Ships transport 80% of global trade. While at the micro scale, operators solve complex optimization problems involving the balancing of operational costs, profits, schedules, and contractual obligations, we show that on the macro scale, this can be modeled by Markov processes. Additionally, we show that global shipping is resilient to short shocks, with little change in port arrivals even following the closure of important choke points. This enables the creation of a one-to-one agent-based model of the ships involved in global trade, with 50,000 agents. Our results demonstrate how shipping networks naturally adapt to shocks without external interventions. We demonstrate that even extreme events, such as the prolonged closure of a crucial shipping route, have a negligible impact on individual ports.

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