A mysterious "hijacking" at sea

Revisiting an old investigation.

Earlier this month, an old photo popped up on my phone, reminding me that it’s been two years since I published a Guardian Long Read story headlined “Seven stowaways and a hijacked oil tanker: the strange case of the Nave Andromeda”. This was an investigation into the alleged hijacking of an oil tanker off the coast of the Isle of Wight in October 2020. After the ship’s captain called in a threat to the coastguard, the British state reacted with full force, sending out the military, who secured the ship against the supposed threat in a nine-minute operation. Seven terrified Nigerian stowaways - the alleged hijackers - were arrested. Top politicians gave inflammatory interviews about the threats at our borders. But within a few months, all charges against the seven stowaways were dropped.

The story mostly dropped out of the news after that, but I was interested in what had actually happened on the ship, and how something that seemed so extreme had faded from view. I spent months trying to track down people who were on board the ship - both stowaways and members of the crew. What I found was a much less dramatic, sadder story, about desperation and how western states try to evade responsibility for migration. The reporting took months - with a long pause in the middle for maternity leave - and it ended up being the first thing I published after my daughter was born.

I have been really busy with other writing recently and haven’t had time to compose a good Substack post, so I thought I’d share an excerpt from an interview I did about the stowaways story. This was for Nieman Storyboard, part of their regular series of story annotations, which offer “deep dives into story work through annotations of the text by the journalists involved”. They’re such a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain - I loved this annotation by Rachel Aviv explaining how she produced her New Yorker story on America’s troubled teen industy.

I annotated my stowaways story with details about how I went about the reporting and how I chose to present the information. I also did a short interview with Chip Scanlan (who, by the way, has a great newsletter about writing, which you can find here), about this piece and my work more generally.

Here’s the interview, and you can find the rest - and the full annotation - over at the Nieman Storyboard .

How does the story fit into your reporting portfolio?
Over the years I’ve taken this approach on a wide range of subjects, returning to a story that hit the headlines in an inflammatory or hysterical way, then speaking to as many people on the ground as possible to build up a sense of what really happened. These include a 2017 report on the Trojan Horse scandal in Birmingham schools (which has since been the subject of a “Serial” podcast), which took 18 months to report; a 2018 look at the UK government’s attempt to investigate British soldiers over alleged war crimes in Iraq; and a 2020 investigation into the Gatwick drone. The way that this alleged hijacking had been portrayed as a terrifying threat to British shores fit in with the increasingly hysterical way that migration and particularly asylum seekers are portrayed in the media and by politicians, so I was interested in going back and reporting it in a more considered way.

Could you describe your writing process?
When I write for the Guardian Long Read, I typically gather a lot of material, and then when I think I’m mostly done with the reporting, I put together a detailed bullet-point plan. This is usually set out in five sections, and I bullet point in detail what will be included in each. I always start this process thinking I don’t have enough material and then end up writing a plan of 3000 words for a story that’s only meant to be 5000 words. Then I send this to my editor to look over and give feedback on, and I use this as the basis for writing the piece. In some ways, this is the stage of writing that I find most difficult, when you have a vast mass of material and you’re faced with a series of decisions about how best to order it and make it hang together.

A story like this has a clear timeline, so that made it slightly easier to structure. I don’t always end up sticking exactly to my plan when I sit down to write, but in this case I mostly did, except for the fact that when I wrote the plan I had yet to speak to Michael, and he ended up featuring very heavily.

Once I actually start writing, I work more instinctively. It’s been quite interesting for me to reflect on these questions about why I made particular structural or word choices, because I often don’t think too much while I’m doing it. I tend to write, fairly quickly, a very rough draft — which I call “draft zero” — with the aim of simply getting all the words down on a page in roughly the right order, without worrying about making it good. This draft zero is usually way too long and very messy. Then I spend some time going through that, tightening it up, moving things around and cutting words out, until it’s formed into an acceptable first draft.

How long did it take you to report, write and fact-check this piece story?
In all it was about 16 months, but with a gap of several months in the middle while I was on maternity leave. In terms of the reporting itself, the first stage was to see if I’d be able to find anyone at all who had been on board the ship. My editor said we needed to speak to an absolute minimum of three people to make the story viable, so I had something concrete to aim for. This was not an easy task as, other than the captain, the names of the crew were not in the public domain. At that stage, I didn’t even know their nationalities. And only two of the seven stowaways had been named in the press. So the first stage of identifying who I was looking for and then trying to track them down took quite a bit of time. I’d almost, but not quite, completed the reporting as my due date approached. The crucial thing that was missing was an interview with a second stowaway; at that stage I had only spoken to John. I took some time off work, but early in the new year I returned to the story, and managed to find Michael on Facebook. I met him in the spring. I also traveled to Manchester to interview John in person, as previously we’d spoken only on the phone. I completed a few other missing interviews, and wrote the piece up soon afterwards.

Reading/listening

• I was genuinely shocked by this Washington Post story about an Emmy-winning documentary which showed the faces of Afghans working with the US military, despite warnings this could pose a serious threat to their lives. One of them is now dead, in an apparent Taliban revenge killing. (The story is paywalled but an archived version is here.)

• Excellent, clear reporting on the problems with the Troubles Act, by my former colleague Daniel Trilling in the London Review of Books.

• This Esquire piece about why debut novels are struggling to breakthrough is bleak but fascinating.

Thanks so much for reading this far. As always, if this is interesting or useful to you, please forward it on or share it! I’ll be back in a few weeks, when I hope to have a bit more time to write something new. Until then.