The informants, a local Kenyan seamen's group, then added this startling note: All 20 crewmen were American.

The tropical seas off Somalia had grown treacherous with pirates in recent years. In 2008, the seaborne marauders stormed and seized a record number of commercial vessels, a giant Saudi supertanker among them, though never an American crew.

The high-seas hijackings, generating tens of millions of dollars in ransoms for the pirates, had eased off early this year, as a U.S.-led international naval force aggressively patrolled the Gulf of Aden. When they managed to mount attacks, the Somali pirates were left in ships' wakes, foiled nine out of 10 times.

It was a lull during which Shane Murphy, a veteran of east African sea lanes as first mate of the U.S.-flagged freighter Maersk Alabama, returned home to talk to a class at his alma mater about this 21st-century scourge.

He told the Massachusetts Maritime Academy students he thought the pirates "knew better than to go against the American ships," one recalled.

Then last Saturday the lull ended. A French tourist yacht and a German commercial ship were taken off the Somali coast. On Sunday, it was a Yemeni tug, and on Monday British and Taiwanese ships were seized. At the regional U.S. Navy headquarters in Bahrain, the command saw a new phase in the battle opening.

"Merchant mariners should be increasingly vigilant," warned the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces, a coalition of more than nine nations deploying three dozen warships in that perilous western corner of the Indian Ocean. The scope of the problem was huge, it said, with too few patrols to watch over a piece of ocean as big as the Mediterranean and Red seas combined.

On Wednesday, it was Shane Murphy's Maersk Alabama cruising through those waters, a relatively small, 500-foot-long container ship, carrying 401 containers of food aid, bound from Oman and Djibouti for Mombasa, Kenya's main port.

Seas were calm and winds light, reported the weather bureau in the nearby Seychelles islands. It was pirate weather, more benign than the earlier storms and swells that helped frustrate the marine criminals, who use swift but light and fragile skiffs to chase down their prey.

The texting tip from the seafarers' association was followed quickly at midday Wednesday by confirmation from diplomatic sources and the Danish-owned Maersk line itself: The Alabama, under the command of Capt. Richard Phillips, was the day's chief prey, seized some 280 miles (450 kilometers) southeast of Eyl, in northeast Somalia.

The 20 crewmen would be the first American hostages taken by pirates in recent memory—if they allowed themselves to be taken.

"I always hoped it wasn't going to happen to us," Phillips' wife, Andrea, said later Wednesday at her Vermont home. "I just got an e-mail from him and knew he was heading into Mombasa. He had even made the comment that pirate activity was picking up."

Only sketchy information trickled in as the day wore on—from Maersk, the U.S. Navy and sporadic satellite-telephone contact that relatives and reporters made with the crew.

Murphy's father, Joseph, who teaches at the Massachusetts academy, told Boston station WBZ he learned that the attackers had chased the Maersk Alabama for three to five hours, periodically opening fire with automatic weapons, before the assailants—said to be four in number—managed to board.

Any help was distant; the Navy said its closest warship was 345 miles away. But the crew—believed to be unarmed except for fire hoses—somehow fended them off, and themselves grabbed one of the pirates.

As the sun sank in late afternoon, a crew member called the Maersk line's offices to report, "We are safe," company CEO John F. Reinhart told reporters at his Norfolk, Va., headquarters. But he added that the call was cut off and "they did not say the pirates are off the vessel."

A standoff ensued, and around sunset off east Africa an unidentified crewman gave The Associated Press the news by satellite phone: The pirates still held Capt. Phillips.

The ship's second mate, Ken Quinn, later told CNN that the crew thought it had negotiated an exchange—Phillips for the captured pirate. But when the Americans released their captive after 12 hours, the Somalis failed to release the captain, he said. The pirates and Phillips were now in one of the freighter's lifeboats off the side, he said, while the American crew sought to free their captain with offers of food—without success.

Meanwhile, as the night deepened, the Navy reported that one of its destroyers, the USS Bainbridge, was steaming to the scene. It was believed to be mere hours away.

Although the Navy runs escort convoys in the region, the Maersk Alabama was not part of one. "The area we're patrolling is more than a million (square) miles in size. Our ships cannot be everywhere at every time," said Navy spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen.

A dozen other ships, with more than 200 crew members, are currently in Somali pirate hands, reports the International Maritime Bureau, a piracy watchdog group based in Malaysia. The bureau has reported 66 attacks since January.

Jim Wilson, Middle East correspondent for Fairplay International Shipping Magazine, saw a "business cycle" at work, after the pirates earned tens of millions last year in ransoms.

"A lot of the vessels that had been taken have been previously released, so like any other businessman, when you're out of stock, what do you do? You go and get more stock," he said. "The Somali pirates are businessmen."

And the crew of the Maersk Alabama are professionals, said Joseph Murphy, who said he believed his son would continue his career at sea once this week's episode ends.

"You've got to get the job done," the father said. "This is another day at work."
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.