A Captain's Duty

is the second mate (called the paper mate), who is responsible for navigation, maintaining charts, and seeing to the bridge’s electronic equipment. He’s the voyage planner, the guy who lays the courses down, labels them, and makes sure the light list (which gives us all the lighthouses along our route) and the Notice to Mariners are up to date. The third mate is in the entry-level slot. He takes care of the safety equipment and does anything the mate tells him to do. Beneath the third is the bosun, the leader of the able-bodied seamen and the foreman who actually puts the mate’s orders into effect. The chief and his men (first, second, andthird engineer) focus on what makes the ship go: the power plant and auxiliaries (compressors, pumps, and motors), as well as maintaining all the equipment on the ship.
    Mark Twain said that going to sea is like going to jail with a chance of drowning, and he was spot on. You give up any idea of a normal, comfortable life when you step onboard. Merchant mariners aren’t weekend warriors; we are there to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. On the water, every day is like a Monday—a workday with more to come stretching out into the distance.
     
    I have a tough reputation in the business. I’m known to be demanding, and I am. Each sailor has the lives of his crew in his hands, and I wouldn’t allow them to be thrown away because someone wasn’t prepared. Andrea’s brother, who’s also a sailor, told her once: “Onboard Rich is a different person from the fun-loving guy you know. You wouldn’t even recognize him.” I do like to have fun whenever I can, but not at the cost of neglecting what the ship needs. That’s not going to happen on my vessel.
    My first order of business was letting the crew know in no uncertain terms that we had to get the security profile right. The news out of Somalia was grim. Everyone knew that pirates there were wreaking havoc on the shipping lanes. The usual route around the Horn of Africa brings you within twenty miles of the Somali coast, but ever since 2005, when the pirates started terrorizing the merchant ships there, captains had been going out fifty miles, then one hundred, then two hundred miles to get away from these bandits. What was afive-day trip now takes ten. Ships don’t double their sailing time unless there are some very dangerous people waiting for them. But no matter how far offshore ships were going, the pirates were finding and hijacking them.
    As soon as I settled aboard the Maersk Alabama, I started getting e-mail bulletins from the Office of Naval Intelligence and various security firms about pirates: mysterious blips appearing on radar and giving chase, gun battles, the works. Ships, fishing boats, and yachts were being taken left and right. A great deal of the action was taking place around the Somali coast and in the Gulf of Aden, a deep-water basin 920 miles long and 300 miles wide that lies between Yemen and Somalia on the Horn of Africa. Something like 10 percent of all the world’s petroleum supply is shipped via the Gulf of Aden, as tankers bring oil out of the ports of Saudi Arabia, through the Red Sea, into the Gulf, then out to the Arabian Sea and on to Europe and America. A trillion dollars’ worth of goods passes by the Somali coast every year. Essentially, sailors are bringing the world’s most vital resource through the world’s most unstable region, which had turned the area around the Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast into a shooting gallery. Anyone sailing there would be under constant threat of attack from pirates, who were getting smarter and more violent by the month. The total ransoms paid were soaring into the tens of millions a year, attracting desperate young men to the gulf like bees to honey.
    And this was exactly where we were headed. Our next destination was Djibouti, which lies at the far western end of the Gulf of Aden. We had to sail in, unload, and get back out before the bad guys could get a bead on us.
    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,