Twenty-nine British holiday-makers were on board a cruise ship targeted by pirates off the coast of Somalia at the weekend, it emerged last night.

Pirates tried to approach the Nautica, with more than 1,000 people on board, while she was sailing in the Gulf of Aden.

Two small boats, each carrying three or four pirates, approached the Nautica and fired eight shots as they tried to intercept the ship. No one was injured and the ship docked in Oman, as scheduled, yesterday.

A spokesman for Oceania Cruises, which owns the ship, said that the vessel was travelling within the maritime safety protection area — a shipping lane set up by coalition forces to provide safe passage in the region — when she was attacked.

She had just passed a group of fishing vessels when the boats approached her and tried to intercept her path. One of the boats managed to get within 300 yards of the boat before firing at her.

The pirates had been seen by a member of the crew as they approached the boat. The ship’s captain, Jurica Brajcic, managed to manoeuvre out of the way of the pirates and, when travelling at full speed, to outpace them.

Although the cruise company said that it had not been aware of any vessels in the immediate area at the time of the attack, Jesper Lynge, a spokesman for the Danish Navy, which currently leads the international taskforce in the region, said that a vessel was dispatched to aid the Nautica as she came under fire, “thereby preventing an act of piracy”.

Danish TV claimed that a French Navy warship, alerted by the Danish Navy, had scrambled a helicopter to the scene to ward off the pirates.

The attack came as the wrangling over the ransom for the Sirius Star, the giant Saudi oil tanker seized in the region two weeks ago, continued. Her hijackers had set a deadline of November 30 for the owners of the vessel to pay a $25 million ransom, but while there has been no news of a breakthrough in negotiations with the ship’s owner, Vela International, the hijackers said yesterday that they were still ready to negotiate.

The surge in piracy this year in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean off Somalia has seen insurance costs rise and brought millions of dollars in ransoms to the pirates.

The Ukrainian authorities are also carrying out last-minute negotiations over plans to release the MV Faina, a ship carrying tanks and other weapons seized in September, for which pirates are demanding $8 million.

While the region has suffered a string of high-profile attacks on cargo ships, an attack on a cruise vessel is much less common. Cyrus Mody of the International Maritime Bureau said that Sunday’s attack marked the first time that a ship of the Nautica’s size had been targeted by pirates.

“There have been a couple of passenger yachts hijacked, but they were much smaller,” he told CNN.

The Nautica is the second cruise ship this year to have come under attack in the region. In April pirates seized Le Ponant, a luxury ship carrying 30 crew members, who were rescued only after an eight-day stand-off.

The Nautica, with 400 crew, was carrying 684 passengers, each paying at least £4,500 for a 32-day trip from Rome to Singapore, when she was attacked at about 9.30am local time on Sunday.

The company said that it operated cruises in the area twice a year and had never experienced any problems.

A spokesman said that it believed this to be an isolated incident and that it would not be cancelling other trips in the area. “Our crew are very well trained in safety, security and antipiracy, and the ship is very well armed to deal with these situations,” he said last night.

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