Birds and Marine Wildlife / 67tion of oil since its opening in the nineteenth century.^20 It greatly
shortened the voyage from the Middle East to Europe, but its depth
and width limited the size of the tankers it could accommodate.
When the canal closed, tankers had to take the longer—and less
profi table—route around South Africa. No longer constrained by
the canal, tanker operators made the trip worthwhile by transport-
ing oil in increasingly larger ships.^21 During the 1950s, the tanker
classifi cation system had only three categories of vessels, refl ect-
ing the size of the world’s carrier fl eet at the time. Beginning in the
late 1960s, the previously “large range” was renamed “large range
1” to accommodate the “large range 2.” Then even larger vessels
were built, the “very large crude carrier,” which carries two mil-
lion barrels, and the “ultra large crude carrier,” which carries three
million.^22 These two carriers, which are used primarily to trans-
port crude oil, are nicknamed “supertankers.”^23 They are the larg-
est commercial vessels ever built. Refi ned petroleum products, such
as gasoline, are typically transported in small or medium-sized car-
riers. All of these vessels are susceptible to accidents, but the super-
tankers have caused the most catastrophic spills and the greatest
environmental damage in history.
Supertankers transport oil very effi ciently, but at considerable
risk. Their size makes them diffi cult to maneuver. They take miles
and miles to come to a stop. Stopping distance becomes a particular
problem near coastlines, where the vessels are especially vulnerable
to accidents. The fi rst major tanker spill occurred in March 1967,
when the Torrey Canyon, one of the fi rst of the supertankers, went
aground on a granite reef off the southwest coast of England. Built
in 1959 to carry a cargo of sixty thousand tons, the Torrey Canyon
underwent “jumboization” in 1964 to carry twice that much. On its
fateful voyage in March 1967, it held a full cargo of crude oil from
Kuwait bound for Wales. Over thirty million gallons spilled out
when it ran aground, resulting in an enormous slick that contami-
nated hundreds of miles of Cornish and French coastline. Edward
Cowan, leading scholar of the incident, points out that if a tanker
had run aground in the same area twenty years earlier, the result-