A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  Coming up, I’d made a study of how that was done. And how it wasn’t.

  The first lesson I learned came from a merchant marine legend named Dewey Boland. Exhibit number one in how not to command a ship.

  Dewey was a tall thin guy in his sixties, an Idaho horse farmer who’d taken to the sea for what reason, only God knows. He was well known and dreaded throughout the merchant marine. I’ve been in union halls where a sweet assignment has come up on a ship and a guy throws down his ticket to get a job on a ship. “Looks good. Who’s the cap?” “Dewey Boland.” And the guy would snatch up his card. “No thank you.”

  Dewey never called you by your name, only by your job on the ship. “Hey, Third,” he’d yell, for “third mate.” It was a way to put you down. I was the third mate on one of his ships. Dewey really had it in for me because I graduated from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and his son had just been thrown out of the federal academy, probably for being a carbon copy of his father.

  Every day at 12 p.m. sharp, we’d do what is known as the “noontime slips,” where you chart your position, your average speed, your fuel consumption. Depending on how you did the calculations, there was a variance of a few miles or so on the number you’d come up with. So I’d get out my books and tables and calculator and I’d get the number. And here would come Dewey at 1300, climbing up to the bridge to compare notes. He did his own calculations by taking a divider—the two-legged compass used in geometry class—and sending it skittering across the map. In three seconds, he had a number. Who cared if it was completely inaccurate?

  “Hey, Third, what do you say? What number did you get?”

  “Cap, I got three hundred and ninety-four miles.” Meaning 394 miles from our last position.

  Invariably, Dewey would blow a gasket. Invariably.

  “Jesus Christ, what the hell are you talking about? I got three hundred and ninety-six.”

  Two miles difference means absolutely nothing in nautical terms. But Dewey specialized in exploding over nothing. His aim was to make your life miserable, not for endangering the ship or steering it into a jetty, but for the most mundane stuff possible. I was ready to go back to driving a cab. You might be able to get away with being Captain Queeg in the navy, but not on a merchant ship.

  Dewey taught me not to put the energy into screaming. I actually had a chief mate once tell me that I was too soft-spoken. “You need to yell more,” he said. I told him what I tell everyone: “It’s when I get quiet that you need to get worried.” That’s the truth.

  I’ve learned as much from terrible captains as I have from good ones. I’ve had captains who stayed in their rooms all day and watched The Big Chill over and over. I’ve found captains hiding in the bowels of the ship, crying because they didn’t feel like the crew loved them. I’ve had captains who nearly capsized the boat by sailing straight into a typhoon because they didn’t want to get in trouble with the company by being a day late into port.

  That happened to me coming out of Yokohama on a steamer. We hit thirty-five-foot swells going forty miles an hour and they put us into a synchronous roll, which happens when your natural motion is accentuated by the seas themselves. It’s a good way to flip a ship over. The captain’s reaction? He sidled up to me and, nervously chewing on the end of a cigarette, mumbled under his breath: “I better call New York and see what the weather is like.”

  “We know what the weather is like, Cap,” I said. “It’s a typhoon.”

  But this captain was such a company man that he was terrified, not of sinking, but of pissing off some bureaucrat back at headquarters. He was willing to endanger the lives of twenty men so that he could make his schedule. Meanwhile, I was holding on to the bulkhead for dear life and hearing chains snap down below and watching equipment fly off one bulkhead, shoot straight across the ship, and crash into the other bulkhead forty feet away, without once touching the deck.

  That’s what you call a roll. And that’s what you call a failure in leadership.

  Another time, I was on a tanker taking heating oil from the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico up the East Coast. We ran smack dab into a hurricane. In three days, we went minus twelve miles. We were just trying to keep the bow of the ship pointed into the wind while the ocean was exploding around us. I would stand in the bridge and watch this gigantic wave of black water come over the bow and roll straight toward me until it smashed against the windows ten feet in front of my face. The bridge would go dark, like you were underwater for a few seconds, which in fact you were, and then it would be past you and you’d see the next one cresting over the bow. I thought, Jesus Christ, I’m standing seven stories above the ocean and I just got buried by a wave. That was a seventy-footer. Those are the kinds of waves that eat tankers.

  The captain was a short Greek guy named Jimmy Kosturas. He was like a statue on the bridge. As the storm tried to rip his tanker apart, he stood there and lit one of these little cigarillos that he liked and then he calmly watched the waves come at him. Jimmy was grace under pressure personified.

  “Course?” he’d say.

  I’d give him the course.

  “Speed?”

  I’d give him the speed.

  He’d nod and take a puff on the cigarillo.

  Then CRAAAAASSSHHH! The wave would hit and the water would slither down the bridge windows, black against the green glass.

  Jimmy stood calmly, a curl of smoke wafting up from his cigarillo.

  I watched as the captain barely ate and barely slept and yet kept his crew focused like a laser beam. By showing no fear. If that hurricane had turned us lengthwise, we would have broken up. But he was as calm and cool as if he were sailing a little dinghy across Boston Harbor on a calm summer day. He barely said a word, but he inspired such confidence that I never doubted we’d make it through.

  Deeds, not words. I’d always remember Jimmy, standing there like Gary Cooper as the ocean tried to kill him. I liked that.

  By the time I got my captain’s license in 1990, I’d seen the good, the bad, and the really bad. I wanted to be the kind of captain I’d loved serving under.

  I can still remember taking charge of my first ship, the Green Wave, a container ship out of Tacoma, Washington. I’d been serving as chief mate on it and a good friend of mine, Peter, was captain, and we were carrying military supplies—planes, helicopters, M16 ammunition, you name it—from base to base all over the West Coast. It came time for the captain to leave and I had to take over. We did our handover of the ship all day and then went out to dinner. We rolled back to the port around 10 p.m. and Peter pulled up in front of the gangway. We got out, and I was standing there looking up at this immense ship in the darkness, and he turned to me and said, “Okay, you’ve got it.” We shook hands and he laughed and said, “Good luck, Cap.” It was the first time anyone had ever called me that in my life.

  I was nervous. I didn’t feel ready. But I had to do the job, so it didn’t matter how I felt.

  I’m sure I made a thousand mistakes that first trip. I was just holding on, trying to learn as I went. But I didn’t try to whip the guys under me into my idea of a perfect crew. I didn’t want to be the Coach Marshall of the high seas. I felt that if you did the job right, if you let people be themselves and cracked down only when they blew an assignment, then morale would take care of itself. You have to show people that you deserve the respect that goes along with the title Captain. You can’t browbeat them into looking up to you.

  My motto became “We are all here for the ship. The ship isn’t here for us.” That really served me, because it’s true. When you’re out of port, the ship is your mother, your temporary country, your tribe. And there was an unspoken part of that saying that I kept to myself: “The captain is here for the crew.”

  Coming up, I got a reputation of being a tough guy to work for. When I’m working, I’m working. I become a little obsessed with making sure things are done right. So if you’re lazy or just plain bad at your job, I’m going to be a nigh
tmare for you. But if you’re on top of your duties, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll never give a good man make-work just to feel like I’m in charge. My attitude is “You hope for the best, but you train for the worst.” Because one day, the worst will find you.

  A bosun, one of the hardest workers I ever had, gave me the best compliment from a crew member. He’d worked with me on more than one ship. “You know, you are a pain in the ass, but I know what you’re going to say before you say it,” he told me. Meaning: You’re consistent. And I am.

  When I got off the ship, as captain, I asked myself the same question: Was the ship better than when I came on? Is it run better, is it safer, is its crew more motivated or smarter about what they’re doing? That’s how I judged myself as a captain. Did I make a difference? There were times the answer wasn’t what I was looking for, and then I analyzed why I hadn’t succeeded.

  In some ways, I’m an accidental leader. I was just an ordinary guy who wanted more for his family. I wasn’t driven to wear the stripes and have power over a group of men. When you walk onto a ship as the captain, you get the good room, the good hours, the good pay. But you have to accept everything that goes with them. And that includes putting your crew’s lives before your own.

  “The captain is always the last off a ship” isn’t just a line in the movies. It’s your duty.

  When you enter the merchant marine, you’re walking into a different world. Danger is your frequent companion. There are any number of things that can kill you: there are people who want to steal what you’re hauling, or the ship itself. It’s not rare to lose a man. Containers drop, wires part, a heavy piece of cargo shifts and turns into a man-killer. A fire onboard can be a death sentence, because there’s nowhere to run and no one to come to your aid. And the loneliness is a fatal part of our lives, too. Men simply lose the desire to return to their lives on land and just disappear in the middle of the night.

  I’ve had my brushes with the grim reaper. In 1988, I was unloading a fire truck in Greenland, trying to get it off the deck onto a barge, and having to do it with a bunch of army guys who’d never been on a ship before. We were sitting at anchor and I was between a heavy spreader bar and a metal hatch combing. The ship took a little roll and suddenly four tons of metal came swinging toward me. I went to hold it off but it kept coming at me and I thought, I can duck down and this steel may crush my head or I can take the hit. So the bar swung in and crushed up against my body and then swung back out as the ship corrected its roll. I broke four ribs in two places each, snapped my collarbone, collapsed a lung, and separated my shoulder. Another three inches and the load would have crushed my chest cavity and I would have been dead.

  The army guys and the crew left on the ship thought I’d been flattened. When we all recovered from the shock, they put me onto a metal stretcher, tied my arms down so I wouldn’t hurt myself any further, and lowered me to the barge about twenty-five feet away so I could be loaded on a landing craft and taken to the base clinic. I knew if they dropped me, I’d be dead—I’d drop straight into the water and to the bottom of the fjord. The soldiers hot-wired a bus and rushed me to the local clinic over a rutted, rock-strewn road, sending jolts of pain through me with every bump.

  And the first thing that ran through my mind, even though I was in constant agony, was “Andrea is going to kill me for getting hurt.” Just out of the clear blue. Maybe it took getting that close to death to know what I would miss about life.

  Then I said to myself, “What the hell do I care what she thinks? I’m the one who’s hurting.”

  I knew I loved her then, if I hadn’t before. I wanted nothing more than to see her again.

  Andrea was in Boston when she got the phone call from Greenland. It was the captain on my ship. Even back then, she knew they never call with good news.

  “What happened?” she said. “Tell me he’s alive.” The captain described the accident and said they were airlifting me down to Fort Dix. Andrea flew down immediately. Soon after I arrived, she was sitting on the corner of my hospital bed. My company, Central Gulf Lines, had flown her down and even found her a room at a local hotel.

  She kept a close watch over me. One of the Fort Dix doctors kept inserting chest tubes—which was excruciatingly painful—without any narcotics. Being a nurse, Andrea knew things are done differently at different hospitals, but I was suffering so badly she couldn’t stand it. She went and chewed the guy out, really giving him hell. To this day, when I’m having trouble with a mechanic or something like that, I’ll look at him and say, “Listen, do I need to bring my wife in here?” And I’m only half-joking.

  Andrea wanted me moved to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she was working, and my company had me airlifted there, since I needed special care on the way. Once I was installed in my bed, I jokingly told everyone Andrea was my wife: “Oh, don’t worry about cleaning that up, my wife’s coming in and she’ll do it.” On her dinner break Andrea would come to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. On one of those breaks, I told her about being in that stretcher and how she was the only thing I could think of. Finally, I said, “Well, I suppose I should ask you to marry me.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess you should.” And I did.

  But I never did get down on one knee.

  As different as we were, we had a lot in common. We both came from big families, and we were comfortable in that crazy atmosphere. I’m very Irish and steady-nerved and Andrea is Italian and emotional. When she’s flipping out over something like not being able to find her keys, I’ll sit there and say, “Okay, let me know when you’re done.”

  “Rich grounded me,” she says. “He laughs at me when I should be laughed at and he pays attention when I need him to pay attention.”

  Andrea likes to say that I became her rock. “I know it’s right out of a movie,” she tells people, “but he does complete me.”

  Sailors are superstitious by nature. Seeing dolphins at sunrise, for example, means you’re going to have a good day. Redheads, priests, fresh flowers, and stepping onto a boat with your left foot first are bad luck. Your life is controlled by the weather, by the pull of the moon, by storms that are brewing in some corner of Africa. And every sailor has his unlucky places. Until I started sailing the Gulf of Aden, mine had always been the Bay of Biscay, a hellacious gulf that lies between France and Spain. The continental shelf runs out under the bay, which makes for shallow water all across it, and shallow water means one thing: rough seas. I was cursed in that damn patch of ocean. Nearly every time I sailed through it, I hit a storm that gave me something to remember.

  One time, I was making my way from Nordheim, Germany, to Sunny Point, North Carolina, with a load of ammo for the U.S. Army. Down below I had millions of rounds of bullets and five-hundred-pound bombs and crates of ammo and who knows what other kinds of explosives. The ship itself was a wreck; the sheathing that prevents the cargo from slamming into the steel hull during rough weather was shredded and useless, the starboard anchor was out of commission, and every other damn thing on that boat was either falling apart or broken. The owner had slashed wages on the ship and the crew was bitter and underpaid. It was a bad situation, but that’s when you learn how to handle disaster.

  So we were making the run out of the bay and a storm whipped up and at the same time we lost power. Our engine stopped dead. I couldn’t steer the ship. We were being thrown around the bay like a cork and down below I could hear these enormous thuds. I could actually feel the vibrations all the way up at the top of the bridge. Something was loose in the hold.

  The storm intensified by the minute. The ship began to pitch until I looked down at the inclinometer, a pendulum that tells you the degree of roll, and saw that we were at 40 degrees. I’d never seen that number before. Never. We were close to turning turtle and going over completely and sinking to the bottom of the bay. The loose cargo was shifting the center of gravity on the ship. A couple more degrees of tilt and the entire load could shift port or starboard
and send us to our eternal rest.

  I started for the engine room. Running down the central passageway, I spotted something odd to my right. I stopped, turned around, and went back. It was part of my crew, seven guys in life jackets huddled together, looking like they were the last men onboard the Titanic. They were staring at me from the darkness, their lips quivering, all of them scared out of their minds.

  I was, too, but I couldn’t show it.

  “What are you doing?” I said, incredulous.

  The sailors looked at each other. The din was even louder down there.

  “Well, Cap,” one sailor finally said. “We’re preparing to abandon ship.”

  I looked at them.

  “You’re telling me,” I said, “that you’re getting ready to get off this big ship to get into a tiny boat, in this weather? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  They looked at one another. I don’t think that had occurred to them.

  “It doesn’t seem like a smart bet to me,” I said. “This is what we’re going to do. Anyone who can work, come with me. Anyone who can’t, go to your rooms. You’re scaring the rest of the crew.”

  Four of the guys came with me and the others scattered to their quarters.

  I raced to the engine room. Our chief engineer was working furiously on the power plant.

  “Get me a status report,” I said. He nodded. He was what we call “fully tasked,” that is, working like hell on six different things that needed doing immediately.

  I hurried down to the cargo holds. Opening the door, I shone my flashlight in to the enormous half-lit space. What I saw wasn’t encouraging. Six inches of viscous motor oil was slopping around the floor. Fifty-five-gallon drums were reduced to the size of footballs by the constant pounding on the hulls. Five-hundred-pound bombs, stacked twenty to a pallet and two pallets high, were tipping back and forth and slamming against one another and the hull.