Pirates: A New History, from Vikings to Somali Raiders

Pirates

Copyright © 2019 Peter Lehr

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934850

ISBN 978-0-300-18074-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations

Introduction: The Sudden Return of Piracy

Part I: Distinct Regions, AD 700 to 1500

Joining the Wicked Order

God Wills It

Turning a Blind Eye

There Was No Choice

Spotting Ships at Sea

Overwhelming the Prey

Raiding the Coasts

Pirate Violence

Efforts to End Piracy on Land

Efforts to End Piracy at Sea

Hunting Pirates

Attacking Pirate Bases

Part II: The Rise of European Sea Power, 1500 to 1914

Seeking a Merry Life and a Short One

Tars, Gents and Traders

Piracy Brings No Disgrace

The Lure of Easy Money

Pirate Ports

The Pirate Queen and her Courtiers

Raffish Instruments of Foreign Policy

Acquiring a Suitable Vessel

Stalking and Capturing the Prey

Desperate Battles at Sea

High-End Piracy

Whoring, Drinking and Gambling

Typical Ends of Pirate Careers

The Pitfalls of Co-opting Former Pirates

Hunting the Hunters

Anti-Piracy Alliances

The Apparent Demise of Piracy

Part III: A Globalised World, 1914 to the Present

They Were Rich, We Were Poor

The Winds of Change

Modern Enabling Environments

A New Raffish Instrument

The Modern Pirate Fleet

Guise and Guile in Modern Times

Shock and Awe Today

The ‘Uniquely Violent Nature’ of Nigerian Piracy

Modern Pirates’ Modus Operandi

Modern Variants of the Merry Life

Piracy and the Law

Citadels and Robot Ships

Hunting Pirates at Sea

Counter-Measures on Pirate Shores

Conclusion: Back with a Vengeance

Glossary

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Maps and Illustrations

MAPS

Viking Invasions in Western Europe.

Wokou Raids in East Asia.

Mediterranean and Corsair Strongholds.

Coxinga’s Pirate Kingdom, 1662.

Somalian Piracy Threat.

Top Ten Piracy Hot Spots.

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

1. A Viking drakkar. Illustration from A. Brun, Noveau Larousse Ilustré, 1866–77.

2. A wooden model of a galley of the Knights Hospitaller, Museo Storico Navale di Venezia (Naval History Museum). Photograph by Myriam Thyes / CC-BY-SA-3.0.

3. A galley running before the wind. Illustration from Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of the Barbary Corsairs, 1890.

4. The Golden Hind. Illustration from Laurence Larson, A Short History of England and the British Empire, 1915.

5. A Spanish galleon. Detail from Cornelis Verbeeck, A Naval Encounter between Dutch and Spanish Warships, 1618/1620. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

6. A Chinese junk. Illustration from the archives of Pearson Scott Foresman.

PLATE SECTION

1. A Viking raid on an English Channel coast under Olaf Tryggvason, 900s AD. Hand-coloured woodcut of a nineteenth-century illustration. North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy Stock Photo.

2. A Viking raid on the Kent coast. Illustration from Henry D. M. Spence, The Church of England: A History for the People, London: Cassell and Company, c. 1897. Classic Vision / agefotostock.

3. Anlaff entering the Humber in spring 937. Illustration from Cassell’s History of England: From the Roman Invasion to the Wars of the Roses, vol. 1, London: Cassell and Company, c. 1903. Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo.

4. Eudes re-enters Paris. Illustration by French painter Alphonse de Neuville (1835–85). The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

5. The head of the pirate Eustace the Monk on a spike. Illustration by Frederick Gilbert (1827–1902) from Cassell’s History of England: From the Roman Invasion to the Wars of the Roses, vol. 1, London: Cassell and Company, c. 1903. Historical Images Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

6. Captain Henry Morgan attacking Panama, 1671. Illustration from Alexandre Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, 1684.

7. A Dutch merchantman attacked by an English privateer off La Rochelle. Oil painting by Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen (1577–1633).

8. A sea fight with Barbary corsairs. Oil painting by Lorenzo a Castro (active c. 1664–c. 1700).

9. The bombardment of Algiers, 3 July 1830. Painting by Léon Morel-Fatio (1810–71), c. 1836–7.

10. A junk attacked by Malay prahus. Illustration from Sherard Osborn, My Journal in Malayan Waters, London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, second edition, 1860.

11. British sailors boarding an Algerian corsair. Hand-coloured print by John Fairburn, c. 1825. Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo.

12. Chinese pirates attacking a European merchant ship. Hand-coloured woodcut of a nineteenth-century illustration. North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy Stock Photo.

13. A sea battle between pirate junks and the Imperial Chinese Navy during the nineteenth century. Illustration from Walter Hutchinson, History of the Nations, 1915. Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo.

14. An execution at Kowloon in 1891: five pirates waiting to be beheaded. Photographer unknown, 1891. Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

15. A pirate boat captured by the Royal Netherlands Navy off the Horn of Africa on display at the Marinemuseum Den Helder in October 2011. Nick-D / CC-BY-SA-3.0.

16. Ransom money is dropped in the vicinity of the MV Faina off the coast of Somalia near Hobyo while under observation by a US Navy ship, 4 February 2009. Mass Communications Specialist 1st Class Michael R. McCormick, USN.

17. Container ship MV Maersk Alabama leaves Mombasa, Kenya, after spending time in port after a pirate attack that took her captain hostage, 21 April 2009. Laura A. Moore, US Navy.

18. A team from the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4) tows the lifeboat from the Maersk Alabama to Boxer to be processed for evidence after the successful rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, 13 April 2009. Jon Rasmussen, US Navy.

19. Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips stands alongside Lt Cmdr David Fowler, executive officer of USS Bainbridge (DDG 96), after being rescued by US Naval Forces off the coast of Somalia, 12 April 2009. US Navy photo.

20. Suspected pirates keep their hands in the air as directed by the guided-missile cruiser USS Vella Gulf (CG-72) as the visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) team prepares to apprehend them, 11 February 2009. Mass Communications Specialist 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky, USN.

INTRODUCTION

The Sudden Return of Piracy

A gloomy November day. A vessel cut through the waves of the South China Sea on its way from Shanghai to Port Klang, Malaysia. The crew of twenty-three sailors went about their business, inattentive to the dozens of smaller fishing vessels in the vicinity. Suddenly, out of nowhere, several heavily armed individuals clambered on board, brandishing long knives and guns. They quickly overpowered the startled crew members before locking them in the hold. Some time later, the captives were frog-marched back on deck. They were lined up along the railing, blindfolded, and then clubbed, stabbed or shot. But their final fate was the same: all twenty-three were thrown, some still alive, into the sea to erase all traces of the horrible crime. It has been said that seldom ‘in the so-called Golden Age of Piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was there ever a more bestial, cold-blooded act of murder on the high seas than that committed by those who took over this ship’.¹ But this attack did not occur in the distant past – it happened on 16 November 1998, and the target was the bulk carrier MV (motor vessel) Cheung Son.

The Cheung Son massacre and other similar events during the 1990s had one thing in common: despite their barbarity, they went largely unnoticed. If piracy came to the public’s attention at all it was usually by way of fictionalised stories – a novel such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), or a Hollywood film such as the Black Pirate (1926) with Douglas Fairbanks, Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn, or, more recently, the amazingly successful Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003– ) with Johnny Depp. The pirates featured in these books and films were nothing but romantic stereotypes of dashing individuals, far removed from reality.² Outside of a comparatively small circle of academic specialists – as well as, of course, seafarers and maritime law enforcement agencies themselves – the menace of piracy seemed to have faded away, such that the term itself came to be associated more with various forms of intellectual property theft than with the maritime crime from which it originated. It was only in November 2005 that this situation changed, when a new breed of high-seas pirates – the Somali pirates – brought themselves to international prominence with a brazen attack on a modern cruise liner.

The Seabourn Spirit³ was not one of those run-down vessels which tend to ply the waters around the Horn of Africa. It was a top-of-the-line luxury cruise ship, its crew of 164 catering to up to 208 well-off customers, and it had just been voted the best small ship in the annual Conde Nast Traveler Readers’ Poll. In November 2005, it was on a cruise from Alexandria in Egypt to Singapore. Its 200 passengers had already enjoyed the voyage through the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden via the Bab el-Mandeb. They were now looking forward to exploring Mombasa, their next port of call.

In the early hours of Saturday, 5 November, at 5:30 a.m. local time and about 100 nautical miles off Somalia’s Banaadir coast, most of those on board were still sound asleep. On the bridge, it was business as usual: monitoring the position of other ships on the radar screen, and keeping an eye on the small fishing vessels that would crisscross the ship’s bow with utter disregard for right-of-way. Suddenly, two small boats sped towards the cruise liner. The crew on the bridge were at first bemused, then alarmed: those aboard the boats were brandishing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs). It must have taken the bridge crew a couple of heart beats to realise that they were under attack by pirates; although there had been some incidents in the previous months, they had taken place much nearer to the shore, and only targeted smaller local vessels – not a state-of-the-art western cruise ship. That pirates would attack such a vessel was completely unheard of.

Surprised or not, Captain Sven Erik Pedersen wasted no time in sounding the alarm and increasing the speed of the Seabourn Spirit. His plan was to outrun and outmanoeuvre the two tiny 7-metre fibreglass boats, and maybe even to ram and capsize one of them. The ship’s security team, alerted by the alarm, immediately jumped into action: Michael Groves, a former police officer, engaged the approaching and wildly firing pirates with a high-pressure hose in the hope of swamping their vessels, while the master-at-arms, the former Gurkha soldier Som Bahadur, manned the ship’s ‘sonic gun’, emitting an ear-piercing high-frequency sound that discouraged the attackers from coming too near. The combination of evasive manoeuvres, high-pressure hose and sonic gun turned out to be enough to shake off the pirates, who vanished into the early morning mist. Except for Som Bahadur, who suffered minor shrapnel injuries, no one else was hurt, even though one of the RPGs actually penetrated the ship’s hull, damaging a stateroom; another round had harmlessly bounced off the stern.

All in all, what might have turned into a prolonged hostage crisis ended in a lucky escape for the vessel itself, its crew and its passengers. Mainly for security reasons, the ship proceeded to Port Victoria straight away instead of calling at Mombasa as originally planned. From there, it sailed on to Singapore, arriving right on schedule, where the passengers disembarked with quite a story to tell.⁴

In the following years, the international community would grow used to such brazen acts of Somali piracy. In November 2005, however, this incident was so out of the ordinary that many observers, including Anthony Downer, then Australian foreign minister, hesitated to call it piracy – for them, it was more likely that the attack was intended as an act of maritime terrorism, perhaps carried out by al-Qaeda. How on earth could two teams of four pirates ever hope to hijack a modern 134-metre ship with several hundred people on board? Eight men would never have been able to keep all of them under control, they argued. Only gradually did the reality sink in that, yes, this had been a pirate attack, and that, no, hard-nosed Somali pirates armed with assault rifles and RPGs would not hesitate to try to kidnap dozens, or even hundreds, of easily intimidated and mostly unarmed passengers and crew members. From then on, the fictitious pirates of the Caribbean really had to do battle with the real-life pirates of Somalia in order to capture the headlines and the ‘good ship Popular Imagination’.⁵ Some of the Somali pirates’ audacious operations even made it onto the big screen: the botched hijacking of the US-flagged container ship MV Maersk Alabama was turned into the 2013 blockbuster movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks.

In April 2009, the Maersk Alabama was carrying food aid destined for famine-blighted Somalia. Due to the dire security situation in most of Somalia’s own ports, it was heading for the Kenyan port of Mombasa – which still meant the ship had to sail straight through the pirate-haunted waters around the Somali coastline. And, indeed, on 8 April, about 240 nautical miles off the coast of the semi-autonomous Somalian province of Puntland, a skiff with four armed men approached the slow-sailing vessel. Like the crew of the Seabourn Spirit, those on the Maersk Alabama’s bridge took evasive measures in an attempt to outmanoeuvre the pirates and to prevent them from boarding. Although they managed to flood the pirates’ skiff, the Somalis made it aboard ship. The crew fell back on a second line of defence in the shape of a ‘citadel’ (something like the panic rooms found in some upmarket apartments) to which they could withdraw and from which help could be summoned and the ship controlled. Once more, however, the Maersk Alabama’s men were not in luck: although most of the all-American crew managed to reach this citadel in time, the vessel’s master, Captain Richard Phillips, and Assistant Technical Manager Zahid Reza were surprised by the pirates and taken hostage. Amazingly, Captain Phillips’s crew also managed to take a hostage: no less than the leader of the pirate gang himself, whom Zahid Reza had been forced to show around the ship, and who was overwhelmed by Chief Engineer Perry outside the engine room. A dramatic stand-off then unfolded: on the one side the remaining three pirates with their hostage Captain Phillips, on the other the nineteen American crew members with the pirates’ leader as their captive. After some frantic negotiation, it was decided that both hostages would be exchanged, and that the pirates would be allowed to leave the ship on one of the Maersk Alabama’s bright orange life boats – their own skiff having by now sunk. But the pirates did not honour the agreement, and set sail with Captain Phillips still in their clutches.

Alerted by the remaining crew, several US warships quickly arrived on the scene, to find themselves facing a peculiar hostage situation: four well-armed Somali pirates holding one hostage on board an 8.5-metre lifeboat in choppy waters. The crisis soon came to a head. With one of the pirates aboard the USS Bainbridge for negotiations, Navy SEAL snipers lying in wait were suddenly presented with three clear targets: one of the pirates was clearly visible – though unnervingly he was also aiming an assault rifle at Captain Phillips’s head – while the other two had leant out of the lifeboat’s windows to catch some fresh air. A couple of expertly aimed shots later and the three pirates were dead, and Captain Phillips was free. The sole surviving pirate was later sentenced to thirty-three years and nine months in a US high-security prison.

Today, Somalis are not the only ones risking their lives as pirates in the hope of getting rich. Currently, there are also plenty of Nigerians who are willing and able to do likewise in the Gulf of Guinea, while incidents of piracy in the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea are on the rise again as well.

Piracy is on the up – not only in news headlines and huge entertainment franchises but also in a flurry of documentaries, articles and books published on the subject, and a series of academic conferences held all over the world. Together these have tackled the question of why the number of pirate attacks started to dramatically rise from the 1980s: the onset of globalisation and the liberalisation of trade in the late 1970s resulted in a significant increase in maritime traffic, while the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War a decade or so later resulted in a disappearance of warships from many areas which they had previously patrolled. From a pirate’s point of view, this meant that there were now both more targets to prey on and a much reduced risk of being captured. Furthermore, various in-depth studies have been published looking at ‘what makes pirates tick’, which examine individual decisions to become a pirate in current times. But as interesting and insightful as such studies are, they provide an uneven picture, since they invariably focus on specific regions, without providing comparisons between various regions affected by piracy today and across the centuries. They thus leave some significant questions unaddressed. Is what motivates certain individuals to become pirates today the same as in the past? How do the activities of modern pirates compare to those of earlier epochs? Are there any lessons that could be learned from historical attempts to curb piracy which could help us end it today? And, most importantly, if naval power is greater today than ever before, why have we not yet been able to put an end to piracy once and for all? Why does piracy persist, seemingly against all the odds? This book answers these questions, focusing on the pirate’s journey across the ages: becoming a pirate, being a pirate, and, finally, walking away from piracy.⁶

Piracy has a long history, and has occurred in various maritime regions all over the world: we cannot talk about a ‘typical pirate’s career’. In order then to tease out continuities and discontinuities of piracy across various cultures and various periods, the pirate’s journey will be subdivided geographically: the Mediterranean, Northern and Eastern Seas all witnessed major outbreaks of piracy at one time or another, and these will be the main regions looked at in this book. The book is also subdivided into three historical periods. Section I focuses on the years between AD 700 and 1500, when the three maritime regions were still largely unconnected and formed distinct theatres of pirate activities, with no cross-pollination taking place. Section II focuses on the years between 1500 and 1914, a period in which European sea powers gradually gained the upper hand over the formerly powerful ‘gunpowder empires’ (the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and, somewhat later, Qing China) by gradually monopolising ‘four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP) relationships’.⁷ Europe also gained increasing influence over land mass, from controlling 7 per cent in 1500 to 35 per cent by 1800 and, ‘By 1914, when this age came to a sudden end, they . . . controlled 84 per cent of the world’s land’.⁸ We will see that even though local manifestations of piracy remained, the continuing meddling of European powers in regional affairs aggravated the problem of piracy both by importing Western types of vessels and weapons, and by adding Western pirates and adventurers to an already volatile mix. Finally, Section III focuses on the years from 1914 to the present in order to explore how piracy has evolved, or devolved, in the current period of globalisation.

A Short Note on Definitions

Two main concepts that we will frequently encounter in this book need mention here: pirates and privateers (known as corsairs in the Mediterranean). As we shall see, both of these maritime predators use the same tactics, and carry out very similar operations – the difference is that pirates act on their own accord, while privateers or corsairs (the term comes from the Latin cursarius, ‘raider’) act under lawful authority, equipped with a commission. This crucial difference is nicely reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of piracy: the ‘action of committing robbery, kidnap, or violence at sea or from the sea without lawful authority’.⁹ By extension, privateering can be defined as the action of committing robbery, kidnap or violence at sea or from the sea with lawful authority. Many of the protagonists we will meet occupy a rather grey area, operating somewhere between illegal piracy and legal privateering – which is why it is sensible to include privateers in the following discussion.

PART I

Distinct Regions, AD 700 to 1500

Joining the Wicked Order

Why do people choose to become pirates or privateers, deciding to make a career out of plundering at sea? Most romantic Hollywood franchises and novels about pirates routinely gloss over the ugly truth that being a pirate was, and in many maritime regions of the world still is, a very dangerous occupation, one that may be rather hazardous to the pirate’s health. An individual who chose this career in times past was probably doing so in the hopes of getting rich quick. But far more likely were the prospects of drowning, starving to death or dying of scurvy, malaria, plague or any number of exotic, then unnamed diseases; being left mutilated for life either through an accident or a fight; being killed in action or tortured to death in a variety of unpleasant and rather messy ways; or being executed by the authorities, or simply left to rot in jail. So it is important to note that piracy as a career choice is not necessarily born of romanticism and the love of adventure.

The decision to turn pirate was usually driven by one of two forces: on the one hand, grievances such as abject poverty, unemployment, harsh living conditions and a generally bleak future; and, on the other, greed or the lure of easy money. Fleeing from justice was another powerful driver: the ‘sea had always served as a refuge for the lawless and criminal elements in society’.¹ The exact mixture of these elements depended not so much on the region but on subregional or even local circumstances which could greatly fluctuate over time.

In the late Middle Ages, the years between 1250 and 1500, there were places that enjoyed economic growth in the Mediterranean which presented many perfectly legal opportunities for enterprising individuals, especially highly skilled artisans. But there were also pockets of stagnation with rising levels of unemployment accelerated by population growth, and spots where endemic poverty was made worse by the incessant raids and counter-raids of various sea powers and their regular navies, who were in turn backed up by privateers – or corsairs – operating with a licence, and pirates operating without one. On the Mediterranean’s Christian shores, established sea powers such as Venice, Genoa and Pisa profited from the booming maritime trade with Byzantium, with the main ports of the Muslim empires such as Alexandria, and with the ports along the coasts of the Black Sea such as Kaffa. High-value commodities like silk, spices, porcelain, precious stones, gold, silver, furs and slaves made the merchants of Venice, Genoa and Pisa rich, along with those of Byzantium and Alexandria. If the citizens of these booming port cities went a-pirating, then they did so mainly driven by greed, and as corsairs, licensed pirates. Unsurprisingly, it was largely the occupants of the lower rungs of the social ladder who signed up: they had the least to lose and the most to gain by entering such a high-risk profession. In the case of the ports of Béjaïa (Algeria) and Trapani (Sicily), for example, ‘people of modest origin’ such as workers, retailers or artisans, fishermen and sailors participated in piratical activities on a part-time basis.² As for the islands dotting the sea lanes, many poor fishermen and peasants eking out a living must have watched the heavily laden merchant vessels passing by with covetous eyes. These locations were usually cut off from economic progress, and more often than not regularly ravaged by corsairs hunting for slaves while also carrying away anything that could be turned into profit. Not surprisingly, grievance and greed worked together to turn some of these locations into piracy hot spots – some of which survived into the nineteenth century.

In Northern European waters, harsh living conditions were also at the heart of the rise of loosely organised fleets of pirates and privateers known first as the ‘Victual Brothers’, later as ‘Likedeelers’, who operated in the Baltic and North Seas in the last decade of the fourteenth century and the first years of the fifteenth. In this region, incessant maritime wars laid waste to many coastal areas, while an oppressive feudal order on land held peasants under rigid, intrusive control; great numbers of peasants and landless workers moved to the cities during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the hope of a better life there, only to find that their misery deepened in the relative anonymity of city life. This was especially the case in the State of the Teutonic Order, a territory comprising parts of modern-day Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Sweden, formed by a Catholic military order which was embroiled in crusades against non-Christian tribal kingdoms and principalities until the early fifteenth century.

Acts of piracy were already rather frequent in Baltic waters, and for exactly the same reasons as they occurred elsewhere: there was dense maritime traffic that made for rich pickings, while the ever-shifting political alliances of the coastal states all but guaranteed an absence of effective maritime policing. In 1158, for example, the populations of the Danish coastal regions of Jutland and Zealand had fled inland due to consistent raids, leaving behind uncultivated and unprotected land: ‘everywhere else desolation reigned. No reliance could be placed on weapons or on strongholds.’³ Duke John of Mecklenburg’s decision to offer privateering commissions to all and sundry in his war against Queen Margaret of Denmark in the last decade of the fourteenth century further opened the floodgates, turning the unorganised pirates into large, organised fleets. The predominantly maritime war of Mecklenburg against Denmark required many new ships to be built – ships that needed to be crewed. And since the war also came with the prospect of large-scale plunder and pillage, a hodgepodge crowd of adventurous or desperate individuals of mostly Northern German origin descended on Mecklenburg’s ports, eager to enlist. The Detmar Chronicle describes them as follows:

In this year [1392] an unruly mob of courtiers, burghers of many towns, office holders and peasants came together, calling themselves the Victual Brothers. They said that they would march on the Queen of Denmark to free the King of Sweden whom she held prisoner, and that they would capture and plunder nobody but support those [of Mecklenburg] with goods and help against the Queen.

Breaking this promise, the Victual Brothers went on to threaten ‘the whole sea and all merchants, whether friend or foe’.⁴

So, like other large-scale organised piracy groups, the Victual Brothers and their successors, the Likedeelers, did not burst onto the scene out of the blue. Whether it was greed or grievance that prompted their bands of men to become sea robbers can only be a matter for speculation, given that none of the mostly illiterate cohort left behind a memoir, but it is likely that both factors played a part in spurring