CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Piracy gets a shot across the bows  Thu Nov 13, 2008 7:01 pm | |
| When the Navy killed three Somalis this week, it raised the stakes in a conflict that is as old as trade itself
Members of the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) parading arrested pirates onboard a cargo ship
When Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden made the rash decision to attack a Danish cargo ship this week, it provided an echo of a bygone age – and a warning of a new one. Operating from a ramshackle dhow, the raiders were chased and confronted by the Royal Navy frigate Cumberland, given the job of tackling piracy in the area. In the ensuing gunfight, three pirates were killed – the first such deaths at British hands for decades, possibly centuries.
As piracy on the high seas becomes an ever more serious problem, it is appropriate that Britain has taken a lead in fighting it. This country has a historic connection to the practice, both as persecutor and perpetrator.
Of course, pirates have been around since long before the Royal Navy – for as long, indeed, as people have moved merchandise across the seas. As long ago as 75 BC, Julius Caesar was kidnapped by a group operating in the Mediterranean. He was so offended by the ransom they demanded for him – a mere 20 talents – that he told them to raise it to 50. At the same time, he promised that as soon he was free, he would hunt them down. The pirates were much taken with their eccentric prisoner, but Caesar was as good as his word, capturing them within a few weeks of his release and crucifying the entire crew.
It was the discovery of the Americas, however, that led to the creation of piracy in its most familiar form. When the Frenchman Jean Fleury stumbled across three Spanish ships close to the Azores in 1523, laden with 500lb of gold and countless pearls and emeralds, he opened the eyes of Europe's sea dogs to the riches to be gained by robbing the Spanish of what they had plundered from the American Indians. And among the brigands, the English quickly moved to the fore. Francis Drake, initially a slave trader, was the most successful. In 1573, he stole so much from a mule train heading across the Panamanian isthmus that he had to leave behind 15 tons of silver. To this day, Latin American mothers frighten naughty children with the threat that "the pirate Drake" will come for them.
In the early 17th century, such "gentleman adventurers" gave way to the buccaneers, a group who would give birth to an entirely new type of pirate culture. They emerged on the island of Hispaniola, today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The indigenous population had been decimated and the bulk of the early Spanish settlers drawn away to the richer settlements on the mainland. Much of the island reverted to wilderness, and its forests became a magnet for the flotsam and jetsam of the Caribbean – runaway slaves and servants, mutinous sailors and soldiers; anyone with a reason to hide. They lived by hunting goats and cattle, introduced by the Spanish and now roaming free in great herds, smoking the meat over an indigenous barbecue known as a "boucan" – hence "buccaneer". A society almost entirely without women, the buccaneers adopted the curious practice of living in male couples. They also developed a fiercely egalitarian culture, hostile to all authority. When the Spanish went on the offensive against them in the middle of the 17th century, many turned to piracy, carrying their democratic and misogynistic culture on to the high seas.
By the 1650s, they were being joined by more conventional figures, men such as Henry Morgan. Under his leadership, between 1655 and 1671, the buccaneers sacked more than 50 Spanish towns and villages around the Caribbean. In his last great raid, on Panama, Morgan sailed at the head of a buccaneer confederation of 38 ships and 2,000 men – English, Dutch and French. Like Drake before them, these freelancers enjoyed the tacit support of northern European governments, who saw in them a cheap, risk-free way of prising open the Spanish monopoly of power in the Americas. However, they soon served their purpose: towards the end of the century, Spain's rivals were beginning to acquire colonies of their own and becoming more interested in trade than plunder.
The buccaneers, then, had become an embarrassment. Some, like Morgan, adapted: he turned pirate-hunter, was knighted and in 1675 became Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica. Others were more reluctant to conform, and indeed the years between 1690 and 1726 saw a renewed wave of piracy, which spread from the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa and into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Madagascar in particular became a haven, where pirates intermarried with the locals and established their own kingdoms. These men were true outlaws, preying on and hunted by the ships of all nations.
It is from this period that our modern image of piracy, as repeated in countless Hollywood films, dates back. This was the age of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd – and of Bartholomew Roberts, the most successful of them all. This Welshman, who drank nothing but tea, seized close to 400 vessels – most of them British and French – between 1719 and 1722. His crew was typical of the age. Like the buccaneers before them, they were democrats. Roberts himself was elected, as were all the other officers, and booty was divided more or less equally, with the captain receiving only twice the share of an ordinary pirate. The privateers saw themselves as champions of common seamen and would place the captains of captured merchant vessels on trial for their treatment of their crews. Those found guilty of brutality were often beaten, although it is striking that Roberts and his men almost never killed prisoners: the idea that pirates made men walk the plank is a myth.
The bulk of Roberts's crew, and those of the other pirate ships, came from slaving vessels. Pirate captains always invited the crews of the ships they attacked to join them, and such were the conditions aboard slave ships – the death rate among the crew was actually higher than among the slaves – that sailors clamoured to take up the offer. In Roberts's case, almost a third of the crew were black, although they were probably slaves themselves, rather than pirates with equal status to their shipmates.
As with the buccaneers, the pirates of the early 18th century lived largely without women. Roberts himself was probably homosexual: a tall, good-looking bachelor, he showed no interest in women and had a relationship with his ship's surgeon that was so close the two men formed a suicide pact, swearing "to blow up and go to hell together" rather than be captured.
Roberts was killed in a confrontation with the Royal Navy off West Africa in February 1722, his throat ripped out by grapeshot. His death marked the end of the classic age of piracy in the Atlantic: within a few years the number of pirates had been reduced to a handful, and by 1726 they had disappeared altogether. But before we applaud the sterling efforts of the Navy, and others, it's worth remembering that the chief beneficiaries were those involved in the slave trade. Without the threat of piracy, shipments increased from 25,000 souls in 1720 to 47,000 a year soon afterwards.
Gradually but inexorably, the navies of the European powers (soon joined by the United States) were making the world safe for trade. There was a brief resurgence of piracy a century later, when the largely black and Indian crews that had fought the Spanish during the Latin American wars of independence mutinied against their white officers and turned freelance, but this was swiftly and savagely suppressed. By 1830 the Barbary pirates - Muslims operating out of North Africa who had terrorised the Mediterranean since the end of the Middle Ages - had also been driven from the seas. A more peaceful age dawned.
Modern piracy, as practised by men with machineguns and speedboats in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Aden, has little of the romance of piracy in the age of sail. But it is no less brutal. As in the era of Henry Morgan and Bartholomew Roberts, it feeds on lawlessness and the weakness of authority. Ports such as Harardheere in the failed state of Somalia, from which pirates operate with virtual impunity, are in a tradition that stretches back to Tortuga in Hispaniola and Port Royal in Jamaica, the great buccaneer havens.
The nations of East Africa can do little to counter pirates like the Somalians involved in Tuesday's confrontation. Tanzania's chief of marine police recently confessed that the country's navy consisted of "very old, very small boats" that could put out into open sea only "if the waves are small". As in the 18th century, it will be up to the navies of powerful nations to take on the pirates. Only when they get serious will the shipping lanes be cleared. Tuesday's operation, and the subsequent gunfight, may be a sign of things to come.
* 'If a Pirate I Must Be: The True Story of Bartholomew Roberts, King of the Caribbean' by Richard Sanders
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/somalia/3454311/Piracy-gets-a-shot-across-the-bows.html
_________________
Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
|
