Piracy

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Piracy at sea cost the world an estimated US$25 billion in 2023. In 2004 the figure was US$16 billion, so the problem has grown rather than faded. Most listeners picture a swashbuckling figure from a storybook. The reality is robbery or criminal violence carried out from a ship or boat against another vessel or a stretch of coast, usually to steal cargo or take hostages. This documentary asks who counts as a pirate and who does not, and why that line mattered so much to lawyers and navies. It asks why the same narrow stretches of water bred raiders across thousands of years. It asks why governments sometimes hunted sea raiders and sometimes paid them, pardoned them, or became them. And it asks how a trade built on kidnapping and plunder turned into a costume, a children's story and a film franchise.

  5613

• 2. Naming The Crime

  ›

  The Greek word peiratēs literally meant anyone who attempts something. It grew from the verb peiráomai, meaning I attempt, and from the noun peîra, meaning attempt or experience. Latin borrowed it as pirata, which could mean pirate, corsair or sea robber. Greek speakers stretched the word to cover any brigand, on land or at sea. English picked it up around 1300. Spelling stayed loose until the eighteenth century, and forms such as pirrot, pyrate and pyrat were all in use.

  The legal edges of the word matter as much as its roots. Piracy generally excludes crimes committed on the perpetrator's own vessel, such as theft by a crew member. It also excludes privateering, which implies that a state government has authorized the attack. Piracy is a specific crime under customary international law. It is also the name of many separate crimes under the municipal law of many states. The word has since been stretched to cover acts on land, in the air, on computer networks and, in science fiction, outer space.

  Geography shapes the crime as strongly as law does. Narrow channels funnel shipping into predictable routes, and that predictability has long invited pirates, privateers and commerce raiders. The source lists the waters of Gibraltar, the Strait of Malacca, Madagascar, the Gulf of Aden and the English Channel as places where the shape of the coast helped attackers. The oldest documented raiders in the record struck in the crowded seas of the Aegean.

  8911133

• 3. Ancient And Medieval Raiders

  ›

  The Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilisations in the 14th century BC. They are the earliest documented pirates. In classical antiquity the Phoenicians, Illyrians and Tyrrhenians gained the same reputation. Before the classical era, many ancient Greeks apparently saw raiding at sea as an honourable way to earn a living. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey treat it as perfectly normal, and abducting women and children for sale into slavery was common. By the time of Classical Greece, the profession was seen as a disgrace. In the 3rd century BC, pirate attacks on Olympus in Lycia brought impoverishment to the town.

  The Illyrians, who lived in the western Balkan Peninsula, raided the Adriatic Sea so constantly that they caused many conflicts with the Roman Republic. Their threat ended only in 229 BC, when the Romans decisively beat the Illyrian fleets. In the 1st century BC, pirate states along the Anatolian coast menaced Roman commerce in the eastern Mediterranean. In 75 BC, Julius Caesar was crossing the Aegean Sea when Cilician pirates kidnapped him and briefly held him on Pharmacusa, a Dodecanese islet. In 67 BC the Senate gave the general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus special powers through the Lex Gabinia. After three months of naval warfare, Pompey suppressed the threat.

  A Gothic-Herulic fleet ravaged towns on the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara as early as 258 AD. By 264 the Goths had reached Galatia and Cappadocia, and Gothic pirates landed on Cyprus and Crete. They seized enormous booty and took thousands into captivity. In 286 AD, Carausius, a Roman commander of Gaulish origins, was put in charge of the Classis Britannica and told to eliminate Frankish and Saxon raiders who were hitting the coasts of Armorica and Belgic Gaul. In the province of Britannia, Irish pirates captured and enslaved Saint Patrick.

  The Vikings were the most widely recognized pirates of medieval Europe. These seaborne warriors from Scandinavia raided and looted mainly between the 8th and 12th centuries. The Norse attacked Seville in 844, and some Vikings climbed the rivers of Eastern Europe as far as the Black Sea and Persia. In the Mediterranean, Moor raiders sacked the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul outside the walls of Rome in 846. By 911, Moors based at Fraxinet controlled the Alpine passes so completely that the bishop of Narbonne could not travel home from Rome. From 824 to 961, Arab pirates in the Emirate of Crete raided the entire Mediterranean.

  The Narentines, a Slavic tribe, revived the old Illyrian habits on the Adriatic from the 7th century onward. They raided most freely when the Venetian Navy was away campaigning in Sicilian waters. They even signed a treaty in Venice and baptised their pagan leader. Yet in 834 or 835 they broke the treaty, and Venetian expeditions to punish them in 839 and 840 utterly failed. In 846 the Narentines broke through to the lagoon city of Caorle. Later, Pope John VIII wrote to their leader Domagoj, asking his pirates to stop attacking Christians at sea. The Venetians kept fighting them throughout the 10th and 11th centuries.

  Northern waters had their own raiders. In 937, Irish pirates joined the Scots, Vikings, Picts and Welsh in an invasion of England, and Athelstan drove them back. Slavic piracy in the Baltic ended with the Danish conquest of the Rani stronghold of Arkona in 1168. In the 13th and 14th centuries, pirates threatened the Hanseatic trade routes and nearly brought sea trade to the brink of extinction. The Victual Brothers of Gotland began as privateers and later turned pirate as the Likedeelers. Their best-known leaders were Klaus Störtebeker and Gödeke Michels. Until about 1440, shipping in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia was in serious danger.

  An Englishman named William Maurice, convicted of piracy in 1241, is named as the first known person to be hanged, drawn and quartered. That suggests King Henry III took an especially severe view of the crime. In the 14th century, the ushkuiniks, pirates from Novgorod, looted cities along the Volga and Kama Rivers. The Maniots of Greece treated piracy as a legitimate answer to their land's poverty, and it became their main income. Their main victims were the Ottomans.

  The Zaporizhian Sich was a pirate republic in the remote steppe of Eastern Europe from the 16th through the 18th century. It was populated by runaway peasants, outlaws, destitute gentry and escaped slaves from Turkish galleys. The rapids of the Dnieper river guarded it against vengeful powers. By 1615 and 1625, its Cossacks had razed townships on the outskirts of Istanbul, forcing the Ottoman Sultan to flee his palace. Don Cossacks under Stenka Razin even ravaged the Persian coasts. The next chapter turns to the Mediterranean corsairs, who by one account were as numerous as the Atlantic and Caribbean pirates at any point in history.

  1014161720

• 4. Barbary Corsairs

  ›

  Anne Hilarion de Tourville, a French admiral of the 17th century, believed that the only way to run down raiders from the corsair port of Salé was to use a captured pirate vessel of the same type. Pirate craft were small, nimble and lightly armed, but crewed in large numbers to overwhelm the minimal crews of merchant ships. Mediterranean piracy was conducted almost entirely with galleys until the mid-17th century. Then highly maneuverable sailing vessels such as xebecs and brigantines gradually replaced them. Even the major powers in the Caribbean fought pirates with oared vessels. The English built galleys in Jamaica in 1683, and the frigates James Galley and Charles Galley proved useful for pirate hunting.

  Around 1500, the Barbary pirates began operating out of the North African ports of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco. They preyed mainly on Christian shipping, with massive slave raids at sea and on land. They were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty but had considerable independence. Many were technically privateers backed by states that were legitimate yet highly belligerent. The corsairs saw themselves as holy warriors, or ghazis, continuing a tradition of resistance that began with the First Crusade in the late 11th century. Coastal villages and towns in Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean islands were attacked so often that people almost completely abandoned long stretches of the Italian and Spanish coasts. After 1600, the corsairs occasionally entered the Atlantic and struck as far north as Iceland.

  According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were abducted and sold into slavery in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries. The most famous corsairs included the Ottoman Albanian Hayreddin and his older brother Oruç Reis, known as Redbeard. Turgut Reis was known as Dragut in the West. A few corsairs were renegade European privateers who converted to Islam, such as the Dutch Jan Janszoon and the English John Ward, whose Muslim name was Yusuf Reis.

  The Barbary pirates had a Christian counterpart in the Knights of Saint John, who operated first from Rhodes and, after 1530, from Malta. They were fewer in number and enslaved fewer people. Both sides used galleys as their main weapons, and both used enslaved rowers. The Muslims relied mostly on captured Christians. The Christians used enslaved Muslims, Christian convicts and a small group of buonavoglie, free men who rowed out of poverty or desperation. Historian Peter Earle described the two sides as a "mirror images of maritime predation, two businesslike fleets of plunderers set against each other". The whole arrangement has also been called a "massive, multinational protection racket".

  European rivalry kept the corsairs in business. France encouraged them against Spain, and later Britain and Holland backed them against France. In the second half of the 17th century, the larger naval powers began reprisals. French bombardments of Algiers in 1682-1683 and 1688 secured a lasting peace, and Tripoli was coerced in 1686. In 1783 and 1784, Spain bombarded Algiers, and the second time Admiral Barceló damaged the city so badly that the Dey asked for a peace treaty.

  The young United States entered this world in 1776, when it lost the protection of British treaties. Morocco had been the first independent nation to recognize the United States publicly, in 1777. In 1784 it became the first Barbary power to seize an American vessel. Peace treaties required tribute, and payments in ransom and tribute reached 20% of United States government annual expenditures in 1800. That burden led to the Barbary Wars, which ended the payments.

  In 1815, a Tunisian squadron sacked Palma on the island of Sardinia and carried off 158 inhabitants. The outrage was widespread. Britain had banned the slave trade and was pressing other countries to do the same, so states still vulnerable to the corsairs complained that British zeal did not extend to freeing enslaved Europeans and Americans. In 1816, Lord Exmouth was sent to secure concessions from Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, including a pledge to treat Christian captives in future wars as prisoners of war. While he negotiated, Sardinian fishermen settled at Bona were brutally treated. On the 17th of August, with a Dutch squadron under Admiral Van de Capellen, he bombarded Algiers. Algiers renewed its slave raiding on a smaller scale, and another British fleet under Admiral Sir Harry Neal bombarded the city in 1820. Corsair activity based in Algiers did not entirely cease until France conquered it in 1830.

  2433323826

• 5. Eastern Seas

  ›

  In Island Southeast Asia, raids for enslaved people and resources against rival polities have ancient origins. They were tied to prestige and prowess and were often recorded in tattoos. The pirate season, known colloquially as the Pirate Wind, ran from August to September, following the ebb and flow of trade and monsoons. The Iranun and Balanguingui slavers of Sulu, the Iban headhunters of Borneo, the Bugis sailors of South Sulawesi and the Malays of western Southeast Asia all took part. Chinese, Japanese and European traders practiced piracy on a smaller scale.

  Between 1770 and 1870, around 200,000 to 300,000 people were enslaved by Iranun and Banguingui slavers. David P. Forsythe put the number much higher, at around 2 million abducted in the first two centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines after 1565. Raiders struck passing ships and coastal settlements as far off as the Malacca Strait, Java and the southern coast of China. Captives were bartered at Jolo for rice, opium, cloth, iron bars, brassware and weapons. By the 1850s, enslaved people made up 50% or more of the population of the Sulu archipelago. The scale was so massive that the Malay word for pirate became lanun, taken from the name of the Iranun people.

  In northern Luzon, in Pangasinan, Ilocos and Cagayan, Moro and Chinese raiders looted and burned villages and enslaved women and children. Spanish authorities built circular adobe watchtowers called baluartes, 6 to 7 meters high, from coral blocks bonded with lime and egg whites. Communities in the Visayas built war barangayanes that could outrun the raiders. Spanish and local forces mounted major naval expeditions from 1848 to 1891. By then the Spanish had steam gunboats that could easily overtake the native warships.

  China's story begins with a Korean merchant. In 828, the Silla king Heungdeok founded the Cheonghae Garrison at what is today Wando island, at the request of Chang Pogo. Chang had been angered by pirates preying on his fellow Silla subjects. The king gave him an army of 10,000 men, and Chang became the arbiter of Yellow Sea commerce. From the 13th century, the Wokou based in Japan began invasions that would persist for 300 years. By their peak in the 1550s, they were mostly Chinese smugglers reacting against the Ming dynasty's strict ban on private sea trade. The ban ended in 1567, partly because the desire for silver had led to open conflict.

  Ming pirates tended to come from the geographic edges of the state. Many were poor fishermen fleeing taxation, conscription or forced labor. Membership was fluid, and few stayed more than a few months or a year. Their groups rewarded those who did the looting first, and ability to do the job was explicitly rewarded. Larger bands acted as local governments for coastal communities, collecting taxes in exchange for protection and writing laws that redistributed wealth.

  Zhu Wan, the Grand Coordinator for Coastal Defense, found that local elites backed the pirates. He called them "pirates in gowns and caps" because they sponsored raiding and profited from illegal trade. When he tried to eliminate the problem, the elites had him demoted and sent back to Beijing, possibly to be executed. Some documents call the pirates "sea rebels", a term showing how political the trade was. Zheng Zhilong and Zheng Chenggong gained so much local power that dynasties and foreign maritime powers hired them as naval commanders.

  In the Qing period, pirate fleets grew huge and preyed on the junk trade of Fujian and Guangdong. In 1802, Zheng Yi inherited the fleet of his cousin Zheng Qi. With his wife, Zheng Yi Sao, he formed a coalition that numbered over ten thousand men by 1804. Famine, Qing naval opposition and internal rifts crippled Chinese piracy around the 1820s. In the 1840s and 1850s, United States Navy and Royal Navy forces campaigned together against Chinese pirates, with battles at Ty-ho Bay and the Tonkin River. Fleets of pirate junks ceased to exist only in the 1860s and 1870s.

  Elsewhere around the Indian Ocean the picture was similar. The Bawarij, Sindhi pirates named for their barja warships, were active between 251 and 865 AD. Their looting of two treasure ships from Ceylon became the casus belli for the Umayyad conquest of Sindh. Pirates who accepted the Royal Pardon of the Chola Empire served in the Chola Navy as Kallarani. In the 18th century, the Maratha privateer Kanhoji Angre ruled the seas between Mumbai and Goa. The Marathas demanded that East India Company ships pay taxes to sail through their waters. The British called the southern Persian Gulf the Pirate Coast, where the Qawasim asserted control. After British campaigns in 1809 and 1819, a first treaty of maritime peace followed in 1820. The Treaty of Maritime Peace in Perpetuity in 1853 softened the label to the Trucial Coast.

  3943585782

• 6. The Golden Age

  ›

  In 1650, France, England and the United Provinces were building colonial empires, and much of the new wealth traveled by ship. French buccaneers had settled on northwestern Hispaniola as early as 1625. At first they lived as hunters, but Spanish efforts to wipe out the buccaneers and the animals they hunted pushed them toward piracy. They moved to the offshore island of Tortuga. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, a buccaneer and historian who remains a major source for the period, the Tortuga buccaneer Pierre Le Grand pioneered attacks on galleons returning to Spain.

  The English capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 boosted the trade. Early English governors freely granted letters of marque, and Port Royal gave raiders a profitable place to sell their booty. In the 1660s, Bertrand d'Ogeron, the French governor of Tortuga, issued privateering commissions to French colonists and to English raiders from Port Royal. By the 1690s, the collaboration had ended. An earthquake devastated Port Royal in 1692, destroying the pirates' chief market for fenced plunder. The Spanish Main was also exhausted. Maracaibo alone had been sacked three times between 1667 and 1678.

  Cash-starved English colonies, including Bermuda, New York and Rhode Island, were willing to underwrite pirate voyages. One colonial official defended a pirate because he thought it "very harsh to hang people that brings in gold to these provinces." Many pirates turned to the Indian Ocean, where silk and calico were ideal booty and no powerful navies patrolled. That set the stage for Thomas Tew, Henry Every, Robert Culliford and William Kidd, whose guilt remains controversial. At one point, nearly 1,000 pirates were located in Madagascar. Captain Misson allegedly founded the free colony of Libertatia there in the late 17th century. The story is probably fictional, and it ends with a surprise attack in 1694.

  The peace treaties of 1713 and 1714 ended the War of the Spanish Succession and freed thousands of seamen. At the same time, Atlantic shipping was beginning to boom. In 1715, pirates raided Spanish divers who were trying to recover gold from a sunken galleon off Florida. The core of the force was a group of English ex-privateers: Henry Jennings, Charles Vane, Samuel Bellamy and Edward England. The governor of Jamaica refused to let them spend their loot there, so they founded a new base at Nassau on New Providence in the Bahamas. It would be home to them and their recruits until the arrival of governor Woodes Rogers three years later.

  The triangular trade made shipping a rich target. Britain also obtained the asiento, a Spanish contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's colonies, which opened Spanish markets to British merchants and smugglers. Merchant shippers used the surplus of sailors to drive wages down and cut corners. Historian Marcus Rediker, in 2004, found mortality among merchant sailors as high as that of the enslaved people being trafficked. Many sailors preferred a freer life as a pirate. Among the most infamous were Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, John Rackham and Bartholomew Roberts.

  England turned against piracy at the turn of the 18th century. The Piracy Act 1698 let admirals hold courts to try pirates wherever they deemed necessary instead of sending them to England. Those trials gave the accused no legal representation and led to the execution of 600 pirates, about 10 percent of those active in the Caribbean. The Piracy Act 1717 and Piracy Act 1721 added seven-year penal transportation to North America as a possible sentence. In 1717, a pardon was offered to pirates who surrendered. The Royal Navy grew from two vessels in 1670 to approximately 124 by 1718 and 214 by 1815.

  On the 22nd of November 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard hunted down Blackbeard at Ocracoke Inlet off North Carolina and killed him. His flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, was a captured French slave ship originally named La Concorde. In 1722, Captain Chaloner Ogle of HMS Swallow cornered Bartholomew Roberts at Cape Lopez, and a broadside killed the pirate captain instantly. Merchants and civilians had thought him invincible, and some considered him a hero. Many historians see his death as the end of the Golden Age. Jean Lafitte, who fought at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, and Roberto Cofresí, based on Mona Island, Puerto Rico, were later and lesser figures. By the 1830s, ships were converting to steam, and the classical idea of Caribbean pirates ended.

  The two-volume A General History of the Pyrates, published in London in 1724, is generally credited with bringing key figures of the Golden Age and a semi-accurate picture of their world to the public imagination. It informed later fiction, most notably the novels Treasure Island in 1883 and Peter Pan in 1911. The Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise, which began in 2003, stereotyped the image further. Those stories never mention what the real crews divided among themselves.

  18929710090

• 7. Plunder And Pay

  ›

  A doctor's chest was worth between £300 and £400, or around $470,000 in today's values, and medicines were the most prized plunder on a pirate ship. Most plunder was cargo and ship's equipment. Jewels were common but unpopular, because they were hard to sell and pirates had little idea of their value. In one recorded case, a pirate was given a large diamond worth far more than the handful of small diamonds his crewmates received. He felt cheated and had it broken up to match their shares.

  Pirate ships ran on a hierarchy that decided how captured money was divided, yet they were more egalitarian than any other form of employment at the time. The quartermaster balanced the captain and could veto his orders. Ordinary seamen usually received a single share at the captain's discretion. On average, a pirate could expect a year's wages from each ship captured. The crews of the most successful pirates would often each receive a share worth around £1,000 at least once in a career, which the source values at $1.17 million.

  In 1692, Captain Thomas Tew took one of the larger hauls from a single ship, an Indian merchantman. Each ordinary seaman received a share worth £3,000, or $3.5 million, and Tew himself received 2½ shares. Some actions that captured several ships produced shares almost double that. The value of any haul varied with who recorded it and where. A piece of eight was worth 4s 3d in England, 8s in New York, 7s 6d in Pennsylvania and 6s 8d in Virginia, because each colony set its own exchange rates until the late 18th century.

  A Royal Navy ordinary seaman, by contrast, earned 19s per month, paid in a lump sum at the end of a tour. That was around half of Merchant Navy pay. Corrupt officers often "taxed" their crews' wages, and 6d per month went to Greenwich Hospital. Six months' pay was withheld to discourage desertion, yet Admiral Nelson noted in a report of 1803 that more than 42,000 sailors had deserted since 1793. Roughly half of Royal Navy crews were pressganged. They were shackled in dock and never allowed ashore until their service ended.

  The Navy had its own lottery. The Cruizers and Convoys Act 1708 moved prize shares from the Crown to the ship's captors. The record came with the capture of the Spanish frigate Hermione in 1762. Each seaman netted £485, and the two captains, Evans and Pownall, received £65,000 each. In January 1807, the frigate Caroline took the Spanish San Rafael, worth £52,000 to Peter Rainier, a midshipman just thirteen months earlier. Four British frigates took the Spanish Thetis and Santa Brigada, loaded with gold. Each captain received £40,730 and each individual seaman £182.

  Only frigates usually took such prizes, since ships of the line were too ponderous to chase the smaller ships that carried treasure. That is a reminder that the law, not just the pistol, decided who was a pirate and who was a hero.

  97949592

• 8. Pirates Today

  ›

  Off the Somali coast, between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, modern pirates strike with automatic firearms and occasionally explosive weaponry. The Strait of Malacca and Singapore is another frequent target. Attackers often use small motorboats to approach and board ships. That tactic exploits the small crews of modern cargo and transport vessels.

  Bringing today's pirates to justice is hard for the international community, because attacks often occur in international waters. Nations have used their naval forces to repel and pursue pirates. Some private vessels carry armed security guards, high-pressure water cannons or sound cannons to repel boarders. Radar helps them avoid potential threats.

  The Strait of Malacca and the waters around Singapore were once controlled by the Orang laut pirates, so the same narrow passage that made them powerful still shapes the danger to ships today.

  513699