![]() ![]() A surprising number of people now live in shipping containers, some of them because they have no other housing option and some of them because they have opted into the Tiny House movement, but a few in the name of architectural experiments involving several-thousand-foot homes constructed from multiple containers. And yet for one of the world’s least prepossessing objects it has developed something of a cult following in recent years. The question, of interest to the inquisitive and important for economic and environmental reasons, is: What on earth is inside them?Ī standard shipping container is made of steel, eight feet wide, eight and a half feet tall, and either twenty or forty feet long it could be described as a glorified box, if there were anywhere for the glory to get in. Given the sheer scale of those numbers, plus the factors that have always bedevilled maritime travel-squalls, swells, hurricanes, rogue waves, shallow reefs, equipment failure, human error, the corrosive effects of salt water and wind-some of those containers are bound to end up in the water. The largest of these can carry more than twenty thousand shipping containers per voyage collectively, they transport a quarter of a billion containers around the globe every year. ![]() In today’s world, some six thousand container ships are out on the ocean at any given moment. There are many reasons for this kind of container loss, but the most straightforward one is numerical. But the most common way for a container to get lost is by ending up in the ocean, generally by falling off a ship but occasionally by going down with one when it sinks. But the specific kind of tumbling off a boat that befell the nearly five million Lego pieces of the Tokio Express is part of a much more recent phenomenon, dating only to about the nineteen-fifties and known in the shipping industry as “container loss.” Technically, the term refers to containers that do not make it to their destination for whatever reason: stolen in port, burned up in a shipboard fire, seized by pirates, blown up in an act of war. Things have been tumbling off boats into the ocean for as long as humans have been a seafaring species, which is to say, at least ten thousand and possibly more than a hundred thousand years. Not long afterward, helicopter pilots reported looking down at the surface of the Celtic Sea and seeing “a slick of Lego.” (As with “fish,” “sheep,” and “offspring,” the most widely accepted plural of “Lego” is Lego.) Soon enough, some of the pieces lost overboard started washing ashore, mostly on Cornish beaches. When the container slid off the ship, into the drink went vast quantities of miniature scuba tanks, spearguns, diving flippers, octopuses, ship’s rigging, submarine parts, sharks, portholes, life rafts, and the bits of underwater seascapes known among Lego aficionados as LURPs and BURPs-Little Ugly Rock Pieces and Big Ugly Rock Pieces, of which 7,200 and 11,520, respectively, were aboard the Tokio Express. Among those were the dragons (33,427 black ones, 514 green), but, as fate would have it, many of the other pieces were ocean-themed. One of those containers was filled with Lego pieces-to be specific, 4,756,940 of them. In heavy seas, it rolled so far abeam that sixty-two of the containers it was carrying wrenched free of their fastenings and fell overboard. If you want to go looking for these dragons yourself, it will help to know that they are three inches long, missing their arms and tails, and made by the Lego company.Ĭornwall owes its dragon population to the Tokio Express, a container ship that sailed from Rotterdam for North America in February of 1997 and ran into foul weather twenty miles off Land’s End. ![]() Mostly, though, they are drawn to the windswept beaches of southwestern England-to Portwrinkle and Perranporth, to Bigbury Bay and Gunwalloe. One was spotted, like Saoirse Ronan, on Chesil Beach another made its home on the otherwise uninhabited Dutch island of Griend, in the Wadden Sea. They are aquatic, in that they always arrive from the sea, and they are capable of travelling considerable distances. ![]() Unlike the dragons of European myth, these do not hoard treasure, cannot breathe fire, and, lacking wings, cannot fly. The black ones are rare, the green ones rarer even a dedicated dragon hunter can go a lifetime without coming across a single one. There is a stretch of coastline in southern Cornwall known for its dragons. ![]()
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