piracy

piracy, the act of taking a ship on the high seas from the possession or control of those lawfully entitled to it. This was sometimes done to acquire the ship itself, but more often just to plunder it, and to rob the crew and passengers. The operative word in that definition is ‘lawfully’, as international maritime law accepts the declaration, by a belligerent power, of a state of blockade as a legitimate reason for the detention of any ship, whether neutral or belligerent, suspected of carrying contraband. Without that legal right, every such act would by definition rank as piracy.

Pirates must be distinguished from privateers and buccaneers, though at different times in different places the distinguishing line was often perilously thin. Piracy was endemic among all seafaring nations until the birth of regular navies, but it was recognized very early on that the pirate was an enemy not of any particular state but of all mankind. Pirates could therefore be punished by the competent courts of any country. When captured, they were usually hanged in chains on prominent headlands, where they could be seen by passing ships as a warning. In England they were often staked to the ground at Execution Dock, Wapping. The last pirate executed in England was in 1840, and in the USA in 1862.

Since the earliest times, no seas were free from piracy. Pirates were present everywhere, from the Indian Ocean to the Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean, and the Sallee pirates of Morocco, northwards to Ireland and south-west England. After the discovery of America, they flourished in the West Indies, the Gulf of Mexico, and along the western coast of South America. It was only when national navies began to develop as permanent institutions that a concerted stand against them became possible. Before that time they were often tolerated by the local populations, who benefited from their largesse, and by local officials who were often happy to accept bribes from them.

Pirates tended to operate from small ships—often captured ones—which were fast enough to overhaul their prey at sea, out of reach of interference by other ships, and capture it by boarding. As gunnery developed, pirates also equipped their vessels with guns, usually captured ones, so they resembled small warships. Often they were as powerful as, or more so than, the naval frigates sent to sink them.

The classic age of piracy was the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when many of the privateers operating in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean became pirates. There is doubt that their flag, the Jolly Roger, ever existed, but their exploits were real enough. They achieved wide notoriety with the publication of Charles Johnson's highly embroidered A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724–6), which some believe was written by Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. It is from this source that many writers have taken their adventure stories, because of its lively accounts of such pirates as John Avery, Edward Teach, Bartholomew Roberts, the female pirates Mary Read (fl. 1710–20) and Anne Bonny (fl. 1720), who were part of the crew of a sloop commanded by the pirate Calico Jack Rackham; and, above all, William Kidd, who committed his many acts of piracy in waters as far apart as the West Indies and the Indian Ocean.

Piracy is a modern scourge, too, and though robbery is the more common motive nowadays ships are still stolen. To conform to the modern definition of it the incident has to occur outside national territorial waters as it is otherwise defined as armed robbery. Attacks covered by both definitions are frequent. In the period between 1980 and 1984 over 400 attacks worldwide on shipping were recorded, including numerous cruel assaults on Vietnamese Boat People attempting to escape to Thailand. More recently the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) reported 445 violent incidents in 2003 compared with 370 in 2002, and in February 2004 four crew members of an oil tanker were shot dead by pirates in the Malacca Strait. Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago with over 17,500 islands, heads the list of countries where piracy is rampant. It accounted for 27% of the attacks, and Somalian waters have proved almost as dangerous.

Bibliography

Cordingly, D. , Life among the Pirates: The Romance and the Reality (1995).
Earle, P. , The Pirate Wars (2003).
Villar, Capt. R. , Piracy Today (1985).