A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  About noon on Wednesday, the media got hold of my name. Suddenly, local news crews started rolling up to our farmhouse and into our driveway. Andrea’s sister, being a true Vermonter, invited them in for coffee. By early afternoon, they had a full house of local reporters and cameramen sitting on our couch and nibbling on cookies, watching Andrea watch the news. Shane Murphy’s father was still calling his son the captain of the Maersk Alabama—which was technically correct, as the chief mate takes over when the captain leaves the boat—but it made Andrea feel like I’d been forgotten. There was still no mention of me on the national networks.

  At this point, Andrea was thinking, This is the scenario. A ship got hijacked. They’ll demand ransom. The company will hold out for a little while. Then they’ll pay the ransom. The crew will get set free and everybody will happy and safe. A couple of merchant mariners who knew me called and said, “Andrea, you know the pirates’ MO. They have a business plan. They just want the money. They don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  “I know, I know,” Andrea said.

  “Knowing Rich, he’s probably on the lifeboat telling bad jokes. And he’s going to come home with a great story.”

  And that’s what Andrea prayed for: just a normal, everyday hijacking. She didn’t want heroics.

  Our daughter, Mariah, called back. “Mom, what happened to Dad?” Andrea told her what she knew, managing to keep her composure. That set the tone for the kids. Mariah was strong—deeply worried but not hysterical. “I want to come home,” she said. Andrea tried to convince her to stay, but Mariah was adamant. Dan called, too. Andrea gave him the choice to stay or come back and he chose to stay for the last couple days of exams week. “I want to finish,” he said. “Oh, Mom, I just studied so hard for these things and I know Dad would tell me to stay. He’d say, ‘Stay and finish the job.’”

  “You’re right, he would,” she said.

  They were right. Do you know how much I paid for that college? Dan stayed to finish his work. By holding it together, Andrea was hoping the kids would be able to handle the news.

  When she knew our kids were okay, Andrea went right back to watching TV, flipping channels between all the major news networks. They were her only lifeline to what was happening thousands of miles away. No special arrangements had been made to keep her or the other families informed of unfolding events.

  One thing did help her through that first day, she told me later. I never say good-bye when I leave for a job. I hate hellos and good-byes and want to hear only what Andrea calls “the plain living part” in between. So I always say, “I’ll see you later” or “I’ll be back.” One of the two.

  That helped sustain Andrea. “He told me, ‘I’ll be back,’” she kept telling herself. “And I believe him.”

  She went to bed having no idea what awaited her in the next few days.

  I pulled up forward on the port side where the pilot ladder was. Four or five crew members were standing at the top of the ladder. I could see them through one of the lifeboat’s windows. The visibility was much more constricted than on the open MOB—you had to duck and weave to get a view of what you wanted through the foot-long windows.

  “Okay, we’re ready for the exchange,” I said to Shane. “Look, make sure you start the Leader going down as we pull up. I don’t want these guys hopping up on the ladder and retaking the ship. Got it?”

  “Roger,” said Shane.

  “I’m coming in with the lifeboat,” I said. I saw two crew men escorting the Leader along the deck. He had a white rag around his hand.

  “Let him come down and when I get a chance I’ll come back up,” I said. We came alongside, bumped up along the Maersk Alabama. The end of the ladder was about four feet above the canopy of the lifeboat. I saw him descending and then he jumped the last bit and I felt the lifeboat rock.

  “Pirate aboard,” I radioed. The Leader came back to me. His hand was obviously hurting him, but he seemed to be in good spirits.

  I was grinning, too. I’d done my duty as a captain. Now all I had to do was save myself. If I saw a chance, I could take it. The oldest instinct—survival—kicked in.

  “Show me how to run the boat,” the Leader said.

  I did. I killed the engine and restarted it a couple of times. I showed him how to steer it, start it, where the compass was. He had a course he wanted to steer—340 degrees—and I showed him how to do that. Then I stepped down and let him up into the con—that is, the conning station, which is elevated above the rows of seats. He took the wheel and turned it away from the Maersk Alabama and pushed the speed up.

  “What about the deal?” I said, shocked.

  “No deal,” the Leader said.

  My mistake number three: Don’t make deals with pirates. We should have never made the exchange.

  I wasn’t surprised by the double-cross. I still felt I was ahead of the game. I’d solved three of my four problems: my crew, ship, and cargo were safe. And I was depending on my luck and my tenacity to save myself.

  The Somalis pushed me toward the front end of the boat. I spotted the hatch up there and I thought of trying to bust out through it and jump overboard. But it was a horizontal hatch door. I’d have had to pull myself up four feet and then dive into the water. I would probably have had a few slugs from one of the AK-47s in my back by then, so I abandoned the idea.

  “We’re taking off,” I said into the radio. “No exchange.”

  The Leader was getting the hang of steering, sweeping one way and then the other. Once he got a feel for it, he set off in a straight line. Next stop, Somalia, I thought. I knew that’s where the pirates would take me. That was their MO. That’s where they would negotiate the price for my head. That’s where their backers and their reinforcements were.

  It was getting close to dusk. In the tropics, the twilight is extended because you’re so close to the equator. And the moon was nearly full. We could still see the Maersk Alabama not too far away. Its running lights were lit and smoke was pumping from its stack, a wake churning behind it.

  The pirates looked back in amazement as if to say, Wow, the ship’s running. Imagine that. There it was, the ship that was broken beyond repair, working perfectly. There was the missing crew running back and forth doing their jobs. The pirates were incredulous.

  I was just about to key the radio and tell the ship to watch out for other pirate boats when I heard Mike on it, saying, “Make sure no other small boats are coming at us from astern.” I nodded. I knew the ship was in good hands.

  I was damned glad to see they were under way. We were still in bandit country, and there was nothing to prevent another pirate team from appearing out of nowhere and taking the Maersk Alabama. If the ship was dead in the water, the crew would have no chance.

  The ship turned its bow toward us, and the smiles disappeared from the Somalis’ faces. The Maersk Alabama was coming at us fast, and from that angle it looked like the Queen Mary. I wasn’t worried. I knew if the ship rammed us, the life-boat would just punch under the water’s surface and then bounce back up. I didn’t inform the Somalis of this amazing feature of the modern lifeboat, however.

  “That chief mate is going to run us over,” the Leader said.

  “Damn right,” I said. “He wants my job. He’s been after it ever since we left Salalah.”

  Musso had his gun on me and his eyes went wide.

  “You get up here!” the Leader shouted and jumped down from the con.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Tell them to stop getting close to us,” the Leader said. “Tell them to let us back onboard.”

  I got into the cockpit and we moved around the Maersk Alabama. It would cut across our bow, and then swing around and do it again. I held the wheel for thirty minutes, and finally the Maersk Alabama went dead slow in the water and lay off about a hundred yards.

  Night fell.

  The pirates got on the radio and were talking back and forth with Shane.

  “Hey, we’ll come on back
tomorrow,” they said.

  “Oh sure, we’ll start afresh,” Shane said. “It was just a misunderstanding.”

  “Yes, you let us on,” the Leader said.

  “Definitely,” Shane joked. “Come back in the morning, we have food and water for you.”

  Strange, really, but everyone was relieved at how things had turned out.

  The only thing that was bothering the pirates was the sky. The Somalis were sitting on the stern of the lifeboat, scanning the night sky, looking for planes and helicopters. They still had in the backs of their minds, I thought, the idea that people were coming for me. The sky was so clear you could even see satellites passing overhead. And we did spot two planes—a big one and then a smaller one that flew over and came back and circled.

  The pirates seemed to be expecting a plane to come to my rescue. They didn’t like that idea. They kept squatting down and listening for the buzz of a plane’s engine. It was like they thought the air force was going to start dropping bombs on us or drop a magical ladder and rescue me.

  I keyed the radio. “Four pirates, two by the stern hatch, one at the cockpit, one at forward hatch. Two AKs at stern hatch, one pistol at cockpit.”

  I heard Shane roger that. I continued: “I’m going to be coming out the rear door. If you see a splash back there, it’s me. Bring the ship to the splash and I’ll come to the other side of your ship.” If I escaped—and that was a big if—I wanted to get the Maersk Alabama between me and the lifeboat.

  The Somalis installed me in the third seat, port side. It gave me a good view of the cockpit and the rest of the ship and I wanted to stay there. And I wanted to stay in one place, so any allies that pulled up on the scene would know exactly where I was located. Friendly fire will kill you just as dead as enemy fire. I keyed the radio and let my crew know what seat I was in.

  The pirates closed both hatches. I guess they feared frog-men coming up and climbing down into the boat. That’s when the heat began: unbearable, unrelenting saunalike heat just permeated the entire vessel. It was pure hell.

  I probably nodded off a couple of times. I came to at around 2 a.m., Thursday morning. I looked out and saw one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in my life: an American navy ship steaming toward us at thirty knots, bright lights shining from the deck, sirens wailing and loudspeaker blaring. The spotlight was so intense it lit up the inside of the lifeboat like it was a movie set.

  “Shut off the light, shut off the light,” the Leader was screaming into the radio. “No action, no military action.”

  My countrymen had arrived. I felt my spirits lift.

  On Wednesday, the media was reporting that the pirates had taken me onto a lifeboat. Andrea said, My God, how did that happen?

  The news channels had by this point reached my second mate on the Maersk Alabama, who told them, “They have one of our crew members. I have to go! I’m steering the boat!” Then he hung up. The second mate wasn’t steering the boat. I guess everyone was going a little crazy by then.

  Thursday morning Andrea’s sister, Lea, did a brief interview for several national morning shows. That was the beginning of the national media descending on our house. By late morning, a whole stream of minivans with satellite dishes was pulling off the two-lane road that goes past our mailbox and setting up in our front yard. Any time Andrea walked outside, this huge pack of journalists would call out, “We want a picture, we want to talk to you, we want an interview.” Andrea went out and said, “Guys, I work in a very public place, and I just don’t want that kind of publicity.” She was also trying to protect our kids from the media frenzy. Soon it came to the point where Andrea looked out the window and saw an electrical line going from one of the news vans into a socket in our house. I’m sure the culprits asked Andrea’s brother or someone, and he was just like, “Sure, why not?” On any given day, we’re good-natured people.

  One thing that was emotionally taxing for Andrea and my family was the constant barrage of rumors. Journalists would call the house and say, “Did you just hear X?” Or “We have unconfirmed reports of Y.” All kinds of gossip and speculation were flying around: other pirates were coming to help the hijackers, a ransom payment was in the works, the lifeboat was out of gas. Andrea and her friends were answering every phone call on the first ring, just praying it was good news. And when she was told things that turned out not to be true, she said, “Please don’t do this to me. You’ll drive me out of my mind.” The press even got her cell phone number. Andrea was amazed at that until she realized it was on the outgoing message on our home voicemail. She quickly changed the message, but the damage was done.

  The reporters got more and more insistent. On Thursday, everyone said, “Just do it.” They naively believed that if Andrea spoke to the media, they’d go away. So Andrea arranged to do a very brief interview with the media. The only TV spot she did was on Wednesday. But it opened up a can of worms. The next day, all three networks were taking turns, competing to get her on the air. The phone was ringing constantly. That’s when Lea decided to speak to the press herself.

  There was a constant flow of people through our house. Letters and postcards from strangers poured into our mailbox. The Boy Scouts came by and cleaned up our yard, without anyone asking them to. Vermont’s two senators, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, called, along with our local representatives and town officials. Even Ted Kennedy left his number and asked if there was anything he could do. Everyone was extremely supportive, including a couple from the local Somali community who came by to hand-deliver a note saying they were praying for Andrea and our family.

  By Thursday afternoon, all of the calls and the letters and the constant barrage of news had become overwhelming. Even Maersk’s CEO, John Reinhart, called and was incredibly caring and attentive. “I need Richard,” Andrea told him. “I want Richard. Please just get me my husband home.” Andrea was scheduled to do a press conference and was freaking out. She hates public speaking and was hugely nervous about doing it. Finally, a friend from LMS ship management, Pete Johnston, called to see how she was doing and Andrea told him how stressed she was by the idea of speaking to the media. “You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to say a word,” he told her. She nearly collapsed with relief. But someone had to go out and make the announcement. Our poor neighbor, Mike, who’d first told Andrea about the hijacking, marched into the front yard and told everyone the news, even though he hates public speaking as much as Andrea does. In a crisis, a good neighbor is worth his weight in gold.

  Help was on the way for my beleaguered wife. Two wonderful women from the victims’ services department of the FBI, Jennifer and Jill, started phoning her the latest updates. The Defense Department also began giving her bulletins as they came in, so she didn’t have to jump from channel to channel on the TV trying to see if her husband was still alive. “I remember talking to Jennifer or Jill, I’m not sure which,” she remembers. “And I said, ‘To you, Richard is just another guy, but to me he’s my life, my future, my everything. I need him back.’”

  Out there in the middle of the ocean, I could only imagine what Andrea was going through.

  The American destroyer was playing cat and mouse with the pirates. They would come up real close to starboard, and then just drift away. Once they were half a mile away, they’d come charging at the lifeboat again and sweep by us and then drift. It was an aggressive way of saying, Any time we want to, we can take your boat down.

  The Maersk Alabama was back in the distance, maybe three miles away. I knew they were out of danger now that the navy had arrived.

  I heard a navy corpsman announce the destroyer’s name over the radio: the USS Bainbridge. The name brought a smile to my lips. The Bainbridge had to be named after William Bainbridge, a merchant marine who’d gone to sea at fourteen and eventually rose to be a dashing, impetuous commodore in the U.S. Navy. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent Bainbridge to Tripoli, at the height of the Barbary pirates’ reign, to subdue the bandi
ts. But instead, he’d run the USS Philadelphia aground on the Tripoli coast and was captured and imprisoned by the pirates. Now his namesake was here to help free me from the inheritors of the Barbary corsairs: the Somali pirates. It was a hell of a coincidence. But one detail disturbed me: Bainbridge had been held for nineteen months before gaining his freedom.

  The Leader climbed up into the cockpit and got the boat going. He resumed our course, doing no more than six knots. There was a magnetic compass up there, so he could steer a course to the Somali coast without too much trouble. And he obviously wanted to have the engine running in case the navy tried to raid the ship. The pirates’ normal routine in the lifeboat was to have two guys in the stern with AKs pointed at me, the Leader in the cockpit with the 9mm pistol, and the fourth guy on the bow, usually sleeping. They rotated back and forth to keep everyone rested. I radioed the Somalis’ positions to Shane. I’d been on the lifeboat for a little under twenty-four hours by now.

  Thursday passed in a daze of heat. And I hate heat. I’m one of those people who looks forward to the first snow in Vermont. I like that feel of cold on my skin. If it’s over 80 degrees, I’m miserable. And it was easily 105 in that boat at 0600. After that, it got really hot. The sweat was dripping off my forehead and stinging my eyes. The lifeboat’s engine was underneath the floor and an exhaust pipe came underneath the boat, so with the engine constantly running, that pipe and the engine were warming up the floor. It got to where you couldn’t even put your feet down because it was so hot.

  On any ship I’ve ever been on, you look forward to the sunrise. You really return to a kind of ancient calendar, where your time is measured out by the angle of the sun. But onboard the lifeboat, I dreaded the mornings, the sun coming up and starting to heat the boat. I looked forward to twilight and darkness as a time when I might get some relief from the blistering temperatures.