Richard Phillips: A Captain's Duty

I sent Andrea a quick e-mail saying I’d made it to the ship safely and we were getting ready to embark. I’m not one for phone calls. Too damn expensive. But I let her know I was aboard and thinking of her.

Andrea misses the days when I wrote her long letters or postcards. I’d always send her at least one long letter written over a week’s time, telling her what ocean I was crossing, what the weather was like, silly stuff the crew was up to. In the beginning, I signed the first postcards “Rich.” That’s when we’d decided we were “in deep like,” not “in love.” It took a while to get more. Andrea still remembers the time she got one letter, before we were married, and at the bottom, it said, “Love, R.” She was so struck by it. I guess that’s when she first thought, “Oh, maybe he is serious.” Andrea has kept every letter I ever wrote her.

I did call a few times from around the globe, and I always used the same opening line. Andrea would be asleep and she’d pick up the phone and I’d say, in this low, Barry White voice, “Is your husband home?”

And she’d say, “No, as a matter of fact, he’s not.”

“Good. I’ll be right over.”

I don’t know when that started, but it became our private joke.

But it was the letters she really loved, especially the ones where I’d get all romantic. I wrote in one that “I miss the inside of your arms.” How could she resist that? And in another, I said, “I’ll be seeing you in the moon.” I explained to Andrea how the full moon was always good luck for sailors, and when I looked at one, I thought of her sleeping under it thousands of miles away. So the full moon became ours, a way to be in touch with each other. And when our children were young, they would all look up at the clear Vermont night sky and the kids would shout, “Look, it’s Daddy’s moon.” And Andrea would say, “That’s right.” And Mariah and Dan would look up at the moon and say, “Good night, Daddy, wherever you are.” Andrea did anything she could to keep me connected to the kids’ daily lives.

I’d always loved kids. One of my jobs before joining the merchant marine was working with schizophrenic children and I’d really enjoyed it. “Dealing with kids is good preparation for dealing with crews,” I told Andrea. And it was true. I even instituted something called the Crying Room on my ships, a little mediation club for crew members who were having problems with each other. I’d write and tell Andrea about every session, how one guy would come into the Crying Room and yell, “He pulled a knife on me!” and the other sailor would say, “Only after he swung at me with a wrench!” I’d listen patiently and nod and let the guys get their frustrations out. At the end I’d say, “Let’s shake hands and get back to work.” Not every captain does that, but I felt it made for a better ship.

When I left for the sea, Andrea always posted a picture of me on the refrigerator, along with a photo of “Daddy’s ship.” Next to it, there was always a list of questions for Daddy that I’d have to answer when I got home. But most of all, we had the full moon to share. Andrea cherished it because it always brought me close to her.

We were scheduled to depart Salalah on April 1. I woke up at five a.m., checked the weather, and then began my morning routine. I walk the entire length of the ship every day, to check for dents, leaks, anything out of the ordinary. The shore gantries had loaded the last container and we’d paid the departing crew, signed on the new members, brought aboard our supplies—food, new videos, and fuel—and were ready to sail. By six thirty a.m., I was on the bridge, drinking my first cup of coffee and looking out at the sun already burning the surface of the water. The boat was a beehive of cranes, men, and swinging containers in constant, frantic motion. But the seas were calm, with this great big sun hanging just over the horizon and a haze of mist just beginning to dissipate.

When you’re a sailor, you return to an ancient rhythm. The sun tells you when to get up and when to go to bed. It bookends your day with these incredible sunrises and sunsets. I couldn’t wait to get out on the water. This is why you go to sea, I thought, as I looked out over my ship. I knew that every day on the water would be different. It always is. The sea would never look the same, its color changing from a granite black to vivid blue to an almost transparent green. Men go to sea for a lot of reasons—for the chance to work in the open air, for love of the oceans, because their father and their grandfather did it, or because they think it’s easy money (it’s not). But if you don’t like mornings like this, when the whole voyage is ahead of you, you might as well stay home and go to work in a factory making toasters. When you’re a seaman, leaving port always reminds you why, despite the danger and the boredom and the loneliness, you wanted to be one in the first place.

As we got ready to depart, I was up on the bridge talking with the port pilot, who would guide us out of Salalah harbor. The pilot called out, “Dead slow ahead,” and the third mate answered, while I watched the RPMs on the engine, wanting to keep it well under our maximum. Within half an hour, we’d cleared the harbor, dropped off the pilot, and were gliding out of Salalah into the glassy Indian Ocean.

Every time I left a port, I thought about how I’d gotten into this profession, how unlikely it was that I’d become a sea captain. If it hadn’t been for a sailor who wanted to meet some girls and have a good time, I might never have even heard of the merchant marine. In fact, growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, outside Boston, there were plenty of people who doubted I’d get farther than the corner bar.

My main problem was that I was a little wild. My nickname in high school was Jungle, and I have to say I earned it. My friends and I would occasionally end up in bars in the rougher parts of Boston or Cambridge and sometimes have to fight our way out. Once, in the early seventies, my buddies and I had a few beers and were roaming around Boston when we came across this huge group of people. “Carnival!” we thought in our stupor. We waded through the crowd until we got to the front and realized we were at a Mau Mau rally where a militant loony was preaching revolution. When the speaker saw us, he just froze. We were lucky we made it out alive, but it was just another night for the boys from Winchester.

You had to be pretty rugged to survive in Boston in the sixties and seventies. I grew up in a neighborhood with its share of milquetoasts and bookish nerds. But it was also full of guys who were throwbacks to a different era, guys who had no problem smacking you in the face as a way of testing what you were made of. And I didn’t flinch. I was known for being someone who didn’t back down from a fight. If you were soft, you stayed in your room until it was time to go away to college.