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The largest moving structure ever built by Man: 69 meters wide, 458 meters long and capable of storing enough oil to fill more than four million barrels, this industrial leviathan has a fascinating and troubled history: constructed in two years, from 1979 to 1981 at the Oppama shipyards in Japan, it changed ownership and name several times, from Seawise Giant to Happy Giant, Jahre Viking and finally Mont: throughout its long history, this masterpiece of naval engineering, capable of reaching nearly 30 km/h despite a weight of almost 600,000 tons fully loaded, has faced the fury of the oceans and always emerged unscathed, even surviving an Iraqi air attack in 1988 during the Gulf War; despite this, there is no happy ending for the largest ship that has ever sailed the seven seas: after several years of anchorage (and decay) in the Persian Gulf, where it was used as a floating storage of crude oil barrels, in 2010 it met a fate common to many other great ships: the degradation and ecological drama of the Alang beaches in India, where in a few months it was completely dismantled, except for its 36-ton anchor, which was sent to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.
In this photo the ship is still whole, awaiting its final agony: in the background an empty, dirty white sky, all around damp sand and iron debris, and in the middle her, the colossus, now old, useless and outdated. The hull, once a vivid dark red, now faded and corroded by rust. I'm not sure if it can be defined as a work of art in the strict sense, but this photo has an impressive communicative power; it depicts a beached giant, still and that will never move again, trapped in a silent gesture of surrender.
One of the most extraordinary objects ever conceived by man lost forever, in the silence of a desert of sand and toxic substances, and in the desert of general indifference. No James Cameron will move the world with a film inspired by its story, no Gordon Lightfoot will write a majestic musical epitaph for it like "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald".
For the immense fortune of the oceanic ecosystem, the Jahre Viking did not meet a tragic end that would have made it immortal; it was scrapped like any Fiat Duna, but in my small way, I felt I owed it a personal tribute. Thus passes the glory of the world, someone once said, and maybe it's right that it should be so; but a fragment of mankind's history did not deserve such a miserable end. Silently, the soul that pulsed among the thousands of tons of steel of its immense hull has been extinguished forever.
With the regret of never having seen it live, my instinct is to wave a white handkerchief and greet it one last time.
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