Captain Phillips: was he a hero?
Brave sailor or reckless fool? Did Maersk’s master ignore official advice by sailing too close to dangerous shores, asks GILES WHITTELL.
On the evening of Good Friday, 2009, Andrea Phillips was at home in Vermont with her sisters-in-law, wondering who was going to play her husband in the movie of his life. He was in desperate straits and a little light relief seemed in order. The sisters-in-law settled on George Clooney.
A lot of people pass the time with this sort of daydreaming, but this was different. Agents really were calling. Large dollar sums were being plucked from thin air and bid up against each other as the value of Andrea’s husband’s story before anyone knew how it would end.
Hollywood was circling, salivating, because the story was a good one, but also because it seemed made for the medium. True stories pre-packaged with good guy, villain, schmaltz, beginning, middle and end are exceedingly rare.
As the sisters-in-law fantasised about Clooney, their brother, Richard Phillips, was drifting towards the coast of Somalia in a lifeboat cast adrift from the container ship of which he had been captain. He was tied to a steel bar in the lifeboat’s cabin with four chain-smoking Somali pirates taking turns to guard him. He was the first American merchant seaman to be taken hostage by pirates in 200 years, and the first big test of President Barack Obama’s crisismanagement courage. Obama would probably have had to make a fuss about Phillips anyway, but the story had taken on a life of its own. It would rule the news cycle until it ended – however it ended – because Phillips had gone and been a hero.
He was a big, tough man with a grey beard, in his fifties. There, the resemblance to Clooney ended, but Phillips had plenty of life experience to compensate. According to his autobiography, he’d dropped out of college, got into a car chase as a taxi driver, survived brutal abuse at a merchant mariners’ academy in Massachusetts and almost been crushed to death while a fire engine was unloaded from a cargo ship in Greenland. By Easter 2009, his sailing career spanned 30 years. Whether it all prepared him for his run-in with pirates depends whose account of it you believe – and as the film it inspired, Captain Phillips, gathers plaudits, some of his crew disagree. That said, four years on, the gist of the real story is clear and scary.
On March 28, Phillips flew to Oman to take command of the Maersk Alabama, a 155 metrelong ship carrying American food aid to Kenya. His route took him via Djibouti, which meant sailing along the Yemeni coast into the Gulf of Aden, then rounding the Horn of Africa and turning south into the most dangerous waters on the planet.
The latest bulletin on threats to shipping from the US Office of Naval Intelligence recorded 39 attacks on the East African coast in the previous week alone. More than 200 merchant seamen were being held hostage on 20 hijacked ships, most of them in lawless ports along the Somali coast. Some had been held for months in sour-aired dungeons, subjected to repeated mock executions, while pirates held out for multimillion-dollar ransoms from the seamen’s employers.
Phillips had a crew of 20, most of whom he barely knew, and no guns. The ship’s defences consisted of fire hoses and lockable grilles designed to stop pirates climbing up the outside ladder to the bridge.
GPS data shows that when the Alabama was boarded on April 8, she was 240 miles off the Somali coast. In his own account, Phillips claims it was 300 miles, but even if true, it was not nearly far enough. A US government advisory dated April 7 urged shis to stay at least 600 miles offshore, and on that day two pirate skiffs launched from a mother ship gave chase and turned back only after Alabama was able to outrun them into heavy seas.
It was a dress rehearsal that left Captain Phillips chuffed, exhilarated and more aware than ever that he was on his own.
‘‘If you are targeted, you can’t call 911,’’ he wrote. You can call a British organisation called the UK Maritime Trade Operation (UKMTO), but he had tried that and found the British condescending and unhelpful. You can call its American equivalent. He tried that too, but no one answered.
The pirates struck again at 7am the next day. This time they launched from closer, with a boarding ladder exactly the right length to hook over Alabama’s gunwale. The fire hoses proved useless. So did distress flares used as rockets. Four men boarded, armed with AK47 assault rifles and led by an interpreter with an American accent who was later identified as Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse.
Almost casually, they started shooting at the bridge. ‘‘I could see the pirates were very thin and dressed in dirty T-shirts and shorts with rubber sandals,’’ Phillips wrote. One of them ‘‘sat cross-legged on the deck and began firing up at me with his AK47’’.
By this time, 17 of Alabama’s crew had locked themselves away in a hiding place behind the engine room, according to a plan agreed the previous day. Nine of those who hid there are now suing Maersk Line, claiming Phillips deliberately ignored warnings not to steer into pirateinfested waters. His critics claim the real hero of the hijacking was Mike Perry, the ship’s chief engineer, but in fairness to Phillips, he credits his subordinates with choosing the hiding place, and admits he should have retreated there while there was time Not doing so was his first mistake.
Maersk Line has more than 360 cargo ships and tankers to keep track of, on five oceans. Phillips did send out distress signals, but he also disabled his radar and switched his VHF radio to a seldom-monitored channel to prevent the pirates contacting their mother ship. He made no satellite phone calls, and when told to place a call by the pirates he deliberately misdialled. It would be hours before the gravity of Alabama’s situation became clear to its owners or the US Navy, but it was clear at once to its captain.
He and two crew members were trapped on the bridge with a reserve of US$30,000 (NZ$35,520) in cash for emergencies, and four strung-out buccaneers who wanted a ransom closer to US$2 million.
The pirates were nervous about Alabama’s missing crew. They started jabbing their guns at their three hostages demanding that everyone be summoned to the bridge. Phillips pretended to oblige: he got on the public address system to announce that ‘‘pirates want the crew on the bridge’’.
The crew stayed put. Eventually, Muse ordered Phillips to help him find them. Again, Phillips pretended to help, announcing himself by talking loudly down all the ship’s corridors and finding no one.
The first breakthrough came when Muse took one of the other hostages on a second search of the ship, unarmed. The hostage took him straight to the hiding place, where the crew put a knife to his throat and trussed him up.
In the non-Hollywood version of the story, this is one piece of heroics that had nothing to do with Phillips. Another concerned the pirates’ speedboat, which Perry claimed later to have destroyed by whacking it with Alabama’s rudder. Phillips thought the pirates had scuttled it themselves.
By mid-afternoon, the three pirates left on the bridge were looking for a way out. Phillips offered them one: a rescue boat that could be winched down to the water or dropped.
The myth-making that quickly took over the story says Phillips gave himself as a hostage to save his crew. The truth is, he had little choice. He joined the pirates in the rescue boat to get them off Alabama, then transferred with them to the ship’s lifeboat when the rescue boat’s engine failed. Finally, he tried to swap himself for Muse, but that failed too: when Muse was lowered on to the lifeboat, he promptly throttled it up and headed for the coast.
Phillips spent five days on that lifeboat, bobbing about on the Indian Ocean and trying not to crack. In the meantime, the world’s press laid siege to his home, a flotilla of pirate ships set out from Somalia to help Muse, and Obama mobilised the world’s largest navy to show them who was really boss.
His point man was none other than General David Petraeus, hero of Iraq and later America’s top soldier in Afghanistan.
Seal Team Six were dispatched to the scene with parachutes and inflatable rafts. The men from the unit that two years later would kill Osama bin Laden were picked out of the water by USS Bainbridge, a guided missile destroyer, which shadowed the lifeboat waiting for permission to fire.
The new president was reluctant to start a shooting war so close to Mogadishu, scene of the death of 18 elite American soldiers in a botched raid in 1993. On his third night as a hostage, however, Phillips jumped overboard and swam towards Bainbridge, hoping her officers would take the opportunity to sink the lifeboat. They didn’t. Instead, the pirates recaptured their man and tied him up with what they called halal knots – apparently a prelude to execution. Obama said the Seals could fire when they had a clean shot.
Their chance came soon after sun set on April 12. Phillips was at the end of his rope, almost literally. Relenting slightly, the pirates untied him to ease the strain on his wrists. He stood up and made to walk out of the lifeboat’s cabin. ‘‘So shoot me,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve had enough. I’m out of here.’’ A shot was fired from the cockpit. Then several more from Bainbridge. Each pirate fell dead with a single shot to the head.
The legend of the Seals was burnished – it was good shooting, by any standards – and the legend of the hero captain was established. Four years on, he’s back at sea and being played by Tom Hanks rather than George Clooney. The critics seem to agree it’s a good piece of casting.