6. Bulk carrier (TITAN) hijacked 19 Mar 09. Six men in a speed boat armed with AK47s and pistols boarded and hijacked the vessel, Gulf of Aden.
7. Cargo vessel (DIAMOND FALCON) fired upon 14 Mar 09. Two skiffs with men onboard armed with automatic weapons and RPGs fired upon the vessel.
8. Vessel reported attempted hijacking 1 Jan 09 at 1730 local time, Gulf of Aden.
9. Bulk carrier fired upon 30 Mar 09. A speed boat approached the vessel while a mother ship was sighted further back, Indian Ocean.
10. Container ship reported suspicious approach 28 Mar 09, Tanzania.
The pirates were approaching and attacking each and every kind of vessel that ventured around the Horn of Africa: tankers, fishing schooners, even luxury cruise ships. Nothing was safe out there. There were so many ships flying down the coast of East Africa, you had to hope you weren’t one of the unlucky ones to see a few pirate boats pop up on your radar. Once you saw them, you had very few ways of preventing an attack: speed, fire hoses, and deception were pretty much your only tools. The Somalis had automatic weapons, speedboats, rocket-propelled grenades, and a reputation for complete ruthlessness.
It was like a lion and a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. You just hoped there was safety in numbers, because if the lion chose you, you were going to have a very, very bad day. And just as the lion looks for weakness—the slow, the lame, the young—pirates zeroed in on ships that looked defenseless.
But Americans seemed out of the reach of pirates. The last time seamen on a U.S. ship were taken hostage by pirates was two hundred years ago, during the days of the Barbary corsairs, Muslim bandits who’d operated out of North African ports like Tripoli and Algiers, on the other side of the continent. Back then, piracy was near the top of Thomas Jefferson’s priority list. In 1801, 20 percent of the U.S. federal budget was spent paying ransoms to the African buccaneers. Crewmen from the ships lived and worked as slaves in the luxurious homes of the Algerian pirate chiefs. America even fought two bloody wars with the Barbary states, giving the Marines’ Hymn its famous second line—“to the shores of Tripoli.”
That was a long time ago. Piracy had faded from the nation’s memory. And if you did get in trouble, it was assumed you were on your own. The U.S. Navy hadn’t been in the pirate-hunting business for two centuries. But by the end of that second day, I felt the crew was ready for an attack. Things could always improve, but we’d made a good start. Little did I know that the men who were going to test us to our limits were already on the water.
FOUR
-6 Days
The situation in this region is extremely serious. We have not seen such a surge in pirate activity in this area previously. These pirates are not afraid to use significant firepower in attempts to bring vessels under their control. Over 260 seafarers have been taken hostage in Somalia this year. Unless further action is taken, seafarers remain in serious danger.
I’d never been approached by a pirate ship in my entire career, but I’d come close. On a run through the Gulf of Aden the previous September, I’d been standing on the bridge when Shane, my chief mate, pulled me aside.
“Cap, you know I mentioned to you that ship we passed earlier?”
I nodded. On the more well-traveled routes around the world, you’d see the same ships again and again, running the same legs of the trip you’re on and stopping in the same ports. Their names pop up on the AIS, the Automatic Identification System. We’d passed a container ship the night before. Shane had been monitoring the radio and heard its name mentioned.
“Six hours ago, it was taken by pirates.”
“Where?” I said.
“Just north of the Kenya-Somalia border.”
It had been a roll of the dice. The pirates had turned north and gotten them, instead of turning south and attacking us.
Piracy has seasons, just like the weather. The Indian Ocean is usually as smooth as glass, a dazzling tropical blue, what sailors call “pretty water,” but from late June through early September, the khareef season arrives, bringing southwest monsoons sweeping across the ocean, making it dangerous for small craft. That means pirate season runs from October through May. By April, the bandits are looking to make a few rich hauls before the stormy season puts them out of business.
Most of the pirates, I knew, came from a northeastern region of Somalia known as Puntland, named after the mythical Land of Punt, known to the ancient Egyptians as the source of gold, ebony, and African blackwood. But from a place that exported riches to the Pharaohs, it had become a place where famine, bandits, and chaos were the order of the day. The government’s collapse in 1991 brought on mass starvation and the arrival of a U.N. peacekeeping force led by the U.S. Army. That all ended on October 3 and 4, 1993, when the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred and eighteen American soldiers and one Malaysian lost their lives in a horrific gunfight.
The pirates claimed they were former fishermen who’d been forced into banditry when their livelihoods disappeared. According to them, foreign trawlers had arrived off their coastline and taken hundreds of millions of dollars of tuna, sardines, mackerel, and swordfish out of the ocean. Other ships dumped hazardous waste in the water to make a quick buck. The local fishermen couldn’t hope to compete with the advanced fleets from Spain and Japan and found that the intruders shot at them when they tried to work the same coastline. Soon they were reduced to begging, and even starvation.
But I’d seen schools of mackerel, tuna, and other fish every time I’d gone down the coast of Somalia. There was a living to be made out there. I believed the Somalis had simply found easier work: piracy.
In the 1990s, boats began leaving Somali ports like Eyl with armed young men aboard to seize the foreign crews and hold them for a small ransom. They were ruthless, professional bandits who’d seen a chance to make it big and took it. They made $120 million in 2008, in a country where most people make around $600 a year. These guys had left any thoughts of sardines and swordfish far behind. To me, there was no difference between them and a bunch of Mafia extortionists, or armed robbers sticking up a gas station. Sure, they’re poor, but stealing is stealing.
When the pirates began, in the early 1990s, they would shoot out of their local ports in beaten-up wooden skiffs with a single outboard engine, so they could only prowl along the coastline, covering a few thousand square miles of ocean. Their boats weren’t equipped to go out any farther. But ships did what they always do when faced with a pirate threat along known shipping routes. They altered their routes. The big ships started sailing farther offshore and the bandits found they were out of luck.
That’s when the Somalis changed the game. Instead of capturing trawlers and freighters and holding them for ransom, they stole the vessels and used them as mother ships. These trawlers can travel hundreds of miles offshore in rough weather, and the Somalis simply tied their skiffs to the back and went searching for bigger game. When they spotted a ship, they’d offload teams of three or four pirates into the skiffs and go hunting. It didn’t matter if they failed. The mother ship gave them the ability to stay at sea for weeks at a time, searching for the right victim. By 2005 or so, there was nowhere to run off the coast of East Africa. Anywhere you could sail, the pirates could follow.
The standard operating procedure for a pirate attack goes this way: three or more quick boats would approach a ship just before sunset or just after sunrise, moving fast. There would be a mother ship lurking behind, shadowing the target from over the horizon. The pirates would come up to the hull of the target ship, throw grappling hooks up to the deck, secure them, then shimmy up to the deck. From then on, it’s a game of ransoms and threats.