In his travels in East Africa and Bangladesh, he had watched traditional sails and masts replaced by outboard motors.
To him, it was a dramatic display of technology going wrong, further proof that the world we built is unsustainable.
In the vast but liminal space of the ocean, cargo vessels — some of the largest machines on the planet — have generally operated in obscurity.
At the most fundamental level, the way modern sails work is similar to the way sails did a thousand years ago: As wind moves against their curves, it creates a high-pressure system on one side and a low-pressure system on the other, resulting in a forward thrust that pushes the ship along.
In 2014, he started the International Windship Association, a trade association, bringing together disparate groups of inventors, researchers and others who wanted to get modern wind propulsion on cargo vessels — not to replace fuel entirely but to require considerably less of it.
He would point them to books and reports by scientific organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that outlined what would happen if the world stayed on its current trajectory, sending average temperatures up 3 degrees or more: vicious wars over resources, mass refugee migrations, major cities engulfed by rising seas.
The industry has been facing more pressure to emit less carbon, but one of the most talked-about methods of reducing shipping’s carbon footprint — using alternative fuels such as hydrogen — is costly and difficult to pull off.
For them, he keeps the environmental slides in, while emphasizing the economic argument: Fuel can be expensive, especially if, in the future, the price of oil spikes, taxes on carbon emissions drive up its cost or the industry is forced to shift to green fuels.
They include a Finnish company that is installing sails on existing vessels, as well as businesses in Britain, France, China and Japan.
The challenge: Ships will need modified engines or new electric motors, fuel tanks up to quadruple the volume and new safety measures for the fuels.
A conventional combustion-engine ship has a life span of 20 to 30 years, and this initial stage of modern wind propulsion largely involves retrofitting sails onto existing ships, using wind to cut down on some fuel use until the ships are scrapped.
I stood on the deck and peered down into one of the holds, where a pair of dockworkers in high-visibility vests stood deep in the bottom, scarcely taller than the coils of steel and dwarfed by the cavernous scale of a ship built to carry more than 63,000 metric tons of goods.
The rotors were on the starboard side: four columns painted in white, each 52 feet tall and seven feet in diameter — wide enough for a seafarer to crawl in and make repairs.
They told me it was the first time they’d seen such a sight or heard the deep whir that comes from the rotors at full spin.
The Afros was the brainchild of Costas Apodiakos, a member of the third generation of a Greek shipping family.
He became interested in using sails on his cargo ships, but it took another 20 years before wind-propulsion materials became light and cheap enough and the technology advanced enough — and nearly another 20 years before Apodiakos could develop, test and install rotors on the Afros, which is managed by a company started by his family.
Apodiakos’s wind-propulsion company, Anemoi Marine Technologies, is now beginning to sell its rotor sails to others, for $350,000 to $1.1 million apiece, depending on the size, with another $500,000 in installation costs.
Each remote has eight big black rubber buttons used to control the trolleys that slide the rotors along the deck, so they can be moved out of the way of cranes at port.
Off the coast of Vancouver, members of the Canadian Coast Guard, fascinated by the sails, asked the officers to turn them on so they could see them spin.
He couldn’t understand what the man was saying, but screaming and gesticulation is something of a universal language: Mandas gathered that the man was annoyed.
Flettner rotors like the ones on the MV Afros are among the first in the water and can be installed in a matter of hours, but their reduction in fuel consumption is limited; they save an average of 3 percent to 15 percent on fuel.
Some of the ships under development use soft, square sails stacked onto masts, like the famously fast clipper ships of the 19th century, but with sleeker, larger designs.
Cargill looked at the wind-propulsion technologies available, including kites and rotor sails, and made a notably bold move: It chose to work with BAR Technologies, a start-up in Portsmouth, England, committing to pay for the company’s first sails — and the cost of installing them on one of the ships that Cargill charters — with the help of a grant from the European Union.
Portsmouth, which sits at the mouth of a natural harbor on England’s southern coast, was built on sail: Many centuries ago, at a time when international trade felt like the rarest of miracles, a French merchant with a fleet of sailing ships developed the port.
In 2014, Ben Ainslie, a knighted Olympic sailor, mounted a campaign costing more than $100 million to win the America’s Cup sailing regatta from a headquarters in Old Portsmouth, building a modern glass-and-concrete structure, six stories high, to house 150 employees, including engineers, sailors and boat builders.
They’re meant to be installed on a ship in groups of three to five, rotating and changing shape to catch the wind so that the vessel can harness more free power from any given gust.
Schofield can’t remember a time before he was sailing Mersea’s creeks and estuaries, throwing barbecues with his friends on marshy banks; leaping into one another’s boats; slapping his homework shut on a Wednesday night to race, with as many as a hundred other kids in dinghies, during Mersea’s weekly regattas.
Part of an effective wind-propulsion system is software that can guide the ship onto routes that might not be the shortest — but, because of how the wind is moving, could be more fuel-efficient.
By the time I visited Old Portsmouth, the Ben Ainslie Racing team had moved out of its building, largely leaving it to Schofield, now the company’s chief technology officer, and his workers.
Bright yellow masking tape was arranged in loops on the floor — the central section 33 feet wide, with two sections 16 feet wide on either side — running nearly half the length of the office.
There were ports to consider, seafarers, shipowners, manufacturers, regulations, the placement of hatches, bird collisions, the not-uncommon prospect of a 36-foot wave breaking across the deck in the middle of a storm.
To allow the ship to go under a bridge, or while it is at port, the wings would fold into themselves, then lower, flat, onto the surface of the deck — a 15-minute process — so they would be clear of the cargo hatches, cranes and railings of the ship.
While few ultramodern wind ships exist yet in physical form, eye-catching renderings are legion, depicting futuristic hulls that could never fit into any existing port or spindly sails mounted onto the top of a cruise ship that look more like antennae than something that can propel a vessel.
“Lose their trust, and it will be harder to convince them the next time.” By the time the company’s designs hit the water, Schofield’s engineers expect average fuel savings of 30 percent.
He wouldn’t disclose the price, saying only that he believes the cost will fall by the time the sails are in mass production and that shipowners will see a full return on investment in just over five years.
Most companies are small and medium-size enterprises — run by shipping owners whose fleets number in the single or double digits, not the hundreds or thousands, and who are less willing to invest in expensive new technologies.
And for every BAR Technologies, there are numerous other modern sail companies that have developed preliminary designs and renderings but haven’t been able to find investors or customers who will pay to get the sails made.
to advance interests counter to the organization’s stated goal to cut emissions, with influential countries including China, Brazil, Japan and India forcing watered-down regulations that would do little to reduce emissions.
But this target is not linked to regulations or enforcement mechanisms and doesn’t align with the global Paris Agreement to achieve carbon neutrality and keep the warming of the planet under 2 degrees by 2050.
Natasha Brown, a spokeswoman for the I.M.O., said the organization acknowledges that more measures are needed and might consider additional ones between 2023 and 2030.
What’s not certain is whether any eventual tax will be big enough to change the way shipping operates — a counterproposal supported by the International Chamber of Shipping, an industry trade group, along with other countries, suggests a levy equivalent to just 67 cents per ton of carbon.
The European Union is planning to include shipping in a continental emissions-trading system, which would affect thousands of ships that sail into European ports.
If, in this context, inventors can build a successful economic case for wind propulsion — a scenario that depends on a lot going right for them — more companies could soon place orders.
The price of some of these fuels is expected to be three to five times as expensive as the bunker fuel that ships usually use, which would make wind propulsion — which by then may save an average of 50 percent or more on fuel costs — even more attractive.
He says that, as exciting as the WindWing retrofits are, what he’s waiting for is the chance to build entirely new ships from hull to sail, using artificial intelligence to determine the shape of a hull and sails that would squeeze even more power from the wind, while making use of the zero-carbon fuels expected to emerge.
Spencer Lowell is a photographer in Los Angeles known for his images of scientific laboratories and industrial facilities and his portraits of leading researchers and corporate moguls.