by Ross Kemp
Teach was a privateer during England’s ongoing war with Spain, targeting Spanish ships, but when Britain withdrew from the war, many privateers turned pirate. Teach was among them. He drew his nickname, of course, from his enormous black beard, which he decorated with ribbons and slung over his ears. Traditional pictures of Blackbeard show him carrying several pistols hanging from his clothes – not entirely fanciful as the weapons of the day were unreliable, especially if they got wet, which was an occupational hazard. In Blackbeard’s line of work, you really wanted to make sure you had a backup if that happened. You wanted, quite literally, to keep your powder dry.
Blackbeard’s reputation was fearsome, and rumours of his barbarity travelled far. It was said that he once shot his first mate just to remind the crew of his position, and that he would allow his fourteenth (yes, fourteenth) wife to be raped by up to six members of his crew in a single night – once he had had his own way with her. In fact, although he was, financially speaking, a very successful pirate, there is little actual evidence of all this barbarity. The same can’t be said for his somewhat gruesome death. A price was put on Blackbeard’s head and he was hunted down by a Lieutenant Maynard. They fought with swords and pistols, and it took Maynard five bullets and twenty slashes with a sword to kill the pirate. Either Maynard’s weapons were dodgy, or Blackbeard was a hard bastard. Once he was dead, his head was cut off and hung from the side of Maynard’s ship – a reminder to anyone who saw it what fate pirates could expect if they were brought to justice.
Ned Low and Blackbeard were buccaneers – pirates who operated around the Caribbean and off the coast of South America. Nowadays ‘buccaneer’ has connotations of swashbuckling romance. The original buccaneers were actually French settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They looked after herds of livestock and for food used to smoke strips of meat over open fires. The French word for this method of cooking is boucaner, and these herders were a pretty wild and unsavoury bunch. When they realized there was a better living to be made pirating the Spanish galleons returning home laden with treasures from Mexico and South America, they lost their enthusiasm for livestock farming, underwent a quick career change and the original buccaneers were born.
Some buccaneers were privateers; others were out-and-out pirates. In many cases, the distinction between the two became a bit hazy. Sometimes they joined forces and attacked entire cities. Even those on the more criminal side, however, lived a weirdly democratic existence. Plunder was shared out according to an established system, and a ship’s captain could be voted out by his crew – a novel way of doing things in the seventeenth century. Perhaps that was why, even back then, stories of buccaneers became popular with landlubbers.
Life on pirate ships was no cosy utopia, however. Rules were strict, and if you broke them you were flogged or killed. Any pirate found stealing from his shipmates or deserting during battle would be marooned on a desert island – a slow and agonizing way to meet your death. An extremely popular book at the time, written by a Dutchman called Alexander Exquemelin, was called The Buccaneers of America. Exquemelin knew what he was talking about because he spent 12 years travelling on buccaneer ships as a surgeon. His book had a pretty colourful cast of characters, such as the French buccaneer Francis L’Ollonais. ‘It was the custom of L’Ollonais,’ he tells us, ‘that, having tormented any persons and they not confessing, he would instantly cut them in pieces with his anger, and pull out their tongues.’ On one occasion, when L’Ollonais wanted to gain entry to a Caribbean town, some Spanish soldiers made an unsuccessful attempt at ambushing him. The buccaneer captured the ambushers and forced them to tell him how to get into the town without being seen. According to Exquemelin, ‘he drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest: I will serve you all alike, if you show me not another way.’
L’Ollonais wasn’t the only one with a penchant for torture. A Dutch buccaneer called Roche Brasiliano derived his kicks from getting blind drunk and roasting Spanish prisoners alive over a spit. Whatever turns you on…
The Caribbean provided rich pickings for the buccaneers because of the trade routes that took a huge amount of commercial shipping to that part of the world. Merchant boats would load up in Europe with manufactured goods and weapons, then sail to Africa, where they would trade these goods for slaves. The slaves would then be taken to the Caribbean to be exchanged for commodities such as sugar, tobacco and cocoa, and the ships would return to Europe. This triangular trade route, however, was not the only one, and the buccaneers of the Caribbean were not the only pirates. The Mediterranean also played host to them, and those pirates that operated there were known as corsairs. There were some European corsairs, but they were far outnumbered by those from the northern coast of Africa, operating especially from Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers and Salé. This was known by Europeans as the Barbary Coast. The pirates that originated from these ports were known as the Barbary corsairs.
The Barbary corsairs terrorized the Mediterranean, the West African coast and the North Atlantic long before the so-called Golden Age of Piracy. As early as the eleventh century, when the Christian countries of Europe were waging war on Islam and other faiths in the Crusades, many Barbary pirates were given permission by the rulers of Muslim North Africa to attack European ships. The effect of these pirates was massive. They wouldn’t just attack ships, but also coastal towns. Huge lengths of the Spanish and Italian coasts remained unoccupied for hundreds of years because of the piracy threat. In 1631 almost all the inhabitants of a town on the south coast of Ireland were captured by pirates and taken to the Barbary coast, where an unpleasant fate awaited them. Between 1580 and 1680, around 850,000 European captives of the Barbary pirates were sold into slavery in North Africa. White slaves in North Africa were not nearly as numerous as black slaves elsewhere – nothing like – but thanks to the Barbary corsairs there were still a hell of a lot of them.
The Barbary pirates kept a proportion of their slaves for themselves, and the lives of these unfortunate captives could be miserable, especially if – as often happened – they were used to row the pirates’ galleys, the light winds of the Mediterranean being less suited to sailing ships. This was brutal work. The slaves were chained to their oars, and anyone not pulling their weight was whipped. Many died from exhaustion or went mad. If it became clear that they were no longer any use, it didn’t take long to throw them over the side (the idea that pirates forced people to walk the plank is just a myth – these brutal men had no patience for such ceremonial methods). The slaves ate where they were chained, they slept where they were chained, they even went to the toilet where they were chained. An Englishman called Francis Knight wrote of his stint as a galley slave in the early seventeenth century, ‘The stroke regular and punctual, their heads shaved unto the skull, their faces disfigured with disbarbing, their bodies all naked, only a short linen pair of breeches to cover their privities… all their bodies pearled with a bloody sweat.’ In around 1670, the families of some of these captives wrote an appeal to the House of Commons: ‘The [slave owners] do frequently bugger the said captives, or… run iron into their fundaments, rip open their bellies with knives, cut their britches across, and washing them with vinegar and salt, and hot oil, draw them in carts like horses.’
Some slaves were consigned to a life of rowing for decades without ever leaving their ships. Others would return to land during the winter months, when it was too treacherous for the Barbary pirates to be on the high seas. Here they were set to work building harbour walls or constructing new ships. They were given very little to eat or drink, and if they collapsed their masters would beat them until they got up again. They were given a change of clothes once a year.
The Barbary pirates didn’t limit themselves to taking men. Christian women were fair game too. They were
sold to the rulers of the Barbary coast and became part of their harems. If they were lucky, they’d be engaged only as harem attendants on the off chance that they might attract a ransom. Male slaves could also be bought out of slavery through payment of a ransom. But most of them came from poor backgrounds, so this rarely happened – unless they were the lucky recipients of money from charities back home set up for this purpose.
The most famous of the Barbary corsairs were two brothers who went by the name of Barbarossa, though only one of them – Aroudj – had the red beard from which they derived their name. His brother Hayreddin, however, became the more famous seaman, and in later years he died his beard red with henna out of respect for his brother. The Barbarossas came from the Ottoman empire, and Hayreddin was a hugely successful privateer around the Mediterranean. But he was more than that. He became admiral in chief of the Ottoman sultan’s fleet, and thanks to his exploits the empire controlled the Mediterranean for many years. Barbarossa was a national hero – in modern-day Istanbul there is a boulevard named after him.
Another well-known Barbary corsair happened, peculiarly, to be an Englishman. His name was John Ward and he spent his early career as a privateer for Queen Elizabeth, plundering Spanish ships under licence from her. When Elizabeth died and James came to the throne, he ended the war with Spain. Ward, like many privateers, was put out of business. And so he turned pirate. Having stolen an enormous 32-gun warship, he spent two years terrorizing merchant shipping around the Mediterranean. In about 1606 he arranged with the ruler of Tunisia to use Tunis as a base in return for a proportion of his spoils. He converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Reis. Ward’s actions made him ever so slightly unpopular in his home country. One contemporary report described him as being ‘very short with little hair, and that quite white, bald in front; swarthy face and beard. Speaks little and almost always swearing. Drunk from morn till night… the habits of a thorough salt. A fool and an idiot out of his trade.’ The English ambassador to Venice called him ‘the greatest scoundrel that ever sailed from England’ – and in a country that wasn’t short on pirates, he was up against some pretty stiff competition. Still, he lived out the rest of his life in Tunis, and died a rich man.
The Western powers were ready to condemn the action of these Muslim corsairs, but they weren’t exactly lily-white themselves. There were Christian corsairs too, who targeted North African shipping. The Knights of St John, for example, were based in Malta and regularly hit Muslim vessels – so much so that in 1720 there were around 10,000 Muslim slaves in Malta alone. Many Mediterranean galleys were manned by Muslim slaves, and while it was true that there were an eye-watering number of white slaves in North Africa at the time, it was by no means a one-sided evil. In 1714 a British naval officer wrote that ‘amongst the several towns situated on the coast of Spain, there may be moors purchased at very reasonable rates, such as are aged, blind or lame. It’s no matter, all will pass so they have life.’ A charming sentiment, and not an infrequent one in those sad days of slavery. As is always the case, every coin has two sides.
But the Barbary pirates were a major risk to Western shipping. In order to minimize the risk, France and other countries started paying bribes – they called them tributes – to the Barbary states. These tributes took the form of gold, jewels and other goods, and meant that the attentions of the corsairs were directed towards the weaker powers of Europe and, after the American War of Independence, the United States (until independence American ships had been under the protection of the mighty Royal Navy). In 1800, 20 per cent of the American government’s annual spending was on ransoms to the Barbary corsairs, and it was this that caused the fledgling United States to build its first navy and engage the Barbary nations in the First and Second Barbary Wars – the US’s first, but often forgotten, brush with Islamic nations. The newly formed United States Marines fought in these wars, and wore thick leather collars to protect them from the cutlass swipes of the corsairs. To this day, US Marines are known as leathernecks. (Interestingly, Royal Marines are sometimes called bootnecks because they would wrap their leather gaiters around their necks to stop themselves being slashed by mutinous crews.)
Despite this anti-piracy effort, it was not until 1816 that the threat of the Barbary corsairs was eliminated. The British navy achieved this by crushing the might of Algiers, killing about 8,000 men and destroying every building in the city. A British warship would not be called upon to fight the threat of piracy for another two centuries. When that happened, it would have the dubious honour of carrying me on board…
The real world of pirates, then, was a brutal one. Unlike the pirates of fiction, who are often portrayed as roguish adventurers, the pirates of history were hard, mean men. Violence and cruelty were second nature to them and their lives were tough and dangerous: for every John Ward who ended his days a rich man, there were many more Ned Lows and Blackbeards, gruesomely beheaded or hanged for their crimes after only a couple of years of plundering on the high seas.
In short, encountering pirates was one of the most frightening things that could happen at sea. They were heavily armed, determined and, surrounded by mile upon mile of water, there was nowhere the victims could go to escape them.
Many things have changed since those days. But some things haven’t. Seventy per cent of the earth’s surface is covered with water. Ninety per cent of all goods are transported by sea. Just look around your house. Tea bags? They came here by boat. Sugar? By boat. Ikea furniture? By boat. The clothes on your back and the car on your driveway? You guessed it. As has been the case for hundreds and hundreds of years, from the days of the Greek pirates, through the Golden Age of Piracy, where there’s trade, there’s crime. And just like in the days of Ned Low and Blackbeard, coming under attack in the middle of the ocean is not like coming under attack on land, because there’s nowhere to run and there are no police stations out at sea.
Modern-day pirates, I realized as I prepared to go out and find them, were not so different from the pirates of history. They were ruthless. They were daring. They were heavily armed – not with cutlasses and pistols but with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. And if my experiences in the past had taught me nothing else, they had taught me this: when someone is carrying that kind of weaponry, chances are they’re prepared to use it…
2. Pirate Alley
On 6 January 2009, just as the hijacking of the Sirius Star was coming to an end and while I was still in Kajaki, a 44-year-old Somali man by the name of Ibrahim Hussein Duale was going about his business, monitoring a school in the Gedo region of Somalia, near the Kenyan and Ethiopian borders. Duale worked for an organization called the World Food Programme. His role was to monitor the feeding of the schoolchildren in this ravaged country. A worthwhile occupation, I’d say. A good man.
Three masked gunmen entered the school. Duale happened to be sitting down at the time. The gunmen told him to get to his feet. He obeyed. And then, without explanation or hesitation, the gunmen shot him dead. Duale had a wife and five children, and was the third World Food Programme staff member to be killed in three months. Two days later, the total went up to four.
A shocking story. But where Ibrahim Hussein Duale came from, crimes like this are commonplace. In a weird kind of way, they’re not even crimes. Somalia has no functioning government. Lawlessness is the norm. I’ve been to some tough places in the world, but the thought of going there made me a bit green around the gills. And the more I learned about that troubled place, the more nervous I became.
The modern history of the country we now think of as Somalia, like the history of most African countries, is deeply complicated. In the late nineteenth century a number of European powers attempted to establish themselves in the area. One look at the map is enough to understand why. The country’s northern coastline is along the Gulf of Aden. If you want to transport goods from the Middle East up through the Red Sea and along the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, your route has to take you throug
h the Gulf of Aden – unless you want the expense of sailing south around the tip of Africa. To control the ports along the Somali coast would be to have a great economic advantage.
The British made treaties with a number of Somali chiefs, guaranteeing them security in return for establishing the protectorate of British Somaliland. The protectorate was bordered on three sides by Ethiopia, French Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, and covered the area around the northern coast. The colonialists were not universally popular. In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement: between 1899 and 1920, British Somaliland came under regular, brutal attack from the forces of a religious leader called Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. A bit of a mouthful – no wonder the British nicknamed him the Mad Mullah. Hassan was eventually suppressed, but 20 years later things were shaken up again with the arrival of the Second World War, when for a short while the Italians took British Somaliland. It was reconquered a few months later.
In 1960 British Somaliland gained independence and unified with Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic. What followed was the internal strife common to many post-colonial African states, culminating in a devastating civil war that started in 1991. The repressive Siad Barré fell from power, sparking a spiral of revolution and counterrevolution as some factions tried to reinstate him and others did whatever they thought necessary to stop this happening. The result was total anarchy. The northern region of Somaliland declared itself independent of the rest of the country, but the international community refused to recognize it.
The humanitarian situation became dire. Fighting raged between warlords, starting in the capital Mogadishu but soon spreading throughout the country; in the meantime, the ordinary people starved. From all over the world, governments sent food aid to help the starving. It’s estimated, however, that the warlords stole 80 per cent of the food that reached Somalia and sold it to other countries in order to raise money for weapons. And so both the starvation and the violence worsened. By the end of 1992, approximately 500,000 Somalis were prematurely dead and 1.5 million displaced.
