NAIROBI, Kenya — The crew of the Naham 3, a longline fishing trawler, will never forget the day in 2012 when they disappeared.
In the early morning hours of March 26, somewhere in the deep blue waters of the western Indian Ocean near the Seychelles, a small boat emerged out of the murk. It zoomed toward the Naham 3 with a burst of gunfire.
“It’s the pirates! It’s the pirates!” the captain yelled.
What followed were four and half years of captivity, during which the crew members were beaten with bamboo poles, ate rats to survive and were held at gunpoint in a sweltering stretch of Somalian desert by a band of pirates who were convinced they were going to make many millions of dollars.
It all ended this weekend. The pirates finally relented, accepting a smaller amount to release the 26 surviving members of the Naham 3 crew after one of the longest pirate hostage ordeals ever endured.
On Monday, the crew members gathered in a hotel here to recount their ordeal. They were wearing donated clothes and relaxed smiles, looking more like a sports team in matching blue polo shirts and new flip-flops. The sailors hailed from several Asian countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, China and Cambodia.
“Some of my crewmen kept saying, ‘We will never go home. We will die here,’” said Antonio A. Libres Jr., one of the former hostages. “But me, no. I never gave up.”
Mr. Libres, a Filipino sailor, seemed almost confused about how his captors could be so heartless. “The pirates are worse than animals,” he said. “You can’t understand these people.”
Somalia’s piracy problem has eased compared with five years ago, when scores of ships were hijacked and the pirate crews waited for shrink-wrapped millions to fall from the sky. (That was the preferred way of delivering ransoms — wrapping blocks of cash in plastic and dropping them from planes by parachute.)
Shipping companies eventually wised up and employed armed guards to fire on pirate skiffs. The added security, along with increased sea patrols by Western navies, brought the pirate frenzy to a halt. According to the European Union’s antipiracy program, there were no Somali pirate attacks against commercial vessels in 2015 and there have been none recorded this year; there were 176 attacks as recently as 2011.
Still, dozens of sailors remained in captivity from earlier attacks. Negotiators had been working for years to free the crew of the Naham 3, an Omani-flagged vessel hijacked while fishing for tuna near the Seychelles.
“The pirates were uneducated, obstructionist, unmotivated and unrealistic,” said Leslie Edwards, the lead negotiator for the sailors’ release. “They picked poor fishermen from poor countries from poor families. They were dreaming about huge amounts of money they were never going to get.”
In the end, negotiators worked with clan elders in Somalia to persuade the pirates to accept a relatively small amount of money to cover the costs of holding the captives for 1,672 days. The negotiators did not disclose the amount, though they said it was “nothing” compared with what the pirates originally demanded. A British law firm helped raise the money, and the rescue mission was coordinated by Oceans Beyond Piracy, a project run by an American nonprofit organization.
The sailors said they often survived on one liter of water a day in the Somalian desert, where the temperatures routinely soared beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They had so little food that they were forced to trap rats, birds and wild cats to eat. The worst part, they said, was seeing three shipmates die — two from sickness, one who was shot to death.
“Even if I tell you all the bad words in the world, that is not enough for them,” Arnel Balbero, another Filipino sailor, said of his captors.
But he said there was no point in staying angry about it.
“What are you going to do?” he said. “The important thing is to start again.”
That start, he said, will be on land. He has promised his family he will never go back to sea.
