Malcolm McLean

摘要

The first container ship was an elderly oil tanker, the Ideal X, whose deck had been strengthened to accommodate 58 well-filled boxes each some 30ft (9 metres) long. Malcolm McLean, normally an unemotional man, as befitted his Scottish ancestry, watched with a twinge of anxiety as the ship left Port Newark in New Jersey. Would the boxes survive the long journey down the east coast, into the Gulf of Mexico and on to Houston? Or might some of the boxes, or all of them, be swept unre-coverably into the sea, as some doubters had predicted? Would the valuable cargoes themselves arrive undamaged after the Ideal X, described by a reporter as an "old bucket of bolts", had been buffeted by Atlantic gales?