by Jeffrey Gettleman
“It wasn’t really a pretty night,” Rachel Chandler recalled. Small, sloshing waves were coming from the southeast, and a trickle of wind blew from the southwest. There was no moon, and the stars were shrouded by clouds.
The boat was slowly edging away from Mahé, the main island in the Seychelles archipelago, for Tanga, Tanzania, the beginning of a two-week passage across the Indian Ocean. The wind was pushing them farther north than they’d planned to be. With no ships or land in sight, the Chandlers’ 38-foot sailboat, the Lynn Rival, bobbed along all alone.
Rachel, who is 57, was on watch — it was her turn to do the four-hour shift — and her husband, Paul, was asleep below deck. It was about 2:30 a.m., and she sat in a T-shirt and light trousers at the stern, feeling seasick. Because the wind was so faint, Rachel turned on the sailboat’s small engine, which chugged along at five knots, just loud enough to drown out other noise.
By the time she heard the high-pitched whine of outboard motors at full throttle, she had only seconds to react. Two skiffs suddenly materialized out of the murk, and when she swung the flashlight’s beam onto the water, two gunshots rang out.
“No guns! No guns!” she screamed.
The crack of assault rifles jarred Paul awake. He had been sleeping naked — as he often does on tropical nights — and hesitated before jumping out of the cabin. “The first thing I thought,” said Paul, who is 61, “was pirates.”
Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard, their assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers clanging against the hull. Paul activated an emergency beacon, which immediately started emitting an S.O.S., and then went up on deck. The men stank of the sea and nervous musk, and they jabbed their guns at the Chandlers.
“Stop engine!” they shouted. “Crew, crew! How many crew number?”
One pirate was particularly concerned about anything flashing, and Paul’s heart sank when the pirate stomped below deck and discovered the emergency beacon, blinking like a strobe, and promptly switched it off. The pirates ordered the Chandlers not to touch anything else, and then they demanded a shower.
This was Oct. 23, 2009. The Chandlers would be held for the next 388 days. In the past few years, loosely organized gangs of Somali pirates, kitted out with Fiberglas skiffs, rusty Kalashnikovs and flip-flops, have waylaid hundreds of ships — yachts, fishing boats, freighters, gigantic oil tankers, creaky old Indian dhows, essentially anything that floats — and then extracted ransom in exchange for their return. As a result, the worldwide shipping industry now spends billions of dollars on higher insurance premiums, armed guards and extra fuel to detour thousands of miles away from the Gulf of Aden, a congested shipping lane just off Somalia’s coast leading to the Red Sea. Navies from more than two dozen countries patrol Somalia’s coast, burning around a million dollars of fuel per day. And yet 2011 is on track to be another banner year for piracy, with more than 20 ships already seized, hundreds of seamen in captivity and the average ransom now fetching upward of $5 million, a fortune anywhere but especially in a country with no government and an economy that has been decimated by decades of war. Of all the thousands of people who have been held for ransom, though, few, if any, would endure as long — and as intimate — an experience behind pirate lines as Paul and Rachel Chandler.
Read more:
Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook
“It wasn’t really a pretty night,” Rachel Chandler recalled. Small, sloshing waves were coming from the southeast, and a trickle of wind blew from the southwest. There was no moon, and the stars were shrouded by clouds.
The boat was slowly edging away from Mahé, the main island in the Seychelles archipelago, for Tanga, Tanzania, the beginning of a two-week passage across the Indian Ocean. The wind was pushing them farther north than they’d planned to be. With no ships or land in sight, the Chandlers’ 38-foot sailboat, the Lynn Rival, bobbed along all alone. Rachel, who is 57, was on watch — it was her turn to do the four-hour shift — and her husband, Paul, was asleep below deck. It was about 2:30 a.m., and she sat in a T-shirt and light trousers at the stern, feeling seasick. Because the wind was so faint, Rachel turned on the sailboat’s small engine, which chugged along at five knots, just loud enough to drown out other noise.
By the time she heard the high-pitched whine of outboard motors at full throttle, she had only seconds to react. Two skiffs suddenly materialized out of the murk, and when she swung the flashlight’s beam onto the water, two gunshots rang out.
“No guns! No guns!” she screamed.
The crack of assault rifles jarred Paul awake. He had been sleeping naked — as he often does on tropical nights — and hesitated before jumping out of the cabin. “The first thing I thought,” said Paul, who is 61, “was pirates.”
Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard, their assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers clanging against the hull. Paul activated an emergency beacon, which immediately started emitting an S.O.S., and then went up on deck. The men stank of the sea and nervous musk, and they jabbed their guns at the Chandlers.
“Stop engine!” they shouted. “Crew, crew! How many crew number?”
One pirate was particularly concerned about anything flashing, and Paul’s heart sank when the pirate stomped below deck and discovered the emergency beacon, blinking like a strobe, and promptly switched it off. The pirates ordered the Chandlers not to touch anything else, and then they demanded a shower.
This was Oct. 23, 2009. The Chandlers would be held for the next 388 days. In the past few years, loosely organized gangs of Somali pirates, kitted out with Fiberglas skiffs, rusty Kalashnikovs and flip-flops, have waylaid hundreds of ships — yachts, fishing boats, freighters, gigantic oil tankers, creaky old Indian dhows, essentially anything that floats — and then extracted ransom in exchange for their return. As a result, the worldwide shipping industry now spends billions of dollars on higher insurance premiums, armed guards and extra fuel to detour thousands of miles away from the Gulf of Aden, a congested shipping lane just off Somalia’s coast leading to the Red Sea. Navies from more than two dozen countries patrol Somalia’s coast, burning around a million dollars of fuel per day. And yet 2011 is on track to be another banner year for piracy, with more than 20 ships already seized, hundreds of seamen in captivity and the average ransom now fetching upward of $5 million, a fortune anywhere but especially in a country with no government and an economy that has been decimated by decades of war. Of all the thousands of people who have been held for ransom, though, few, if any, would endure as long — and as intimate — an experience behind pirate lines as Paul and Rachel Chandler.
Read more:
Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook
