Grace O’Malley stands out as an isolated example in her time of a woman who took command of ships and armed forces, and proved able to survive as a leader in a hostile environment ruled by warlike men. Aside from military commanders such as Boadicea and Joan of Arc, one of the few women to match her achievement was the Chinese pirate Mrs. Cheng, whose fleets of junks ruled the South China Sea in the early years of the nineteenth century. Her full name was Cheng I Sao, which means “wife of Cheng I,” but she is often referred to as Ching Yih Saou, or Ching Shih.42
The customs, traditions, and way of life of the Chinese have for centuries been very different from those in the West. In the ports and along the rivers of southern China, entire communities lived and worked on the boats. In these floating villages the women played an active role in handling the sailing junks and small boats, and worked alongside the men when fishing and trading. The same conditions prevailed in the pirate communities. English observers such as Lieutenant Glasspoole noted that the pirates had no settled residences onshore but lived constantly on their vessels, which “are filled with their families, men, women and children.”43 It was not unusual for women to command the junks and to sail them into battle. The Chinese historian Yuan Yung-lun described a pirate action which took place in 1809: “There was a pirate’s wife in one of the boats, holding so fast by the helm that she could scarcely be taken away. Having two cutlasses, she desperately defended herself, and wounded some soldiers; but on being wounded by a musket-ball, she fell back into the vessel and was taken prisoner.”44
Against this background it was not so surprising that a woman should assume leadership of a pirate community, particularly as there was a long tradition in China of women rising to power through marriage. Mrs. Cheng was a former prostitute from Canton who married the pirate leader Cheng I in 1801. Between them they created a confederation which at its height included some fifty thousand pirates. By 1805 the pirates totally dominated the coastal waters of southern China. They attacked fishing craft and cargo vessels as well as the oceangoing junks returning from Batavia and Malaysia. They lived off the provisions and equipment which they plundered at sea, and when these supplies proved insufficient they went ashore and looted coastal villages. They frequently ransomed the ships which they captured, and they ran a protection racket in the area around Canton and the delta of the Pearl River.
When Cheng I died in 1807, his wife moved adroitly to take over command. She secured the support of the most influential of her husband’s relatives, and she appointed Chang Pao as commander of the Red Flag Fleet, which was the most powerful of the various fleets in the confederation. This was a particularly shrewd move. Chang Pao was a fisherman’s son who had been captured by her husband and proved himself a brilliant pirate leader. He commanded respect among the ranks of the pirates and had become the adopted son of Cheng I. Within weeks of her husband’s death, Mrs. Cheng had also initiated a sexual relationship with Chang Pao, and several years later she married him. Henceforth Mrs. Cheng acted as commander in chief of the pirate confederation, with Chang Pao in charge of day-to-day operations. Between them they laid down a strict code of conduct, with punishments even harsher than the codes adopted by the pirates who operated in the West Indies in the 1720s. The punishment for disobeying an order or for stealing from the common treasure or public fund was death by beheading. For deserting or going absent without leave a man would have his ears cut off. For concealing or holding back plundered goods the offender would be whipped. If the offense was repeated, he would suffer death. The rules were equally strict over the treatment of women prisoners. The rape of a female captive was punishable by death. If it was found that the woman had agreed to have sex with her captor, the man was beheaded and the woman was thrown overboard with a weight attached to her legs.
For three years Mrs. Cheng and Chang Pao fought off all attempts by government forces to destroy the pirate fleets. In January 1808 General Li-Ch’ang-keng, the provincial commander in chief of Chekiang, led an attack on the pirates in Kwangtung waters. A fierce and bloody action took place during the night, and at one point Li sent in fire vessels. The result was an overwhelming victory for the pirates. Li was killed by pirate gunfire which tore out his throat. Fifteen of his junks were destroyed and most of the remainder were captured. Later that year Chang Pao advanced up the Pearl River and threatened the city of Canton. Attempts were made to starve out the pirates by cutting their supply lines, but this simply led to the pirates going ashore and looting the villages. Every naval force sent out to intercept the pirates was defeated, and by the end of 1808 the authorities had lost sixty-three vessels. Some of the local communities constructed barricades and formed militia units which managed to repel pirate raids: they would lure pirates into ambushes and pelt them with tiles and stones and buckets of lime. All too often the pirates swept aside the amateur forces and took a terrible revenge. At the village of Sanshan in August 1809 the pirates burned the place to the ground, beheaded eighty villagers, and hung their heads on a banyan tree near the shore. The women and children who had been hiding in the village temple were carried off by the pirates. When Chang Pao attacked the island of Tao-chiao in September 1809, his pirates killed a thousand of the islanders and abducted twenty of the women.
The sheer numbers involved in some of these pirate attacks make the activities of the pirates in the West Indies pale into insignificance. Sometimes Mrs. Cheng’s forces went into action with several hundred vessels and up to two thousand pirates. At the height of its power in 1809 the confederation’s fleet was larger than the navy of many countries. There were some two hundred oceangoing junks, each armed with twenty to thirty cannon and able to carry up to four hundred pirates. There were between six and eight hundred coastal vessels armed with twelve to twenty-five guns and carrying two hundred men. And there were dozens of small river junks which were manned by crews of twenty to thirty men. These vessels had sails and up to twenty oars, and were used for going up shallow rivers to plunder villages or to destroy farms when local communities had failed to pay protection money.45
Mrs. Cheng’s reign as a pirate leader came to an end in 1810. Chinese officials had enlisted the assistance of Portuguese and British warships, and increasingly large forces were being assembled to counter the pirates. When the Chinese government offered an amnesty to the pirates, Mrs. Cheng resolved to take the initiative and secure the best possible terms. She decided to go unarmed to the Governor-General in Canton, and on April 18, 1810, she arrived at his residence with a delegation of seventeen women and children. It was a bold move and proved entirely successful. She was negotiating from a position of strength because the Governor-General and his advisers were only too aware of the terrible damage and casualties which her pirate squadrons were capable of inflicting. It was agreed that the pirates would surrender their junks and their weapons, but in return they would be able to keep their plunder and those who were willing were allowed to join the army. Mrs. Cheng also negotiated that her lieutenant and lover, Chang Pao, be given the rank of lieutenant and allowed to keep a private fleet of twenty junks. On April 20 no less than 17,318 pirates formally surrendered and 226 junks were handed over to the authorities. Not all the pirates got off scot-free: 60 were banished for two years, 151 were permanently exiled, and 126 were executed.46
Mrs. Cheng and Chang Pao settled in Canton but later moved to Fukien, where they had a son. Chang Pao eventually rose to the rank of colonel and died in 1822 at the age of thirty-six. Mrs. Cheng, who was a wealthy woman, returned to Canton. She kept a gambling house but led a peaceful life and died in 1844 at the age of sixty-nine. It is a pity that there are no authentic descriptions of Mrs. Cheng’s appearance or character. The exploits and battles of the pirate confederation are recorded in detail in Chinese documents, but she herself remains a shadowy figure. She was evidently a resourceful and powerful woman. Whether she justifies the claim of one historian47 that she was “the greatest pirate, male or female, in all history” is questionabl
e, but for three years she controlled and masterminded the activities of one of the largest pirate communities there has ever been.
The most famous pirate shipwreck took place on the shores of Cape Cod on April 26, 1717. Sam Bellamy had captured the slave ship Whydah a few weeks before in the Windward Passage as she headed for London. He took command of her, and in company with a captured sloop commanded by his quartermaster Paul Williams, he headed north. After plundering a number of merchant ships off the coast of Virginia, they agreed to make for Block Island in order to careen and refit the two pirate ships. As he approached the treacherous shoals off Cape Cod, Bellamy was leading a small fleet of four vessels, which included the Mary Anne, a small merchant vessel of the type known as a pink. She had been captured earlier in the day, and her captain taken off. Three members of her crew had been left on board, and seven armed pirates placed in charge of her.
During the evening of April 26 the weather turned nasty. Driving rain reduced visibility so that the ships lost touch with each other, but more serious than the rain was the strong easterly wind which sprang up, sweeping in from the Atlantic and building up to gale force. Bellamy and his prizes were now sailing off a lee shore on a stretch of coast which has claimed hundreds of ships over the years. At some time between ten and eleven at night the Mary Anne found herself among breaking waves and ran aground. The crew cut down her masts to reduce the strain on the hull, but the wind and the waves simply drove the vessel further up the beach. The men decided to stay on board, and they spent an unpleasant night battened down in the hold. In the morning they found the pink was high and dry on a barren island. They were rescued by two men in a canoe, who raised the alarm. Within hours the seven pirates were in the hands of a deputy sheriff and his men. On October 18 they were tried before an Admiralty Court at Boston, and six of them were hanged a month later.1
The Whydah did not survive the storm. Ten miles further up the coast she was swept toward the breakers. The anchors were dropped, but they dragged and Bellamy ordered his men to cut the anchor cables. A large square-rigged ship had no hope of sailing off a lee shore once she was among the breakers. The Whydah struck on a shoal a few hundred yards off the beach. Her mainmast went by the board and the ship began to break up. Only two men reached the shore alive: Thomas Davis, a young Welsh shipwright, and John Julian, an Indian who had been born on Cape Cod. One hundred and forty-four men, including Bellamy, died in the storm, and during the next few days many of the bodies were washed up on the beach.
Every pirate ship had to be prepared to ride out gales and storms at sea. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico had the advantage of warm and sunny winters, but they were (and of course still are) subject to hurricanes which built up in the Atlantic and swept across the region with devastating results. Jamaica was a regular target. In 1712 Governor Hamilton reported that a hurricane had destroyed thirty-eight ships in the harbor at Port Royal and nine ships at Kingston. Ten years later, on August 28, 1722, a hurricane hit the island at half past eight in the morning. According to Captain Chaloner Ogle of HMS Swallow, who was at anchor off Port Royal, there was “as much wind in my opinion as could possibly blow out of the heavens … all the merchantmen in the harbour foundered or drove ashore excepting one sloop.”2 The seas threw up rocks and stones and flooded the town to a depth of five feet.
The pirate Edward Low was heading for the Leeward Islands in a brigantine when the same hurricane swept across his path. Mountainous waves threatened to overcome them, and the crew were forced to throw overboard six of their guns, their provisions, and all their heavy goods to lighten the vessel. For hours they worked the pumps and used buckets to bail out the water. They debated whether to cut away the masts but decided against this and instead rigged preventer shrouds to secure the mainmast “and lay to upon the other tack, till the storm was over.”3 The schooner which was sailing in company with the brigantine had her mainsail split by the force of the wind and her crew had to cut away the anchors at her bows, but otherwise she came through the storm unscathed.
Charles Vane was not so fortunate. In February 1719 he was cruising in the seas to the south of Jamaica when his pirate sloop was overtaken by a violent hurricane. He was swept by the storm toward a small, uninhabited island in the Bay of Honduras. Here his sloop was driven ashore and smashed to pieces. Most of her crew were drowned. Vane survived the shipwreck but spent several weeks on the island in a miserable state. The local fishermen who visited the island to catch turtles helped him to survive, and eventually he was taken off by a ship from Jamaica commanded by Captain Holford, a former buccaneer. He was taken to Jamaica and hanged.
It was a shipwreck which ended the travels of Robert Dangerfield, a thirty-two-year-old seaman from Jamaica who was captured by pirates and forced to join them. After an eventful voyage which took them from the West Indies to Boston, across the Atlantic to the west coast of Africa, and back to North America, they found themselves off the coast of Carolina. Violent onshore winds forced them to anchor some miles to the south of the Ashley River in the hope of riding out the gale. The anchors dragged and the ship was swept ashore; “she struck and as the tide fell away and the sea growing very high was forced on a reef of sand and was forced to cut away our mainmast and seeing our condition desperate we made floats to save our lives and so got ashore having 8 white men drowned out of 44 and 7 negroes drowned.…”4
Considering the primitive state of navigation and charts in the early part of the eighteenth century it is surprising that more pirate ships were not wrecked. Any competent ship’s master could determine latitude by measuring the altitude of the sun at midday with a quadrant or backstaff and making some simple calculations, but until the introduction of lunar distance tables in the 1760s, and John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer around the same time, there was no accurate method of finding longitude at sea. This meant that a mariner could find out to within five or ten miles where he was in a north-south direction, but could not be certain where he was in an east-west direction.
There were charts, of course, but although these were beautifully drawn and gave the general shape of coastlines and the position of islands, they were often inaccurate. William Dampier, the buccaneer and explorer, reckoned that most of the charts overestimated the width of the Atlantic by as much as ten degrees: “Mr Canby particularly, who hath sailed as a Mate in a great many voyages from Cape Lopez, on the Coast of Guinea, to Barbadoes, and is much esteemed as a very sensible man, hath often told me that he constantly found the distance to be between 60 and 62 degrees; whereas ’tis laid down in 68,69, 70 and 72 degrees, in the common draughts.”5 Ten degrees was the equivalent of six hundred nautical miles, a dangerously large error for a ship at the end of an ocean crossing.
Dampier is one of the most interesting of all the people who were involved with piracy, and his published journals are a valuable source of information about the navigational problems which faced the oceangoing seamen of his day. He was born in 1652 and was the son of a Somerset farmer. He went to sea at the age of seventeen and sailed on a merchant ship to Newfoundland, and then joined the crew of an East Indiaman bound for Java. In 1673 he joined the Royal Navy, which at this period was engaged in a long-running campaign against the Dutch. He was present at the two battles of Schooneveld on board the Royal Prince, the flagship of Sir Edward Spragge, but he fell ill and was invalided out of the navy. He went home to his brother in Somerset to recover his health. There he received an offer from Colonel Hellier, one of his neighbors, to go out to Jamaica to manage his plantation.
Dampier sailed from the Thames early in 1674, working his passage as a seaman on a ship commanded by Captain Kent. After a year in Jamaica, he headed for the Bay of Campeche, where he spent ten months working among the logwood cutters, an experience which is vividly described in his journals. Tiring of this heavy work in one of the most unhealthy regions of the world, he headed back to England. Before setting off on his travels again, he married Judith, a woman on the hou
sehold staff of the Duchess of Arlington. His wife saw little of him during the next ten years because he was almost continuously at sea. From 1679 to 1681 he was with the buccaneers led by Captain Bartholomew Sharp, being present at the attack on Portobello and several of the other raids described in the journal of Basil Ringrose, a member of Sharp’s crew. In 1683 he joined a buccaneer expedition led by Captain John Cook: they sailed from Virginia to the Guinea coast of Africa, back across the Atlantic to South America, around Cape Horn and up the coast of Chile to the Juan Fernández Islands, and then out into the Pacific to the Galápagos Islands.
By 1685 Dampier was back in the region of Panama, where he joined a group of buccaneers led by Captain Swan, who commanded a ship appropriately named the Cygnet. In March 1686 they set sail for the East Indies. During the course of the next two years they voyaged among the Philippines, they explored the coast of China near Macau, and they threaded their way among the Spice Islands of Indonesia to Australia, then known as New Holland. They anchored in a bay on a barren stretch of the north coast, careened their ship, and observed the native aborigines, who Dampier considered to be “the miserablest people in the world.” After a stay of two months on the Australian coast, they sailed northwest, past Sumatra, to the island of Nicobar in the Indian Ocean. There Dampier and several other members of the ship’s company left the buccaneers and set off on their own. He spent an eventful period making trading voyages among the Indonesian islands before heading for home. He returned to England in September 1691.
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