. Mainprize and Harris ventured out into the hallway on one deck; Harris braced against a bulkhead as a torrent of water swept between his legs. Mainprize managed to text a friend: “Engine control room is taking on water,” he wrote. “Engine is off and we are floating sideways in huge sea.”

By midnight the phones of friends and family scattered across the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand had gone silent. In the early morning of Sept. 2, the only signals emitted from the Gulf were two pings from its emergency radio beacon.

The search-and-rescue effort was conducted by Japan, the nearest country to the vessel’s final distress signal. Despite pleas from the crew’s families, who felt the Japanese effort was too brief and limited in scope, the governments of Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines didn’t assist. Ultimately, family members were left to organize a monthslong search at their own expense. Of the ship’s 43 crew, only 3 were rescued, and one of them, Joe Canete Linao, died soon after. The remaining 40 men, including Mainprize, Harris and Captain Addug, have never been found.

Tom Mainprize at his home in Sydney with his brother William’s bike. William Mainprize died when the Gulf Livestock 1 sunk in a typhoon in 2020.

“The Australian Maritime Safety Authority had no jurisdiction over the ship, the search operation, or the resulting investigation,” an AMSA spokesperson said in a statement. A New Zealand government spokesperson told the news site Stuff much the same in 2021, stressing that its maritime safety agency had provided regular updates and other assistance to the families of its missing citizens.

The sinking of the Gulf was the worst disaster in the history of the live-export trade, an industry made up of about 150 ships with a market value totaling $20 billion to $30 billion. While the industry’s size makes it a tiny fraction of the $2.2 trillion global commercial shipping fleet, which numbers around 100,000 vessels, the live-export fleet was already disproportionately prone to catastrophic accidents before Addug headed into the path of the typhoon. “The Gulf Livestock 1 sinking was a tragedy that really brought a focus to the potential dangers of the whole trade,” says Damien O’Connor, who, as New Zealand’s minister of agriculture, spearheaded a ban on his country’s export of live cattle afterward. In 2024 the UK followed suit, and Australia announced plans to phase out seaborne exports of live sheep.

But in recent years other countries, especially Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, have been ramping up the export of live cattle, swine and sheep. At the same time, Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam have become key importers. All of this raises questions about whether the trade is dying or just shifting to less regulated places.

Why Addug chose to sail into the jaws of a major typhoon remains a mystery. The ship’s black boxes, which might explain his decision-making in his final hours, lie 3,000 to 6,000 feet beneath the surface of the East China Sea. Family members of the lost men remain frustrated that the ship’s owner, Gulf Navigation Holding PJSC in Dubai, chose to move on instead of continuing the hunt for answers. The company didn’t respond to repeated requests for interviews or comment for this story.

“They don’t want to know,” says Ulrich Orda, the father of the Gulf ’s veterinarian, Lukas Orda, who was among the dead. “They want to make sure that all failings, everything, is buried with the ship.”

A handful of countries export livestock, including the US. From 2013 to 2018 the country shipped 2.2 million farm animals internationally, 545,495 of them by sea. (The rest were sent by land or air, primarily to Canada and Mexico.) Prior to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia was the biggest importer of American cattle. Middle Eastern countries with climate headwinds, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, are notable importers, too.

But for many years, the two most important countries in this business, by far, were Australia, the No. 1 exporter, and China, until recently the No. 1 importer. In 2019 alone, Australia shipped 2.4 million animals abroad, mostly cattle and sheep. (It also does a healthy trade in goats, buffalo and alpacas.) Traditionally, China leaned on live export to shore up its supplies. In 2020 it imported more than 250,000 live cattle, though the number has declined more recently as domestic stocks have grown and customer demand has dipped.

Problems have arisen with the way this trade is conducted. According to a 2020 investigation by the Guardian, five livestock vessels were lost in the decade preceding the Gulf disaster, resulting in the deaths of crew members and tens of thousands of animals. The human and animal suffering is difficult to calculate, but what’s clear is that those five sunk ships accounted for more than 3% of the global live-export fleet, making such vessels twice as likely to suffer a total loss as general cargo carriers.

In these scenarios, it’s often the animals that face the longest odds. In 2015, the carrier Haidar sank in Brazil while being loaded with 5,000 cattle. In 2019, those lost included the Queen Hind, which capsized in a Romanian port with 22 crew and 14,600 sheep on board. In both of these cases, the crew survived, but most of the livestock drowned.

The Girolando Express, a livestock carrier built in 2014, is docked at Darwin Port, awaiting loading, 2025.

There are several reasons the industry is so dangerous. Although the average ship age for the global general-cargo fleet is 20 years, the average for livestock carriers is 36. About 80% of livestock vessels weren’t built to transport animals, despite the unique weight and stability issues they pose. “What happens is somebody buys a tanker or a car carrier at the end of its days, when the former owner was ready to send it to Bangladesh and have it scrapped for recycled steel,” says Lynn Simpson, a former live-export ship veterinarian who’s since become an industry whistleblower. “And they just refit it with animal pens and give it another 10, 20, 30, 40 years of potentially precarious work.”

The Gulf was one of these secondhand vessels. Built in Germany as a container ship in 2002 and christened the Maersk Waterford, the vessel changed ownership and names three times before it was bought in 2015 by Gulf Navigation, which owns a fleet of carriers, mostly oil and chemical tankers. That year the ship was renamed the Rahmeh and retrofitted with 475 pens on four levels totaling almost 70,000 square feet. Images taken throughout its history suggest the ship’s condition declined in the years after that retrofit. Its hull and superstructure, previously maintained with sharp coats of navy and white paint, were covered over by a drab gunmetal gray. A once-clean waterline became blackened by scum and riddled with rust.

By the end of 2014 the Gulf was technically owned by a Gulf Navigation subsidiary called Gulf Navigation Livestock Carrier 1 Ltd., a limited liability company registered in Panama whose only recorded asset was the ship. Various staffing agencies oversaw crewing contracts. MarConsult Schiffahrt was the ship’s general manager, a responsibility that involved enforcing the International Safety Management Code. Like Gulf Navigation, MarConsult Schiffahrt didn’t respond to inquiries for this story.

In 2019 the Gulf began to experience a slew of mechanical issues, according to port records. That May it was held for three days in Broome, Australia, after port officials identified “serious deficiencies” in its maintenance, navigation and safety training, according to the AMSA. Inspectors also identified “issues related to the calculation of stability on board” and halted loading until the proper numbers were crunched.

“I learned not to trust these people early on. It’s big money, shipping. If they can cut 1% off their expenses, that’s a big margin, and the people in the suits on land, who are making the decisions, they don’t care.”

Lynn Simpson, former live-export veterinarian

Records show that authorities at the Indonesian port of Panjang noted seven more deficiencies with the Gulf, including problems with the ship’s working conditions, pollution control systems and logbooks. Another issue involved the Gulf ’s “main engine propulsion,” which its official accident report later said was “marked as out of order” because of “defective” parts in a combustion cylinder. A mechanical problem of this severity meant the Gulf ’s engine was struggling or completely unable to power the vessel under normal sea conditions. More problems involved faulty engine room gauges and thermometers, as well as an insufficient emergency safety plan, a required document under international maritime law that outlines procedures for crew response in the event of a collision, grounding or sinking.

It’s up to individual port officials to determine whether a ship should be detained following an inspection failure such as this. According to Tokyo MOU, an international organization that oversees ports in the Asia-Pacific region, Panjang officials didn’t detain the Gulf. And though the extent of repairs and updates made to the Gulf following the inspection is unknown, the ship was soon back at sea on a journey of some 3,000 nautical miles, to Townsville, Australia, where it arrived on May 23.

“I learned not to trust these people early on,” Simpson, who spent a decade working on live-export ships, says of the industry’s upper management. “It’s big money, shipping. If they can cut 1% off their expenses, that’s a big margin, and the people in the suits on land, who are making the decisions, they don’t care.”

The job of the Gulf Livestock 1’s stockmen—Mainprize, Harris and Lochie Bellerby, a New Zealander—and Orda, the veterinarian, entailed walking the long corridors between hundreds of pens holding anywhere from 6 to 21 cows each. The men ensured the animals had enough water, feed pellets and hay, and monitored to see if any had become injured or ill. The rest of the crew were Filipino able seamen—skilled, certified deckhands—who maintained the ship, cleaned pens and disposed of any animals that died.

Emily Hastings, one of Mainprize’s sisters, says her brother wasn’t planning to make live export his career. “Will had a connection with the animals and loved learning new ways to care for them with what was available,” she says. “He found purpose in that.” A stockman could also make $200 to $300 a day, depending on experience, for a typical 26-day delivery. After deliveries, Mainprize often embarked on epic solo journeys. He’d cycled Pakistan’s Swat Valley and Jordan’s Wadi Rum, and trekked into Mongolia’s Altai Mountains to stay a few days with the region’s famed eagle hunters. “He’d found a way of getting paid to see the world,” says his brother, Tom.

In the swirl of swell and sinking ship, [Jay-Nel] Rosales found himself near the body of a cow and held on. Somewhere in the distance, [Eduardo] Sareno was floating beneath a full moon. Each time Sareno was buoyed to the crest of a wave, he saw a little less of the ship, until finally it was gone.

Harris, Bellerby and Orda were doing their first live-export trip. Bellerby was looking forward to spending more time at home in southern New Zealand, managing his family’s farm. Harris, known as Scotty, was saving for a house. So was Orda, who’d just had his first child in February and was scheduled to begin a job at a veterinary clinic in Townsville, on Australia’s northeast coast, after his contract on the ship ended in October.

Orda came aboard on June 24 for several legs between Australia and Southeast Asia. A month later, the Gulf broke down off the Philippines’ southern coast, according to the industry publication Baird Maritime. Engineers had to board the ship to help with repairs. Orda texted his family during the ordeal. “In the last 24 hours it has broken down. It has failed 3 times for about 18 hours in total,” he wrote.

On Aug. 14 the ship pushed off from Napier, New Zealand. Less than 24 hours later, Addug sent an email to MarConsult Schiffahrt, later viewed by Bloomberg Businessweek, reporting that the main engine head gaskets were leaking and that there were problems with the freshwater cooling system. The problems prompted Mainprize to text his friend and fellow live-export stockman Harry Morrison, who was back on land in Australia. “Oh God,” Mainprize wrote. “This could be a long journey.” Repairs took around eight hours to complete as the Gulf floated listlessly on the South Pacific currents.

Addug reported no other mechanical issues to MarConsult Schiffahrt in the time between the breakdown and the sinking in the early morning hours of Sept. 2. But messages sent by Mainprize and other crew to family and friends make it clear that the ship’s problems continued. One video Mainprize sent to his siblings showed the faucet in his cabin spewing brown sludge. “It’s definitely a mixed bag with these ships,” Morrison says. But on the Gulf, “the conditions seemed horrific.”

Around dinnertime on Aug. 28, Addug received the first notification of a developing low-pressure system from MarConsult Schiffahrt. The storm and the ship were now in the Philippine Sea, about 350 nautical miles apart, and both were heading northwest. MarConsult Schiffahrt’s staff in Hamburg advised Addug to take “stringent adverse weather precautions,” according to the official accident report. Addug confirmed receipt of the email and said he would heed it. As the ship’s captain, he knew the final decision on when and how to navigate the impending storm was his.

By dawn on Sept. 1, the paths of the Gulf and Maysak had converged. On the bridge, Addug sent a message to MarConsult Schiffahrt at 1:28 p.m. to say all was in order. At 4:21 p.m. he sent along routine information about the ship’s planned arrival at Tangshan.

These benign communications betrayed the chaos unfolding on board. It was now too rough to do anything other than buckle down. Addug ordered everyone to put their mattresses on the floor to avoid being thrown out of bed. Group meals were canceled. In a text thread with his mother, Harris said the crew hadn’t been “allowed outside for 12 hours.” The ship, he said, was running at a 20-degree list. “Fucked,” he wrote.

When the Gulf ’s engines failed around 6 p.m., swinging the ship broadside into the 40-foot swell, the vessel’s chief officer, Eduardo Sareno, received a radio call to report to the engine room. For the next hour, according to his later account, he and the ship’s other engineers fought against the roll of the sea. Without the drone of the engine, the men worked in an eerie silence. The lights flickered. Around 7:30 p.m. the Gulf ’s pistons began firing again. Sareno retreated to his cabin, where he lay sleepless on the floor with his radio in case of another emergency.

He didn’t have to wait long. Shortly after midnight he felt the floor tilting steeply to starboard. The lights went out. The ship leaned hard in the darkness, then harder. When the lights came back on, Sareno rang the bridge from his cabin telephone and asked the third officer what the angle of the list was—he was told 30 degrees, more than enough for the ship to capsize. Sareno called another officer and ordered him to pump out the huge starboard ballast-water tanks to try to ease the list. Then he left his cabin to join that officer in the engine room, but he was forced back by waves breaching the decks and the severe angle of the ship.

Fifteen minutes later the engines failed again. Addug came on the radio to tell everyone to don life jackets and come up to the bridge, the highest point on the ship’s main structure. When Sareno reached the stairs leading to the bridge, he saw that one of the Gulf ’s huge generators and two of its five lifeboats had already been washed off. Somehow he managed to make it up three stair levels against the list and the slam of the waves, but when the sea churned once more, he knew he wasn’t going to reach Addug. He saw a lifeboat bucking on the water nearby and decided to jump. Just before he did so, “the big wave,” as he later called it, smashed into the Gulf and swept him away.

At the same time, on a lower deck, able seaman Jay-Nel Rosales found himself alongside Mainprize and one of the ship’s engineers, who radioed Addug. “Where are you?” Rosales later remembered Addug responding. “Come up here at the bridge. All of us are here.” But the ship’s list was too great to climb the stairs. Rosales radioed Addug and told him they couldn’t make it. “OK then,” Rosales recalled Addug saying. “You take care there.” A moment later a wave—presumably the big wave—swept the three overboard.

In the swirl of swell and sinking ship, Rosales found himself near the body of a cow and held on. Somewhere in the distance, Sareno was floating beneath a full moon. Each time Sareno was buoyed to the crest of a wave, he saw a little less of the ship, until finally it was gone.

At 1:10 a.m. the Japanese coast guard received the first of two pings from the Gulf ’s emergency beacon. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Sept. 2 that coast guard boats reached the ship’s last recorded position. That evening the crew spotted an orange life vest and a pair of waving arms.

As he sat on the deck of a coast guard vessel minutes later, a heavy blanket wrapped around him, Sareno stared blankly at his rescuers and asked, “I’m the only one? No other one?” For two days, he was. On the night of Sept. 4 the Japanese coast guard spotted a half-submerged life raft. Clinging to one side was a single man: Jay-Nel Rosales.

They also found Joe Canete Linao, the crewman who died soon after. Then the coast guard had to call off the search—another typhoon was barreling in. When the operation resumed on Sept. 7, the sea seemed swept clean. Forty-eight hours later, the operation ended. Four life rafts, one lifeboat and 40 crew remained unaccounted for.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Gulf Navigation said, “Everyone in the company is devastated by the enormity of this tragic accident” and was “committed to a full investigation.” MarConsult said that “our thoughts are with our crew and their families.” In 2022, Panama released the official accident report, its responsibility as the country whose flag the ship had been flying. It revealed little beyond what had come out in the press and what Sareno and Rosales had said in their only public comments to date—the only ones they’ve offered. (They were publicly interviewed by a panel of Philippine officials that included Maya Addug-Sanchez, a judge and the sister of Captain Addug.)

What the report does makes clear is that Gulf Navigation, which had the principal responsibility as the ship’s owner, did little to help Panama’s investigators. The investigators reported that the information Gulf Navigation supplied was either “poor” or “not collected” at all. Particularly, they noted, the company offered little detail regarding MarConsult Schiffahrt’s communications with Addug about “the state of the main engine during passage from New Zealand to China” or how much the management company was communicating about the storm with the captain. Indeed, the report doesn’t mention the ship’s breakdown off the Philippines in July, nor does it include any communications between Addug and MarConsult Schiffahrt on Aug. 29, when Addug knew the storm was growing stronger.

Australian cattle loaded on the Girolando Express at Darwin Port. The pens have feed troughs, water bowls, and automated water systems, and space is ventilated to ensure fresh air.

Also left out was a portentous email viewed by Businessweek that Addug had sent Gulf Navigation’s then director of technical operations, Aniello Esposito, prior to the Gulf Livestock 1’s arrival in Napier, New Zealand. Addug asked Esposito if he should divulge to port authorities there that the ship’s emergency power generator was “inoperable.” He urged Esposito to get back to him. Addug said MarConsult Schiffahrt hadn’t responded to his message about the mechanical issue. It’s unknown whether Esposito responded; like MarConsult Schiffahrt and his bosses at Gulf Navigation, he didn’t respond to requests for comment.

According to the Panama report, Gulf Navigation also never turned over the ship’s loading papers from the Napier stop, which would have outlined the weights of the livestock, feed, water and other cargo—critical measures of a ship’s threshold for stability in rough seas. The investigators were forced instead to base their analysis on a stability report, a document that breaks down the weights of individual aspects of the ship, from diesel oil to ballast water to cattle manure. That report had a print date of Aug. 12, two days before the cattle were loaded in Napier.

In New Zealand, cattle are weighed in kilograms when they arrive at a quarantine station in the hours or days prior to their loading onto a vessel. To ship more animals at once, a cattle exporter wants each one as light as possible. New Zealand law allows exporters to “curfew” the animals for as long as 12 hours—that is, to stop feeding them. (Curfewing also reduces effluent spillage onto roads when cattle are transported from stockyard to port.) But, according to Simpson, the former live-export veterinarian, curfewing can last much longer because of logistical delays in the drive to port, the loading process and so on. Often, she says, the difficult nature of the transport means the animals also don’t drink any water during that time, which can stretch on long enough for them to suffer early stages of dehydration.

The average weight of a dairy cow is about 270kg, or a little more than 595 pounds, but during the curfewing process an animal can shed a striking amount of weight. Businessweek and the Food & Environment Reporting Networkr were able to obtain the Gulf ’s loading papers from Aug. 14, the official record of the weights, which note only an “average weight” of the 5,867 dairy cattle on board: 250kg, or just over 551 lbs. Sareno, whose job it was to ensure the ship wasn’t carrying more weight than it could bear, recorded the ship’s weight as 3,233,630 lbs, or about 1.5 million kg. But Mainprize, Bellerby and Harris would have had the feed and water troughs filled in anticipation of the cows’ arrival. “Once filled up again, they are no longer 250-kilogram cattle but 270-kilogram cattle,” Simpson says. The difference would have been more than 250,000 pounds—equivalent to at least an additional 430 cows.

At this point, Simpson says, the weights were far off enough that the ship’s stability should have been recalculated. But, she says, this often doesn’t happen. It’s unclear whether any officers did the math again.

Around the time the Gulf broke down outside Napier, Mainprize had told Morrison in his messages that the ship’s pace left him concerned that it would run out of cattle fodder. The holds where the feed was located in the Gulf were deep in the hull; if they were low or empty, the ship’s center of gravity would have been much different than it had been in Napier, when the original verification was done. The emptying of the ballast tanks that Sareno ordered done in the midst of the storm would have shifted the ship’s stability even further. When a vessel’s center of gravity shifts upward, it starts to roll slower and slower with each swell. In their report, Panama’s investigators concluded that the Gulf ’s rolling got so extreme that it “caused a sudden capsizing and sinking.”

Lennart Ephraim, the managing director of chartering and operations at Dutch shipping company Vroon BV, says balancing animals’ weight throughout the export process is complex and challenging. “Of course, weather has an impact, but then ship design and how you manage and route your voyages makes a difference,” he says. He also acknowledges that curfewing is a common tactic to squeeze more animals aboard: “There’s always going to be people that try to trick the system.”

Cattle trucks set to unload livestock onto the Girolando Express Livestock Carrier, at Darwin Port in Australia.

Gulf Navigation and MarConsult Schiffahrt had already learned the limits of a ship like the Gulf. Back in 2018, the Jawan, a converted livestock carrier of roughly the same vintage with the same hull dimensions and weights, had almost capsized while setting off from Australia with thousands of cattle aboard. Filmed rolling uncontrollably at severe angles, the ship was immediately turned back to port and its livestock offloaded. It was carrying 4,327 cattle on board, one-quarter fewer than the Gulf did on its ill-fated voyage.

“If the same group had been managing the two ships, and she was such a doppelgänger to the Gulf Livestock 1, were the same modifications made to the Gulf to ensure she was safe as possible?” Simpson asks. “Two such similar ships, getting similar conversions, trading from the same country on similar routes? There is no way they didn’t see the potential for risk.”

In the months leading up to the sinking, Gulf Navigation was in financial crisis. A public audit conducted by Deloitte found that, in the first nine months of 2020, the company had incurred a loss of more than $17 million, after losing about $13 million the year before. According to a person familiar with the company’s internal operations at the time, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, Gulf Navigation had breached several covenants in some of its loans and was forced to repay them by refinancing with a private equity firm at high interest rates and with tight stipulations.

Lynn Simpson, a former live-export veterinarian, with her dog at her friend’s farm in Australia where she boards.

On Aug. 31, just hours before the Gulf disappeared, Gulf Navigation fired its entire board of directors and appointed a new one. Publicly it said this was “to support the company’s relentless efforts for a new start in the maritime sector after the peak of the impact of Covid-19.” Days later, Gulf Navigation filed an insurance claim for the lost ship; the insurer eventually paid $22.4 million. The person familiar with Gulf Navigation’s operations says the money was used to repay part of an outstanding loan. The company appeared to have more incentive to keep the creaky vessel at sea than to scrap it, but wasn’t exactly awash in funds for maintenance and repairs.

Within the industry, the response to the live-export bans in New Zealand and elsewhere has been muted. Shipping companies have long been able to adapt to political currents and consumer demand. According to a report by the Dutch agribusiness financial company Rabobank, by mid-2024 the flow of dairy cattle from Australia and New Zealand to China had slowed “to barely a trickle.” The reduction, the report said, was because of both the New Zealand ban and the slowdown in Chinese demand. But Southeast Asian markets, where “there has been a renewed focus on local herd expansion and milk supply growth,” are poised to pick up some of China’s slack. Meanwhile in South America, where there’s less regulation on live export, the trade is growing. The government of Australia, which has continued to permit the shipping of live cattle overseas, said in a statement that the industry is “strongly regulated” and that it’s “committed to ensuring high welfare standards are maintained in this trade.”

“At the moment, the global trade for livestock is quite strong, and all the ships are utilized,” Vroon’s Ephraim says. He acknowledges the headwinds his company and the industry writ large are facing. The industry’s response has been to phase out converted live-export ships in favor of vessels that have been purpose-built for the trade. “If you purpose-build, you can center your design around what the animal needs,” says Ephraim. “That’s the blueprint.”

Over the course of three years and through lawyers, sources, emails and social media messages, Eduardo Sareno, Jay-Nel Rosales, Maya Addug-Sanchez and the family members of the remaining 36 Filipino seamen have declined to comment. The Australian and Kiwi family members who spoke to Businessweek still want to know more about what happened out there.

For Ulrich and Sabine Orda, Lukas’ parents, palpable anger remains, not only toward Gulf Navigation, MarConsult Schiffahrt and the other companies associated with the ship for leaving its black boxes at the bottom of the sea, but also toward the Australian, New Zealand and Philippine governments, for not doing more to bolster search-and-rescue efforts.

“We don’t have a word in English to capture the deepness of grief at this level.”

Karen Adrian, whose son Scott Harris died when the Gulf Livestock 1 sank

Lochie Bellerby’s kin built a memorial for him on the family farm. “It’s got this gorgeous view, looking at his favorite mountains,” says his mother, Lucy. “We’ve built a little hut there, so we can have sleepovers with him.”

The Mainprizes haven’t had a funeral. For a while they wanted to throw a party, a celebration of Will’s life, but the thought of it has been overwhelming. It’s all “a strange limbo,” says Mainprize’s eldest sister, Sarah. Although they knew it seemed crazy, for years they held on to a shred of hope that Will might be out there on one of the countless uninhabited islands in the western Pacific that the families desperately wanted searched. “We joke,” his sister Emily says. “ ‘Will, stop. Come back. Come back to normal life.’ ”

Karen Adrian, Scotty Harris’ mother, has found some comfort in being “a pain in the ass to a lot of people,” by calling officials in the New Zealand government’s Ministry for Primary Industries and the live-export industry and digging for more information. The distraction is hardly enough. “We don’t have a word in English to capture the deepness of grief at this level,” she says. “It doesn’t exist.” Last year she wrote a note to her son and gave it to a stockwoman who was heading out on a ship that would pass over the place where the Gulf Livestock 1 was lost. The note read, in part:

I am so honoured to have such a beautiful kind and generous soul call me Mum. Thank you for choosing me. I have loved every minute of our journey together.

This cannot be the end.

The stockwoman read the note to the crew, slipped it in a bottle and threw it overboard.