OFF MY SHIP

Sea captain offers locals business insights

Staring death in the face as Somali pirates held him captive on a lifeboat after leaving his merchant ship, Capt. Richard Phillips felt he had already won a key battle, and that even if he did not survive, he would go out a winner.

Pre-planning and drilling, according to Phillips, gave the crew and himself more control of the situation than the pirates would have preferred. They were able to feign a breakdown. The pirates had lost their own vessel; their leader had been captured by the Maersk Alabama crew. Taking him onto the ship’s lifeboat as a surety and lowering it onto the seas, Phillips convinced the pirates, was their own best course of action. It was a calculated move, and Phillips makes clear that he was no sacrificial lamb.

“My main responsibility was to get these pirates off my ship and I knew if I went with them they could never get back on,” Phillips said. “That would be my responsibility. My crew, my ship, my cargo would be free.”

Doing so was, however, a counterintuitive choice.

“I should have been the last person off my ship, but somehow I knew that would be the best course of action,” Phillips, who tells of his ordeal in the book “Captain Phillips: A Captain’s Duty” and whose story was adapted into the movie “Captain Phillips” starring Tom Hanks, told guests at last week’s annual banquet of the Houma-Terrebonne Chamber of Commerce.

The lesson, according to Phillips, was that the usual plan, what has been taught and what is conventional, won’t always fit the situation if a desired goal is to be achieved.

It was one of many inspirational messages peppered throughout his 40-minute talk, broken up by occasional laughter and concluding with a thunderous ovation.

Aware that many of the guests at the chamber dinner are involved – peripherally or directly – with marine industries, Phillips made a statement that might ring true to any competent sailor or officer.

“I don’t think anyone solved a crisis at sea by losing their wits,” Phillips said, the words easily applicable to shore-side challenges as well.

The story of Phillips’ ordeal is familiar, and has withstood retelling over time. It is also unfortunately historic. The April 2009 five-day ordeal marked the first known successful seizure of a

U.S.-flagged vessel in nearly two centuries, with the last known event taking place in 1821.

Phillips has been hailed as a American hero, although he denies that this is so. Some of the members of his crew differed.

A Texas suit against the owners of the ship, the Waterman Steamship Corporation was brought in late 2009 by a crewmember but was dismissed late last year. Other court action, filed in Alabama, is still pending although some crewmen have settled.

The crewmen who sued say Phillips and therefore the company endangered them; procedures, they said, were not followed.

Other crew members did not sue and cooperated with the making of the Captain Phillips movie.

Phillips and the company stand by the account in the book and the movie, although Phillips acknowledges that some license was taken in the film.

The short version is that on April 8, 2009 the Maersk Alabama and its crew of 23 was pursued by pirates 240 miles off the Somali coast, and boarded.

Crewmen were secured in the engine room and in other places on the ship, defying attempts by the pirates to find them. A total of $30,000 was taken by the pirates from the ship safe.

But things began to go badly for the attackers.

Their leader was captured by crew members, their boat sank, and they had no ready means of escape.

Phillips, who said he was already a hostage, went with the pirates into the lifeboat. The pirates did not, as promised, exchange their leader for Phillips but kept him on board the lifeboat. Thus began a three-day ordeal for Phillips that was ended by U.S. Navy Seal Team 6, with four pirates killed and one surviving, who was taken into custody.

The movie departed from reality in a number of details, including the scene where Phillips gives his sea-bag to a longshoreman to carry.

“I would never give my bag to a longshoreman, I carry my own weight,” Phillips said, in an interview prior to his speech. Although Hanks wore a uniform, Phillips said he did not.

In the interview, Phillips said one of the more chilling aspects of his ordeal in the lifeboat was when the sound of approaching helicopters hurled his captors into a state of fear.

“To see these guys with weapons on you go into abject fear, to see that fear in these people with the guns is not a very good thing,” Phillips said. “If a bullet had come into the lifeboat the next one would have been coming at me.”

Key to his survival, Phillips said, was taking every opportunity to make his captors see his humanity, to see his eyes.

“I had a conscious thought, you want them to think of you as a person, make it harder for them to kill you,” said Phillips, who to this day bears no animus toward the pirates.

“I understand the situation they were in,” Phillips said, noting however that “they were my adversaries. They were not my friends.”

Security measures in the shipping industry, he said, have largely been increased since the Maersk Alabama ordeal.

More ships have security officers on board. There are increased patrols off the Somali coast, a hot-bed of piratical activity, by the U.S. and other nations.

“There are 34 nations with naval ships there, so when the cop’s on the beat crime is down. But Somalia, he said, is not the only place where piracy exists on the globe, and the onus of vigilance is still on crews and officers.

“Piracy is all over the world, it is still the second-oldest profession.”

Phillips said he did not go back to sea until 14 months after the encounter; he retired from the Merchant Marine last year and spends his time touring and speaking.

When addressing the Chamber he shared an additional piece of advice that he didn’t need capture to teach him.

“Never trust a pirate,” he said.

Sea Capt. Richard Phillips told his story to the Houma chamber, serving as the keynote speaker for the entity’s annual awards banquet. Phillips said he stayed calm when taken captive by pirates in April 2009.

SHELL ARM SIRONG | THE TIMES