07 May 2009

AUDIO: Captain Talks Family and Piracy

Father says news of piracy aboard son’s ship was “devastating”

 

This is a transcript of an audio file (4:56) of Capt. Joseph Murphy, a professor at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and America.gov writer Matt Herrick talking about matters related to international piracy, Murphy’s upbringing and how news that son Shane’s ship had been hijacked affected the Murphy family.

(begin transcript)

MATT HERRICK: This is Matt Herrick with America.gov. Recently, I traveled to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy to talk with Captain Joseph Murphy, professor of marine transportation, about how the institution prepares its students to deal with piracy on the high seas.

Murphy teaches courses in security and anti-piracy, but he is also the father of Shane Murphy, chief mate on the Maersk Alabama container ship that was hijacked by Somali pirates on April 8th in the Gulf of Aden.

Captain Murphy.

CAPT. JOSEPH MURPHY: I started — I was born and raised in Boston. Irish Catholic, obviously. Inner-city kid. My grandparents had a cottage down in Brant Rock, which is right up on the coast here. We summered there every summer. When my mother was pregnant, she was laying on the beach there. We were water puppies. I mean, we could swim at, you know, maybe 4 years old, 5 years old. My sisters and I, my brother and my sisters and I, we could all swim. Used to skin dive lobster here. We had boats. We did all of that. Shane, for example: I owned a lobster boat down here and I used to fish when I was home in the summer. I have pictures of Shane standing in the porta-crib with his lifejacket on, on that lobster boat. I’d give him a string with a piece of wooden lath — lobster lath — and he thought he was fishing. He would pull ‘em in all day. Loved it. My kids … my kids love the water. They love boats. They love to fish. They’re all like that. I think that comes … you know, that respect for the sea and the love of the sea and all that comes from your association with it. They know it’s dangerous. They know it can be lethal. They understand all of that. But they learned how to survive in that environment and they enjoy it.

MATT HERRICK: Yet, experience and training cannot fully prepare a mariner’s family for the reality of a hijacking or kidnapping.

Captain Murphy.

CAPT. JOSEPH MURPHY: If you didn’t know anything about Somali pirates, you probably wouldn’t be too frightened until somebody told you that your son was being held captive. If you do know about Somali pirates, then you’re really frightened because you know that potentially there could be a real serious outcome there.

MATT HERRICK: You know about them.

CAPT. JOSEPH MURPHY: Sure I do.

MATT HERRICK: How about your wife?

CAPT. JOSEPH MURPHY: No, she doesn’t have any idea.

MATT HERRICK: So, when the knowledge isn’t there, you’re a little more …

CAPT. JOSEPH MURPHY: No, I had to tell her, you know, early in the morning that our son was being held by pirates off the Somali coast. That is a devastating situation. It is a devastating situation for Shane’s wife. Both really collapsed. You know, they were, you know, just totally emotionally wretched. You know … mariners are willing to accept that risk.

MATT HERRICK: Good parents, said Murphy, show their children how to mitigate risk. He uses New England’s frigid Atlantic Ocean to teach this lesson about security.

CAPT. JOSEPH MURPHY: I want you to think of your mother. OK? And she’d say, ‘Get out of the water. Your lips are blue.’ [laughter] Right? And she’d make you come up and you had to sit there for … she’d dry you off with a towel and make you sit in the sand. And she’d say, ‘You can’t go in the water for 20 minutes. You got to wait until you stop shivering.’ OK? Well, what is that? That’s situational awareness. First of all, she learned that from her mother. OK? That’s cyanosis. It’s the carbon dioxide building up in your blood because it’s not effectively exchanging. The shivering is a sign of cold. Your body is trying to produce heat. She took you out of the water. She did the best thing she could possibly do, which was dry you off. And then she had you sit in the sand because there was thermal exchange there — conductivity. And then she would tell you you can’t go in because she was — actually they were trying to get your core temperature to come back up. And the next time you went in — which was five minutes later, of course, not 20 [laughter] — you couldn’t stay in as long because your core temperature was dropping and dropping and dropping. That’s what has to happen with security. We have to be able to develop that situational awareness where we use empirical experience to prevent an occurrence. We can’t stop them all. We can’t. But some we can. And it’s far better to prevent it than to have to mitigate it.

For more information, see “Young Mariners Get Close-Up Lesson in Thwarting Pirates.”

(end transcript)

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