For several years now I have been trying to work out what has
gone out of kilter in Britain. And I have to admit I don’t get it
all. If it is something political, it is not like anything taught
in any political science course I know of.
There are innumerable instances of this peculiar
dysfunction (death wish?) such as councils sending juvenile
delinquents on Caribbean holidays while brave Gurkha ex-soldiers
are allowed to starve to death on barren Nepalese hilltops, but the
British attitude to piracy seems a good example of what is
happening.
It is certainly true that a lot of other countries are not
much better, or even worse, but in this matter Britain seems a
particularly egregious example of impotence and paralysis, given
its proud history as principal guardian of the freedom of the
seas.
Civilized countries have fought pirates at sea, with no
messing about, for as far back as history can be traced. Julius
Caesar was captured by pirates as a young man. While waiting to be
ransomed he became quite friendly with his captors and joked that
after his release he would return and crucify them all. Or at least
the pirates, who did not know Caesar well, thought he was
joking…
Britain, having given rise to the Elizabethan buccaneers,
then led the world in stamping piracy out. One of the worst British
pirates, Henry Morgan, was knighted and made governor of Jamaica.
Knowing all the tricks of the trade he gradually rounded up and
hanged many of his former colleagues. The notorious Edward Teach
(“Blackbeard”) met his end at the hands of Lieutenant Robert
Maynard, RN, who, after an epic cutlass duel sailed into port with
Teach’s head swinging from his bowsprit. A couple of female pirates
of the same era got off on what was known as a “belly plea” (they
were pregnant).
Methods of execution varied. A large letter “E” painted on
a wall at the Thames marks Execution Dock, where, it is said,
pirates were chained to drown by having three tides pass over them.
Their corpses were then covered in pitch and hung in iron cages on
prominent headlands as a hint to other mariners to keep to the
straight and narrow.
With considerable effort and sacrifice Britain took the
lead in abolishing slave-trading and at the same time also took the
lead in sweeping away piracy, holding pirates to be the common
enemies of all mankind. Many a Victorian British sailor cut his
teeth on anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean.
By the late 19th century piracy at sea had all but
disappeared. As Kipling put it, 19th century ships could sail
without fear:
Ye have smoked the hives of the Laccadives as we burn
the lice in a bunk,
We tack not now for a Gallang prow or a plunging Pei-ho
junk;
After a brief outbreak at the end of the Napoleonic wars,
by the late 19th century, with its complacent assurance in the
advance of civilization, pirates has become nostalgic and comic
figures, with their (partly apocryphal) plank-walking, eye-patches
and peg-legs, a sure sign that their day in the real world was
considered done.
In the Australian children’s classic, Norman Lindsay’s
The Magic Pudding, the disillusioned sailorman Bill
Barnacle lamented:
So one fine day I sails
away,
A pirate for to
be.
But I found there was
never a pirate left
On the
coast of Caribee,
For pirates go, but their next of
kin
Are merchant captains
hard as sin,
And merchant
mates, as hard as nails
Aboard of every ship that sails …
Or as John Masefield put it:
Alas, the quiddling pirates and the pretty pranks they
played
Have all been put a
stop to by the naughty Board of
Trade;
The schooners and
their merry crews are laid away to
rest,
A little south of
sunset, in the Islands of the Blest …
As well as pirate verses, schools of pirate paintings
sprang up, led by Howard Pyle in the U.S. and Norman Lindsay in
Australia. I remember being taught at school that the coming of the
steamship had put an end to piracy, except, perhaps for a few
quaint and queer places like the pre-revolutionary China
coast.
That, however, was then and this is now. It seems
grotesque that high-tech modern navies seem able to do almost
nothing about Somali pirates, who are apparently getting their
information about ship movements electronically from the
information flowing in and out of Lloyds, the Baltic Exchange, and
similar high-tech sources. Most bizarre of all, British ships,
which led the world in stamping piracy out before, have been at the
center of a series of incidents that seem to demonstrate
civilization’s impotence in the matter.
The strikingly misnamed Wave Knight, a navy
support ship with a contingent of heavily armed marines
aboard,
did nothing when pirates seized a yacht and
the couple aboard from virtually alongside it. The victims were
kept prisoner for months and badly mistreated. Journalist Melanie
Phillips, whose predictions in this area have been proven correct
by events, has written that “human rights law …has driven our legal
system so catastrophically off the rails.”
Royal Navy ships (such as there still are) have been
ordered not to capture pirates because, once they have taken them
on board, they are not allowed to return them to Somalia or other
African states where their human rights might be violated by the
unenlightened authorities. However, in one of the
latest incidents, pirates captured by HMS
Cornwall were given meals of specially-prepared halal
food, medical check-ups, cigarettes and, in one case, a nicotine
patch, before being released, while, presumably, Robert Maynard
spun in his grave. Apparently legal opinion was that there was no
framework to prosecute them. This is odd when the outlawing of
piracy is one of the oldest examples in existence of nations
agreeing to a common international law. Pirates were traditionally
held to be Hostis Humani Generis,
or generic enemies of all humanity. In 1827 the British
government defined piracy to include slaver-trading, making
slave-trading punishable by death. The first post-revolutionary
ships of the U.S. Navy were built to help suppress Barbary pirates
and slavers in the Mediterranean in conjunction with the Royal Navy
and other European powers.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph,
Praveen Swami has stated that pirates took 1,065 hostages last
year, up from 867 in 2009 and 165 in 2007. It would appear that
giving pirates meals and cigarettes does not have a strong
deterrent effect on their activities, especially not compared to
the Caesar/Maynard methods. He quotes Jack Lang, the UN Special
Advisor on pirates (why does the UN need a special advisor
on pirates? Our friend Lieutenant Maynard got by without one and
dealing with them is not, or should not be, exactly complicated),
to the effect that 90% of those captured are released because of
legal issues. According to the International Maritime Bureau, 587
hostage crewmen and 28 ships are being held right now. Given the
weapons and equipment at the disposal of modern navies, this is a
staggering figures.
Not all pirates have been quite as fortunate as those
taken aboard HMS Cornwall for hospitality, however. Last
summer a gang made the mistake of boarding a Russian ship,
the Moscow
University (a name almost as inappropriate in
its way as the unknightly Wave Knight). Russian special
forces promptly stormed the vessel. Later Russian authorities
claimed to have released the pirates, but then stated cryptically
that: “they could not reach the coast, and, apparently, all have
died.” I think it is a reasonably safe bet that it will be some
time before an attempt is made to hijack another Russian
ship.
However, in Britain itself pirates have not had a
completely free run: authorities have cracked down in their own
peculiar way. There have been cases of local councils banning
children’s pirate parties where skull-and-crossed-bones flags are
flown. And no, I am
not making this up.
