The Maersk Alabama, which is the vessel boarded by pirates off East Africa, is a much smaller boxboat than the above. The story is related very well in the link below so I won't bother to repeat it, just to make a couple of points.
The captain wound up in the lifeboat because it was a freefall lifeboat. This is one which is mounted angled down on rails at the stern and is released from inside the boat. Everybody has to strap themselves in and the thing hurtles down into the water in a stomach wrenching plunge. The captain was showing them how to operate it when they decided to take him with them. He then spent several days bobbing around in the Indian Ocean with heavily armed and increasingly desperate pirates. Not nice, and he has deservedly become an All-American hero.
The three remaining teenage pirates were surrounded by a billion dollars of American hardware and the conclusion was fairly inevitable. They were shot simultaneously by US Navy Seals snipers on the stern of the USS Bainbridge when all three were in view at the same time, probably unaware that the Americans had night sights that made them as visible as in broad daylight.
The USS Bainbridge then made her way to Mombasa, detouring to provide assistance to another American cargoship, the Liberty Sun, which was being fired upon by pirates in revenge for the slaughter of their comrades.
Although the temptation is to solve the pirate problem by force, this seldom works out. The French stormed a seized yacht last week but the owner died in the firefight, probably by a French bullet. The Indian navy destroyed a fishing boat being used by pirates as a mother ship some time ago only to find out next day that it was a foreign fishing boat that had been seized and all the innocent crew had perished along with the pirates.
The long term solution is clearly to wipe out the Somali pirates shore bases but the Americans are doubtless reluctant to do this remembering the horrific images of the bodies of dead American soldiers being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu after the Black Hawk Down debacle.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6115871.ece