Day 19. Gods of the sea.

In 1904, a prominent Danish sea captain named Peter Mærsk-Møller founded the Steamship Company Svendborg with his son, Arnold Peter. The father and son team achieved enough success towing cargo in their first few years to finance the construction of a shipyard in Odense, where their company began fabricating increasingly massive cargo liners. The fledgling Steamship Company Svendborg would, over the decades, evolve into the world's biggest shipping enterprise: A.P. Møller-Mærsk.

The size and scale of the company's ships is mindblowing. Today, each one of Mærsk's trademark sky blue E-class container ships can haul 36,000 automobiles at a time. According to The Guardian, "just 15 of the world's biggest ships," most of which belong to Mærsk, "may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760 million cars." If you could lay the Empire State Building on its side, it would be over 100 feet shorter than Mærsk's largest freighters. And yet here, in unassuming Copenhagen, sit the people who rule the ships that rule the seas.

Poseidon at the gates of Mærsk's world headquarters in Copenhagen