Seafaring stories with very different destinations

You know how it is with buses … wait forever and then three come along at once? Well, the same thing happened to me last year, only with books. I had just published my first. It is an ethnography about seafarers: that is to say, it is a detailed account of the life of seafarers based on observational and interview research. It was published as I was in my 14th year at the Seafarers International Research Centre studying seafarers and the wider shipping industry. The book took a long time to research, involving five voyages (on two tankers, two refrigerated ships, and a rusty bulk carrier), time spent in north Germany with unemployed transmigrant seafarers, and time in India with seafarers' wives, and it took a long time to write. It was a long time, too, from the date the manuscript was submitted to the book's appearance on the shelf.

So imagine how I felt, after all this time and graft, when out of the blue Portobello Books kindly sent me a copy of a new book by the journalist Rose George, Deep Sea and Foreign Going, based on her own voyage on a Maersk container ship. The book had already received a lot of publicity and was the BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. Everyone I knew sent me references to it, to its reviews, and to Rose's talks about it. I started to read the book and was about halfway through when a third book appeared. This book, Horatio Clare's Down to the Sea in Ships, was also based on voyages on Maersk vessels.

I like both books. Rose's for its gallop through time and space, literature and facts and figures, and Horatio's for the feeling that his writing conjures within me. Horatio describes himself as a travel writer, and reading the account of his travels I am transported back to the bridge, and the sea, and the salt spray of the ocean, to be among men I recognise. It's a moving, vibrating, noisy, confined environment: a tin can on a vast ocean wilderness.

So can these three different accounts live alongside one another, each adding something different to the understanding of life at sea? In particular, what can lengthy and often painstaking ethnography do for us that journalism and travel writing might not? Having considered all three books, I think I have arrived at some answers.

In travel writing there is self-evidently a focus on places and personalities. So from Horatio's account we learn about ports in China and people like Igor, a Ukrainian taxi driver encountered in Antwerp. We hear snippets of banter between Horatio and his shipmates and we are taken to the engine room and the bilges where he spends some of his time hanging out with other crew members. We feel the sea, and the weather, and stay on board alongside him.

Rose's narrative also follows a logic linked to the trajectory of the voyage in time and geography. Here we learn a lot about the captain, with whom Rose spends many hours, and about the activities associated with shipping, the industry's history, and some of its problems too – security and piracy.

There is much here to feast upon. Yet neither account offers a detailed understanding of the intricacies of life on board or much that could be construed as critical. These are things that ethnography can offer, with its strict code of ethics and confidentiality, its detailed delving into the interactions between people, their cultures and their ways of being. Having gained people's trust, successful ethnographers are no longer "guests" but are incorporated into the daily lives of those they live with. They come to know about rituals, habits, conflicts, hierarchies, and routines. People confide in them knowing that their words will remain anonymous even if they are reproduced in texts or presentations. Everyday matters remain central.

There was much I didn't write about in my account of the modern-day lives of seafarers. I excluded the sensational and the extraordinary (accounts of rare forays into brothels and near-miss lifeboat accidents, for example) in favour of the routine and the ordinary. Yet in revealing the everyday lives of others, ethnography carries an extraordinary power to stimulate empathy and understanding. Too often statistics or accounts of the bizarre render real people absent in the stories we hear and read, and in this sense they allow human populations to remain invisible. We may be aware of how many people are affected by the bedroom tax, for example, but it is only when we know someone personally, or by close secondhand association over time, that we come to realise what people really suffer when subjected to new laws; and equally, to social change, uncompromising workplaces, and dangerous spaces. In society, therefore, ethnography has an important place in writing and broadcasting. I declare an interest – and I commend it to you.

Helen Sampson is the recipient of BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed award for ethnography, in association with the British Sociological Association. A special edition of Thinking Allowed marks the announcement of the winner on Wednesday 30 April at 4pm on Radio 4.