A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea

By: Richard Phillips
Location: NF 920 PHI
Genre:  Pirates and Bravery


"I share the country's admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew. His courage is a model for all Americans."
--President Barack Obama 

My daughter wanted to be a pirate, I am pleased she did not become one -they are not nice people. My work mate watched the movie of this book- it freaked her out. This is a story of vile pirates and ridiculous bravery. Duty and bravery- do we know we have these qualities, or must we wait until we are forced to discover them. If we find them, we discover something else, we discover what a hero looks like.



8th April 2009 was just an ordinary day for 53 -year-old Richard Phillips, captain of the United States-registered cargo vessel, the Maersk Alabama, as it headed towards the port of Mombasa. Ordinary that is until, two hundred or so miles off the east coast of Africa, armed Somali pirates attacked and boarded the freighter. It was the first time an American cargo ship had been hijacked in over 200 years.
What the pirates didn't expect was that the crew would fight back, nor did they expect Captain Phillips to offer himself as a hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew - a courageous gesture that resulted in his being held captive on a tiny life-boat off the anarchic, gun-plagued coast of Somalia. And so began a tense five-day stand-off, which ended in a daring high-seas rescue by U.S. Navy SEALs.
In A Captain's Duty, Richard Phillips tells his own extraordinary story - that of an ordinary man who did what he saw as his duty and in so doing became a hero. It is a thrilling true tale of adventure and courage in the face of deprivation, death threats and mock executions and also a compulsively readable first-hand account of the terrors of high-seas hostage-taking.