Richard Phillips - A Captain's Duty

“Yeah,” he admitted, “I was just closing them.”

“Which doesn’t do much good, does it?”

“No, I guess not.”

Colin shook his head. “I’ve gone over this with him six, seven times,” he said.

I nodded.

“We are in search of excellence,” I said, “but oh, we will accept so much less.”

A few of the guys laughed. They knew that was one of my sayings.

The drill ended. I gathered all the crew except the third mate in the ship’s office and broke down what had gone right and wrong. It hadn’t gone perfectly by any means. I don’t want to give the impression that this was a ship of fools. Most of these guys were good sailors, but every captain has their own way of doing things, and you have to teach the mates your approach. That first drill was a shake-out exercise. I knew the crew would step up and things would improve drastically.

During the critique, Mike, the chief engineer, called out, “What about a backup safe room in the after steering room?”

If pirates attacked, the chief engineer would go immediately to the engine room. The first and third engineer would go to the after steering room. The rest of the crew would run to the ship’s office. But if the pirates breached that door, the crew would need a second safe room and after steering was a perfect candidate. It was hidden off a tiny corridor and would be nearly impossible for the pirates to find.

“Good point,” I said. “Let’s make it happen.”

“What if they’re listening in on the radio?” an AB asked.

“Unlikely,” I said. “But it’s a good point. So we won’t mention locations. If I hear from the chief mate, I assume he’s on deck. If I hear from the second mate, I assume he’s at his muster point. Engineers in the engine room. If you don’t have a muster point, I’ll assume you’re in the safe room. Everyone got that?”

The men nodded.

“What else have we got in case of pirate attack?” I asked.

“We’ve got twist locks and flares,” somebody called out. A twist lock is a heavy metal lock used to secure containers to the deck. They were great for throwing down at pirates and braining them, but completely inaccurate. We had ten on the bridge ready to go.

“Okay, everyone know what they need to work on?”

More nods.

Whenever you get a bunch of sailors together to drill for pirate attacks, there’s usually one guy who’s seen just one too many John Wayne movies and wants to go toe to toe with the bastards. Usually, he’s sixty-five years old and three hundred pounds and gets out of breath running to be first in the dinner line. Sure enough, as we were wrapping up the drill, this crusty old AB spoke up. “Cap, we got to have weapons,” he said. “I want to fight.” The motto of the United States Merchant Marine Academy is, after all, Acta non verba , or “Deeds, not words.”

But it wasn’t going to happen. This guy could barely climb a ladder and now he wanted to take on a group of young, fit pirates who would as soon gut him and throw him overboard as look at him.

“Listen,” I said. “We don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight. Fighting is an option, but we have to play it by ear. First, we muster. Then we get the hoses and lights ready. Then we secure ourselves. Got it?”

Nods all around.

“Then, if we find out that all they have is knives and clubs, we can use hatchets and axes and lead pipes that we have stockpiled. We can use twist-lock poles”—long steel bars used to secure the containers—“as pikes.” The image of doing battle with pirates like medieval warriors might seem ridiculous, but there had actually been cases where a crew charged out of their safe room waving poles and axes and the pirates freaked out and jumped over the side. It was a dangerous move, but the prospect of spending four months being held for ransom drove the sailors to desperation.

We also decided that if the pirates boarded, no one would walk outside with their keys. If the pirates captured one guy with a set, they could access the whole ship. I also ordered every seaman to lock every door behind them. On an earlier trip with Mike, the chief engineer, I’d complained about the pirate cage bars on the engine room, which the crew liked because they allowed air to pass into the hot interior. But that meant the heavy watertight door was often left open, and I wanted it secured at all times, as the engine room led directly into the house and intruders could race straight up to the bridge. Mike agreed to get the pirate bars off and to have the big steel door secured at all times. And we’d previously agreed that deadbolts needed to be installed on the inside of the watertight doors, in case the pirates were able to shoot off the locks. We’d already done that on the superstructure, but there were a few doors elsewhere that still needed the deadbolts. Mike ordered his guys to get on it.

“Good,” I said. “I know these precautions are a pain in the ass, but they might save our lives. We need to do better next time.”

With that, I let the guys get back to their work. The drill had taken fifteen minutes, the critique thirty.

Another captain might have taken that moment to pull some crew aside and chew them out. But over the years I’d learned a different way of command. I didn’t want to be a screamer like my father or some captains I’d sailed with. I knew how completely that had turned me off to what he was saying. I didn’t want to aim for perfection when some guys weren’t capable of it. We had to crawl before we could walk. Then we could think about running.

That instinct also went back to my initiation into the merchant marine—my first trip on my license.

When I left the academy, I had a third mate’s license, which allowed me to work at the bottom of the officer ladder on any ship. But you have to wait for the call. I went home and started painting houses, waiting for the right job to come along. I’d passed on Florida and Bahamas runs—too boring for my taste. I was at a girlfriend’s swimming pool when a personnel guy for a shipping company called me and said, “I’ve got a ship and I need a third mate.”

“Where you going?”

“Alaska.”

Alaska sounded different, alluring even. I was on a plane to Seattle three hours later.

After half a day in the air, I pulled up to the dock in a taxi. The driver stopped in front of what looked like a floating junk pile. “Wrong place, buddy,” I said. “I’m working on a ship. This is a barge.” And he looked at me like I was slow or something and said, “You’re the third guy I dropped here today. This is your ship.”

When I walked onboard, the second mate said to me, “You’ll never be on another ship like this one.” He was right.

The Aleut Provider was heading up from Seattle to Alaska and back. We were scheduled to go through the Inland Passage up through Charlottetown over to Kodiak, through the Aleutian Islands, and then up to the Pribilof Islands in the Arctic Circle, hitting a bunch of tiny fishing villages where they process the salmon and king crab that the trawlers bring in. We would also be bringing supplies up to the Indian villages on a contract with the U.S. Government, but anything we hauled back at a price was pure profit. So the ship was loaded down with every kind of frontier product you can imagine: seal skins heaped in the cargo hold, salmon meat stuffed in the refrigerated holds. And piled on the deck, high above the gunwales, were trucks, empty beer kegs for refilling in Seattle, motorcycles, telephone poles, snowmobiles, and fire hydrants.

It looked like the Beverly Hillbillies’ Cruise to Nowhere.

I was a third mate on his first trip. I rarely spoke to the captain, that’s how low on the totem pole I was. My room was a tiny space with a wooden door, which would later be ripped off its hinges by a storm and be replaced by a wool blanket, my only protection against the arctic winds. I would wake up in the morning and there would be water flowing under my feet. I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into.