Story here.
The waters around Singapore have been a hot spot for years. And back in the days of Vietnamese boat people, pirate attacks were a major hazard for them. I’ve always found it fascinating that pirates proliferate in this day and age. Unfortunately, these are not colorful Johnny Depp characters, and there’s nary a parrot on their shoulders. These are some bad-ass mo-fos.
How is this a surprise?
The US Navy had to rescue North Koreans from Somalian pirates recently.
Piracy is becoming a very big problem, globally.
Oh, no surprise. We’ve had pirates over here for ages. Just fascinating when I stop to think about it.
Well, according to that article it seems more like a name game. Though, these so-called pirate’s legitimacy as a somalian coast guard is questionable, are they really genuine pirates, or are they more like privateers? Seems like the semantic game that Western countries play with the word “Terrorist”, casting the word around as a cover-all for any opposition.
Privateers have been outlawed by international law for more than a century.
And Somalia has no legit government to issues a letter of marque anyhoo.
Outside of fiction, have pirates ever been anything but the worst of criminal scum?
Well, they weren’t always the worst of criminal scum. Most historic accounts agree that pirate crews “back in the day” were treated significantly better than warship or merchantman crews, and even enjoyed a degree of shipboard democracy. Cite: http://www.peterleeson.com/An-arrgh-chy.pdf (working paper is hosted on a personal page, but is written by a prof at George Mason University - there’s some decent intellectual chops here).
That being said, the business of pirates was always theft, rapine, and murder - certainly the actions of criminal scum. But democratic criminal scum, and thus not the worst of the bunch. 
Apparently the piracy problem of the coast of Somalia is bad enough that it’s making it increasingly hard to get basic supplies (food) to the refugee camps.
A call went out from the UN, and the Danish Parliament decided to dispatch HDMS Thetis - not exactly a battlecruiser, but plenty enough to make your average modern-day pirate run a quick cost-benefit analysis. (Interestingly enough, the ship is specifically designed for arctic operations in ice-filled waters. One presumes the A/C is running overtime.) Reuters story here
The Danish Navy took over escort duty from France and later handed off to the Netherlands.
No UN resolutions or other international procedures were needed - piracy has been under the jurisdiction of any interested warship for centuries.
One of the more interesting methods I’ve heard comes from the waters around the Philippines and Borneo. Pirates will stretch out a rope or cable of some sort in the path of an oncoming cruise liner late at night. The ship hooks the rope, dragging the pirates’ boats behind. They scurry up the rope, overpower whatever crew they come across, break into any safes they find, then back down the rope and away.
ISTR that a few years ago there was a discussion here on the Dope about the possibility of giving old Cold War patrol ships, such as the US Navy’s PHM missile boats, that have been decommissioned from regular service, to some of the nations in various piracy hot spots - with the intent that they use them for anti-piracy operations.
The general consensus I recall was that while a PHM would probably be able to chew up anything being used by a sub-national group for piracy, that it would problematic to be sure that the nation getting it would use it for anti-piracy patrols, rather than, say, extortion of “piracy licensing fees.”
The conservatives were right- global warming is a myth!
(For those unfamiliar with the teachings of Pastafarianism, a.k.a. the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are **PYGMIES + DWARFS??**)
No. For the most part they’ve just been varying degrees of scum. Democratic scum, to a degree as Mr. Excellent pointed out, but scum nonetheless.
That said they could sometimes show a bit of compassion now and then. In A General History of Pirates by Charles Johnson (1724 I think) he describes one merchant captain whose ship was taken by pirates. The pirates were all set to do mean things to him when one of the pirates, son-of-a bitch had a peg leg and everything, told them to lay off the merchant captain because he served under him at one point. Made it clear that this merchant captain was a decent fellow who didn’t abuse his crew so they ended up not torturing him.
Marc
That story doesn’t exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy in regards to pirates.
Read Peter Earle’s The Sack of Panama. You’ll have a hugely different view of Henry Morgan, if you only associate him with the rum that bears his name today. And he was one of the more controlled and ‘accountable’ pirates in history.
Mighty_Boy is a captain of cargo ship doing the West Africa-Southern Europe route for the largest shipping company in the world. They get constant warnings and reports about pirates in all areas of the world where pirates operate. Most modern pirates board ships and steal things while doing their darnedest not to be noticed. Apparently the majority operate that way. The number of piracy incidents are pretty big because of this.
The mean sunofabitches operate in areas where there is no authority to enforce the law (like Somalia). The crew being killed is not unheard of.
Well, I ( vaguely ) recall reading about one place and time where the pirate crews were mostly escaped slaves, and the ships they were robbing mostly filled with treasure stolen from the Americas. It’s hard for me to look at them as worse than genocidal slavers and looters, although I doubt they’d qualify as nice guys.
And I also recall there was one period where they went out of their way to do as little actual harm as possible, under the theory that live merchants and unwrecked ships could be robbed again the next time they sailed by. They preferred terror tactics to rob with as little fighting and killing as possible ( one example; leaving the nubbin left over from it’s forging on cannonballs, so they shrieked terrifyingly when fired ). Rather like a seagoing Mafia; ruthless criminal-businessmen, more interested in profit than killing. Later on, this version was supplanted by more out-and-out bloodthirsty maniacs. A fairly common pattern in criminal society from my admittedly casual observations.
So no, I wouldn’t say that they’ve always been the very worst.
Nor should it. By and large these people were murderers, rapist, and thieves. Even the “good” guys like Captain Morgan did some pretty horrible stuff to people.
Marc
I wonder if there’s some government somewhere that would give you a letter of marque to go hunt pirates.
I’m envisioning a yacht of some kind, but with 50 cal machineguns and maybe a minigun or something like that, and a trained crew.
If you had such a vessel and a legitimate letter of marque, wouldn’t maritime insurers and shipping companies potentially pay you to go hunt pirates?
Nope, Letters of Marque are illegal according to current international maritime laws.
Marc
bump, the problems with such an idea are many. I don’t claim that any single problem is insoluble, but combined they make for a pretty huge bar against such an idea.
How do you keep your pirate hunters honest? The temptations for going free-lance, as it were, would be huge.
What does the pirate hunter do with the pirates when it catches them? The sort of vessel you suggest doesn’t have the room to hold prisoners for any length of time. Hell’s bells, I was on a 12,000 tonne vessel that had no space to keep prisoners. By far, the simplest thing would be to allow for summary executions. AIUI that would also be legal - piracy being still an official death penalty crime under international law, too. But can you imagine the fuss of having private contractors empowered to act as judge, jury and executioner? Even my gut reaction of, “give 'em a fair trial and hang 'em,” stumbles on that set of circumstances.
Related to points 1 & 2, if they are empowered to mete out punishment, the temptation for claiming that “persons X, Y, or Z were pirates, and that’s why they’re dead and we’ve confiscated their ship,” is going to become astronomical.
Local governments will fight such free-lance policing tooth and nail. The very proposal for such an idea is going to be seen as a huge slap to the government: an indictment that they cannot control their own territory. While you can argue that Somalia is effectively a non-state without any government, that’s not the case with other piracy hot spots, including Indonesia and Thailand.
Finally, while they are a minority of the cases, there are hints that certain powerful nations have supported piracy to steal ships, as well as cargoes. ISTR a few years ago an Australian flagged oil tanker ended up in one of the southern Chinese ports, under ahem disputed management. While flagged naval vessels aren’t likely to be attacked by such nations, simply because of the potential for escalation beyond anyone’s ability to control; there’s no such disincentive to attack a free-lance piracy patrol vessel.
On preview: Or one can go with the simple answer that MGibson gave. :smack: