PIRATES come out of nowhere in the night, fast and quick in high-powered boats. They approach unseen when there is no moon to light the water, unheard when the wind is up. The charts of the Shinyo Ocean are clearly marked, warning in block capitals: EXTREME RISK OF PIRACY/SET WATCHES – STEER CLEAR – NO STOPPING. In case the message is not clear enough, the cluster of small islands that make up the Riaus is circumscribed in red. This is Asia’s largest and most active concentration of pirates; it is also just about where we happen to be.
The Shinyo Ocean is carrying 180,000 tonnes of oil from Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates down the Malacca Straits, round Singapore and then up past the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, Vietnam and across the South China Sea to Taiwan. After a dinner of roti canai, vegetable curry and lentil dahl, Kappithan, the captain, orders lockdown and we are confined aft in the blockhouse. Here are found the engine room, the bridge, our ‘guest’ quarters, a ping-pong table and a well-stocked library of DVDs, if second-rate Hollywood action flicks and Bollywood extravaganzas happen to be your taste. Inside, we guzzle cheap lager, which tastes wet and no more, and smoke knock-off L&M cigarettes bought by the crew in the Middle East. Two crewmen posted outside, Jasprit and Syam, make do with a little food and flasks of tea, their standard-issue binoculars close to hand. Both are from India, which, along with the Philippines and Indonesia, has for centuries crewed the world’s commercial shipping. They are small men, smaller still when seen with the deck before them stretching out towards the prow for the length of more than three football pitches. They have no night-vision gear, no guns.
It was in these waters, a few hours outside Singapore on a bearing for the East Malaysian coast one evening during the last voyage of the European-owned, Hong Kong-flagged Shinyo Ocean, that looking out to sea, the captain’s wife spied a small Indonesian fishing boat on what appeared to be an intercept course. She knew well enough that such fishing boats are crewed by half a dozen men and stay close in to land; this vessel was too far out to sea and the outboards too large for a mere fishing smack. She counted more than six heads on deck. She raised the alarm. The Singapore Navy, with their sleek Formidable-class multi-role stealth frigates, the most advanced surface combat craft anywhere in Southeast Asia, are a common sight in the shipping lanes, darting from tanker to tanker, but it had no ships in the vicinity.
Increasing speed is not necessarily a course of action open to the captain of a very large crude carrier, or VLCC; depending on water depth, cargo weight, tides and other factors to be calculated, going faster can take twenty to thirty minutes at the risk of creating suction that will bottom a boat in shallow waters. There is only one real option – the fire hoses. Simple, but effective.
The pirates of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea are old school and, unlike their peers off the Somali coast, have yet to acquire rocket-propelled grenades. The local boys prefer handguns, or more usually just knives, machetes and cutlasses, easy enough to subdue the crew of a boarded vessel with. The trick is to keep the pirates from boarding in the first place. Oil tankers carry powerful hoses that, when set to ‘fog’, are effective in dousing a shipboard fire; when set to ‘straight stream’ they blast a hard jet of saltwater at up to 250 pounds per square inch, enough to capsize a small boat. With the twenty-two Indian crewmen on alert and the ‘water cannon’ primed, the suspect fishing boat turned away in search of easier prey.
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Our small party joins the Shinyo Ocean an hour from Singapore’s World Trade Centre Ferry Terminal as it slows to take on passengers and provisions from a small supply tender, the Jolly Rachel, owned and crewed by three Aceh men who lost their village to the tsunami and seem to have been at sea ever since. The tanker is behind schedule, held up in Singapore’s busy shipping lanes (four-fifths of the world’s seaborne oil and freight travel down the Malaysian coast, around Singapore and into the South China Sea). Having arrived early, we bob about on the Jolly Rachel for an hour, nauseous from the choppy sea and shrill Indonesian pop music blasting from the helm. And then we were alongside a US$130 million behemoth of the sea, 354 metres long, sixty-one metres wide, riding six storeys above us in constant motion. She burns sixty-two tonnes of bunker fuel a day – at a cost of US$50,000 at the prevailing price.
The captain slows the Shinyo Ocean to seven knots and ladder steps are dropped as the Jolly Rachel matches her speed. The ship seems to magnify tenfold as we close in on the hull, and especially during the jump, after which comes the long, long climb to the deck, the mind fortunately focused on the feet. Once safely aboard, the Jolly Rachel veers away sharply – even at these slow speeds the tiny tender could be sucked under the Shinyo Ocean and pulverised if either vessel loses synch. The captain increases speed to fourteen knots and by nightfall we are passing out of the Singapore Straits into the South China Sea, steering a course for the Riau Islands.
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The South China Sea is 900,000 square miles of open ocean, but there is always another vessel on the horizon in these busy shipping lanes – container ships sailing west from China piled high with goods destined for the markets of Europe, or VLCCs like this one, hauling oil and bulk commodities to feed the hungry factories of China and Taiwan.
We have come aboard the Shinyo Ocean to see how oil is moved around the world, to experience at first hand the crucial uninterrupted flow of black gold from the Middle East to East Asia. If the economies of East Asia are the workshops of the world, then oil is the lifeblood that keeps the gargantuan machine running. Along these routes, beyond all the spreadsheets and statistics, the skyscrapers of Shanghai and Hong Kong, flows the fuel that stoked the much-vaunted East Asian economic miracle. And the greatest threat to these shipping lanes today is posed not by war or political crisis, but by bands of pirates in high-speed boats who come out of nowhere to storm the tankers.
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Pirates have plied the seas off the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, Vietnam and southern China, across the South China Sea to the Riau Islands and Borneo, and north to Luzon and Batan from as early as 400CE. ‘Infested’ is how the first Europeans to venture here found these waters more than a thousand years later, before the imperial navies of the West set about eradicating the pirate threat to their profits.
In the fifteenth century China’s newly ascendant Ming dynasty felt itself largely free from the threat of land invasion from the north and the Mongol confederacy, though it kept a wary eye. But it was disdainful of coastal security and in 1479 the inward-looking Ministry of War dismantled an incredible navy built to spread China’s influence over half the globe. Its giant junks had dominated ocean trade while Europe was still feeling for a way around Africa, and Arab control of the spice trade, in tiny caravels.
The most celebrated medieval traveller in these parts from Arabia was Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Batuta, a Moroccan Berber and Sunni Muslim, who visited China sixty years after Marco Polo. Ibn Batuta set out east from Tangiers as a young man of twenty-one, despatched to China by Muhammad Tughluqand, the Sultan of Delhi, known as the ‘Bloody Sultan’ after his penchant for having men who failed him flogged and their entrails force-fed to their families. On returning home thirty years later, Ibn Batuta dictated an account of his travels to the Andalusian Islamic scholar Ibn Juzayy. Published as Travels in Asia and Africa, his memoirs contain vivid images of twelve-masted Chinese junks crewed by a thousand men. They record Chinese ships patrolling the South China Sea with 400 armed soldiers aboard to do battle with pirates and rescue hostages.
Just a few years before Vasco da Gamma entered the Indian Ocean, China burned its naval records and severely curtailed all but coastal cabotage; Chinese subjects were forbidden on pain of death from going to sea and the southeast coast was left open and vulnerable. Chinese pirates and the Wokou, their Japanese counterparts, were regular raiders along the Korean and Chinese coasts, and the Ming government, now with no effective navy, emptied its coastal towns in a bid to starve the pirates out. It was a strategy doomed to failure and a protective wall encircling Shanghai was built in 1555, the lines of which can still be traced around the old town, Nanshi.
Always pragmatic in its foreign relations, China in the sixteenth century entered into an agreement that required Japan to deploy a coastguard to deal with piracy. It was a deal that revealed to Japan the full extent of China’s naval weakness and while the Wokou continued their raids, attacks by semi-official privateers escalated and flotillas of Chinese pirates terrorised the southern Chinese coast, roaming freely across the South China Sea. Officially, seafaring had been suppressed, but those who knew better had an almost unfettered hand.
The balance of sea power swung back and forth. The great Chinese admiral Qi Jiguang fought and defeated Japanese pirates along China’s east coast in the 1560s. In the 1590s Japanese warlord Hideyoshi enlisted the support of mercenary pirates for his invasions of China, but he was defeated by Korean admiral Yi Sun Shin, famous for his fleet of Geobukseon, or turtle ships, equipped with iron cladding, cannon and a mounted dragon’s head that spewed a sulphurous smokescreen to mask the ships in close combat.
Piracy flourished in the South China Sea with Chinese, Javanese, Filipino and Japanese raiders; there were even reports of a pirate band of black slaves escaped from the Portuguese in Macau. It would be some time before the Europeans could afford their lucrative new trade routes any semblance of security.
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The Riau Islands are comprised of the Riau, the Natuna Islands, Anambas and Lingga Islands. A province of Indonesia, with Tajung Pinang as its capital, there can be no better place for pirates to hide – 3,200 islands among which a speedboat can quickly disappear.
Shinyo Ocean’s watch reported that at 3.50a.m. seven pirates armed with long knives boarded a nearby Panamanian-registered bulk carrier, the JKM Muhieddine, as it passed sixty-four nautical miles east of the Malaysian island Pulau Tioman. The vessel was steaming at eleven knots towards Singapore when the gang boarded her aft. Having subdued the carrier’s master and another crew member, they stole money and personal belongings – cameras, mobile phones, spare shoes and clothing – moving on to the chief engineer’s cabin where they took his money, then tying up the captain in the aft bollard. They made their getaway at 4.10a.m. The JKM Muhieddine had been righteously mugged.
It was a busy night. The watch later learned that at 2.20a.m., eight pirates in a speedboat and armed with long knives and metal pipes had come alongside and boarded the chemical tanker Sun Geranium in the same area as the Muhieddine. They took the bridge and tied up the two officers on duty before taking them to the master’s cabin. The rest of the crew were tied up on the poop deck above the bridge aft. The pirates stole money, phones, cameras and valuables before speeding away.
No one was injured in either attack; more worrying was the thought of two large ships underway at night in busy shipping lanes with no one at the wheel. Collision is a constant risk. The International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur maintains a round-the-clock watch on acts of piracy and armed robbery in the Malacca and Singapore straits and out across the South China Sea. By its reckoning, the same gang, well known in these waters, hit both ships.
‘They’re not pirates,’ our captain said the next morning, ‘they’re just petty thieves.’ Like any householder in a bad neighbourhood, there was little he could do but lock down the ship – even opening a door from the inside, just for a few minutes, requires a mountain of paperwork and places the ship’s insurance at risk. It is of some small comfort to learn that ships the size of the Shinyo Ocean are rarely attacked. The prospect of a twenty-two-metre climb up a rope swinging from a grappling hook fired onto the deck sends pirates off in search of smaller carriers instead, a container ship perhaps – easier to sneak up on, board and flee.
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Our captain was right – these were not pirates we were dealing with, but petty thieves, sea-borne muggers with speedboats and a violent attitude in balaclavas and flip-flops, who took cash and Nokias, then disappeared into the night. It was not always so. Contrary to legend, when pirates of old boarded ships the first things they seized were navigational instruments and charts. Then they went for the silver. They came in hordes, armed with two-handed ‘hackers’, long and heavy swords swung with both hands that could cut through armour, with small daggers at their belts to finish the job.
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Pirates were lured to the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea by the same spices and treasures that brought the Europeans. A European who sailed to the Spice Islands to load up the hold with cloves or nutmeg before limping back home could be made for life, such were the prices. The pirates were not unaware of this development in global trade; they had, after all, been hijacking Chinese junks and Arab dhows for the silk and porcelain they carried for hundreds of years. New routes sprang up across the South China Sea and all involved rounding Singapore, providing rich pickings for pirates, especially those in the maze of islands that make up the Riau archipelago. Many of the routes were the preserve of the East India Company in the seventeenth century, and such a plague was piracy that the Admiralty in London granted the company permission to punish pirates. Those captured were hanged from the yardarm, or flogged, their foreheads branded with the letter P.
Sailing from Singapore to Taiwan today, once beyond the Riau Islands you are largely clear of pirate activity until reaching the northern tip of Luzon and the Batan and Babuyan islands. Then you again find yourself in historic pirate territory. In 1574, the notorious Chinese pirate Lin Feng sailed into Manila Bay with a flotilla of sixty-two ships and two thousand men and women (piracy then being a family business and distinctly less gender-specific than it is today), intent on settling there and making it his base. A year later the Spanish torched Lin Feng’s fort, burning it to the ground and hounding the pirates back out to sea, so saving the Chinese imperial fleet a task, a breakthrough in Sino-Spanish relations. Lin Feng and his crew were far from done though, and they continued to pillage the Formosa Straits.
One man’s pirate is another man’s free trader. In 1624, the Dutch established a base at Anping in Taiwan, close to the Han Chinese immigrant settlement of Tainan, and from there launched raids to disrupt Spanish trade between Fujian and Manila. The two European nations were at war, not least over trade routes to Asia. The Spanish retaliated by occupying Keelung, near Taipei, and the two navies went at each other up and down the Taiwan coast for two decades, each accusing the other of piracy.
Courtesy of Wattis Fine Art, Hong Kong (www.wattis.com.hk)
Taiwan was not to remain in Dutch hands for long. With the collapse of the Ming dynasty, the rise of the Qing was not universally welcomed. Pirate chief Coxinga, the son of a Ming admiral, resisted the Qing for years from his base in Amoy, eventually sailing his pirate fleet to Taiwan, capturing it from the Dutch and dying there in 1662. Patriotism met piracy. The Qing didn’t take back Taiwan from the pirates for another twenty-one years.
All efforts to wipe out the scourge of piracy eventually met with the same fate – failure. In the 1760s, two centuries after the razing of Lin Feng’s Manila Bay base, Spanish-chartered vessels laden with silver and other goods were regularly waylaid and relieved of their cargoes between Canton and Manila, and near the Balintang Channel between Batan and Babuyan.
The area is still high risk today. Once again, the Shinyo Ocean locks down after dinner, two crew members stationed aft with high-power hoses, doors sealed from the inside.
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One of the earliest pirate bestsellers, in what has proved to be a popular genre, was Mr Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates by Richard Glasspoole, published in 1815. The original text was intended only for the eyes of the East India Company’s Select Committee of Supercargoes. Based in Macau, the Honourable Company’s intelligence-gathering arm for the South China Sea also happened be a group of men to whom Glasspoole owed his life, the company having paid a not inconsiderable ransom for him, part in cash, part in cloth, opium and gunpowder, with even a telescope thrown in. Glasspoole had been taken by a band of pirates who roamed along the southern Chinese coast and down as far as Hanoi, headed by the fierce female pirate and master tactician Ching Shih. She held him captive for three months.
A former Canton prostitute working the ‘flower boats’ of the Pearl River, Ching Shih had married the notorious pirate Ching Yih in 1801 and assumed command of his fleet upon his death in 1807. This was no small inheritance – a fleet of 800 large ships and a thousand smaller boats; 80,000 men and women armed with daggers and curved cutlasses. The Chinese imperial fleet attacked the pirates using fire ships filled with explosives as floating bombs but Ching Shih would not be defeated. She and her vast pirate gang brought Glasspoole on pillaging expeditions, sacking towns and plundering villages. Glasspoole’s release was almost scuppered when Ching Shih flew into a rage at being palmed off with a second-hand telescope by the East India Company. A new one was quickly found and Glasspoole was sent on his way. Ching Shih agreed a lucrative amnesty with the Chinese government, disbanded her fleet and used the money to set her self up in the casino business.
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Piracy was firmly established as a way of life across the South China Sea, with its own rituals, hierarchies and divisions. Ching Yih had divided his fleet into squadrons, each sailing under its own flag – red, yellow, green, blue, black and white – designated flag-carriers leading the attacks. The mythical empress of heaven, Tien Hou Sheng, adorned Ching Yih’s own elaborate flag. She was the calmer of storms and a goddess to the fishermen of southern China, many of whom in hard times would turn to piracy to survive.
With pirates pouring out from the southern China coast, the Haiphong River in Vietnam, the Philippines, Borneo and the Riaus, the South China Sea was by now truly ‘infested’. When William Farquhar, the first British resident in Singapore, arrived in 1819 he was greeted by a row of skulls on the shoreline, a welcome present from the Riau pirates. The problem was such that Singapore merchants petitioned the Royal Navy and a bounty was set on the head of each pirate killed or captured. Royal Navy captains, always with an eye to boost their wages, pursued their new prey and the purse that went with it vigorously.
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Whether the Royal Navy, the East India Company or the Chinese imperial fleet, the course of action was always the same: suppression. According to the Hansard of the British Houses of Parliament for July 25, 1862:
Mr Crawford (MP – City of London) said, he wished to ask, ‘Whether the attention of Her Majesty’s Government has been drawn to recent statements in the public papers relative to renewed and systematic piracy in the Eastern Archipelago, and the signal service conferred by the destruction of a piratical fleet and the liberation of more than two hundred captives by a steamer of the Government of Sarawak; and whether Her Majesty’s Government are prepared to take steps to put a stop to such practices?’
Mr Austen Henry Layard (MP – Southwark and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the administration of Lord Palmerston) replied, ‘The attention of the Government had been called to the account recently published of the attack made on the Borneo pirates and the additional services which Rajah Brooke, and those who acted with him, had rendered to the cause of civilisation and humanity, as well as to the commerce in those seas. The attack, it appeared, was very effective, and some notorious captains and spies had been captured, and signally punished.’
Those detained by James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, had been ‘signally punished’ all right. Brooke had been punishing pirates in Borneo since becoming rajah in 1841 at the behest of the sultans. In 1843, the Royal Navy ship HMS Dido arrived in Sarawak to aid him in the suppression of piracy, but when Dido departed for duty on the China coast, Brooke was left vulnerable. The northern Borneo pirate Serip Usman, who hated Brook for having mobilised the Sultan of Brunei against his gang and the stranglehold they enjoyed, hatched a plan to dispose of both Brooke and the sultan while the Royal Navy’s back was turned. But his intelligence was faulty. As Dido sailed away for China, a fleet commanded by Admiral Cochrane arrived in Brunei and, joined by Brooke, set a course for Usman’s base on the banks of the Marudu River in Sabah. Brooke’s forces numbered more than 500 soldiers, but Usman had fortified his camp – no land approach was possible and the river was blocked by giant logs linked with iron chains. Brooke’s marines hacked at the logs as the fleet and fort exchanged cannon fire. Eventually the soldiers broke through, storming Usman’s base as the pirate gang fled into the jungle leaving their dead leader behind.
Courtesy of Lok Man Rare Books, Hong Kong (www.lokmanbooks.com)
Even as Brooke clashed with Usman, another pirate, Pengiran Usop, was attacking Brunei. Brooke fought on against one pirate after another – the Kimanis of North Borneo, the Sea Dyaks of Sarawak, the Balanini of Jolo, the Illanun of Mindanao and Sabah, and gangs from Sumatra – forming his own private army in 1862 and allying with the friendly sultans, the Royal Navy, the Sarawak Rangers, anyone who would fight alongside him. He was the classic imperial adventurer, suppressing piracy to tame the lands he ruled, to, as he wrote in his diary, ‘open the country to commerce and civilisation … to bestow happiness on its inhabitants’. Still, Brooke was not an unsubtle man – contrary to Conrad’s unflattering fictionalisation of him as Captain Brown in Lord Jim – and understood that his suppression of pirates was in a sense an ‘interference with the rights of native states to war one upon the other’. But for all that he was still an imperialist and was, after all, the ‘White Rajah’, and so suppress piracy he did, right up until his death in 1868.
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It was in 1809 that China’s Admiral Tsuen Mow Sun complained, ‘the pirates are too powerful, we cannot master them by our arms’, but it would take a group of far-sighted Qing dynasty officials to see that, after centuries of neglect, China must have a navy. Supporters of the so-called Self-Strengthening Movement between 1861 and 1895, the likes of statesman Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang, the man responsible for suppressing Yakub Beg, recognised the need to deprive the pirates of the freedom of the seas and safe havens along the coast. Li and Zuo established shipyards and bought iron-clad naval ships from Europe, but it was a drop in the ocean against the length of China’s coastline, the expanse of the South China Sea and the swelling pirate gangs. In the 1920s, state control weak, corruption endemic, warlord armies swarming across the country’s south, piracy continued to thrive. I Sailed With Chinese Pirates by the Russian-born journalist Aleko Lilius lists numerous attacks on ships out of Hong Kong, some brazen, pirates disguising themselves as passengers to rob all onboard before escaping to a trailing craft. Crews were murdered and vessels burned.
Lilius recounts having met Lai Choi San, or ‘Mountain of Wealth’, in the 1920s – yet another female pirate in command of a junk, running a protection racket extorting money from Macau’s fishing fleets. Fascinated by pirates, he tracked down Wong Kiu, the leader of the West River pirates who ran floating brothels, opium dens and pig farms, and then Ko Leong Tai, known as ‘Dog Man’. Kidnapped by pirates, Ko had been locked in a cage when his family refused to pay his ransom. Once released, he could no longer walk without severe pain, and so instead he crawled, thus earning his moniker. Ko’s great obsession remained to revenge himself on the brother who had denied his freedom.
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Perhaps the most notorious pirate the South China Sea has ever seen was Shap’n’gtzai, who began terrorising the region in the 1840s with his lieutenant, Chui Apoo, the so-called Barber Pirate on account of his having been a practising barber before deciding that clipping merchantmen was more profitable than clipping merchants’ hair. Shap’n’gtzai’s raiders interfered with trade to such an extent that the Royal Navy initiated a search-and-destroy mission in 1849. Shap’n’gtzai was anchored with his fleet at the mouth of the Haiphong River in northern Vietnam when the British came upon him, and he might have escaped Her Majesty’s vengeance had the tide not turned and swung his junks’ cannon to face each other. They went to the bottom one by one. Chui Apoo, at his base at Bias Bay some fifty nautical miles northeast of Hong Kong, was betrayed by his own men for the reward on his head. The harbour though remained a haven for pirates into the 1930s, and piracy in the South China Sea, particularly around the Riaus, continued (until the recent upsurge off the Somali coast) to be the worst found anywhere in the world.
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Piracy, as the activity off the Somali coast shows, will flourish where the rule of law is weakest. And while poverty, boredom and a sense of injustice drive young men in cities to join street gangs, on the coasts, deprived of a livelihood by over-fishing, ignored by governments and encouraged by corrupt and conniving officials, piracy offers a route to easy money. Now, it is container ships laden with consumer goods; then, it was opium, silver and the cargoes of the East Indies and China trade. The unravelling of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in the mid-1990s saw a surge in activity around the Riau Islands, with the straits of Malacca and Singapore as well as the South China Sea becoming hot spots. Frequent bouts of political instability in the southern Philippines fuel piracy in the Celebes Sea. Last summer, a cattle transport ship just hours out of Mindanao’s General Santos City, bound for Australia, came under heavy machine-gun fire for two hours from pirates in four speedboats.
As prosperity rises, so piracy recedes; one would be hard pressed to find a pirate in Fujian – though there are plenty of smugglers – Bugis pirates were swept out of Singapore long ago, and Hong Kong is no longer a haven for prostitutes-turned-commanders of thousand-ship pirate fleets. Today, China’s warships police for pirates off Somalia as part of an international patrol, perhaps logging experience for some future need. In Indonesia and the Philippines, where government authority is uncertain, high-powered speedboats still come out of the night.
