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Captain Richard Phillips and the Pirates

What's ahead for the Vermont captain

by Mel Allen

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Captain Richard Phillips
Andrea Phillips Interview

The first December snow has come to Underhill, Vermont, and that makes Richard Phillips happy. "My kind of weather," the 54-year-old Merchant Marine captain says. It's been only eight months since Somali pirates took him from the helm of the Maersk Alabama, the American container ship they seized on Wednesday, April 8, 2009, off the East African coast: the first pirate capture of any American ship since the early 1800s.

Demanding ransom, the Somalis held Phillips at gunpoint onboard the ship's enclosed lifeboat. For the next five days, the story of a ship's captain sacrificing his safety for his vessel and 19-man crew riveted the world, his face seen across televisions everywhere. Then, on April 12, Easter Sunday, came the electrifying news: U.S. Navy SEAL snipers had killed three of the pirates in one daring, high-risk volley amid roiling seas and fading light. The fourth pirate was in custody aboard a Navy destroyer, where reportedly he'd been negotiating the ransom. "His courage is a model for all Americans," President Barack Obama said of Phillips.

Life for Richard Phillips and his wife, Andrea, an emergency-room nurse in Burlington, hasn't been the same since his ordeal. After 30 years at sea, 19 as a ship's captain, he's been tied to the land since his rescue. He says he wants to head back to sea, but admits that maybe it's time for new challenges. When his memoir, A Captain's Duty, is published in April, he'll be entering his own uncharted waters--a nationwide book tour. Columbia Pictures has bought the movie rights. He meets from time to time with a speech coach, who is helping this natural storyteller hone his delivery, to capture an audience.

Only a day before our visit, however, news reports were focusing on Maersk Alabama crew members who were saying that no matter how heroic Phillips's actions, he'd been negligent and stubborn in steering his ship too close to pirate-infested waters, even after warnings that a more prudent route would be much farther out to sea. "We all make mistakes," he says, the snow swirling outside. "I'm prepared for the criticism. I expected it. It's the society we live in. I think there are a lot of contradictions in what's being said. Why do things change three, four, six, eight months down the road? I feel comfortable in what I've done. I'm sure there's some human nature involved in this."

We talk for three hours in Phillips's rambling 1840s farmhouse, with a barn across the road and 16 acres of snow-covered fields out the windows. He wears a shirt emblazoned with the photo and logo of the USS Bainbridge, the destroyer that rescued him. What follows is an edited version of our conversation. For clarity and brevity, Phillips's remarks are compressed. My comments in italics are meant as narrative bridges. Phillips's book, A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy Seals, and My Dangerous Days at Sea, will be published by Hyperion in April.

"Pirates are like a pack of hyenas on the hunt. Usually these are 25- to 30-foot fishing boats [with] high-powered engines on the back. They go fast, and they're very maneuverable. They've got four or five guys in a boat who all live on the mother ship. The mother ship can be a tugboat, a fishing boat, a yacht, [or] just something they've stolen. Forty or more guys are living on it, and they either tow their boats or they put them on the deck if it's a big enough ship, and they go [hundreds of miles] out and they just sit there and drift and wait for a target ...