Flying the Black Flag: a Brief History of Piracy
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Flying the Black Flag: A Brief History of Piracy Alfred S. Bradford Praeger The Locations and Chronological Periods of the Pirate Bands Described in This Book 1. The Greeks (800–146 bc) 2. The Romans (753 bc to ad 476) 3. The Vikings (ad 793–1066) 4. The Buccaneers (1650–1701) 5. The Barbary Pirates (1320–1785) 6. The Tanka Pirates (1790–1820) 7. America and the Barbary Pirates (1785–1815) FLYING THE BLACK FLAG A Brief History of Piracy Alfred S. Bradford Illustrated by Pamela M. Bradford Contents Preface xi Part I. Greek Piracy 1. Odysseus: Hero and Pirate 3 2. Greeks and Barbarians 12 3. Greek vs. Greek 19 4. Greek vs. Macedonian 25 Part II. The Romans 5. The Romans Take Decisive Action 35 6. The Pirates of Cilicia 38 7. The Scourge of the Mediterranean 43 8. The End of Mediterranean Piracy 49 Part III. The Vikings 9. “From Merciless Invaders ...”57 viii Contents 10. The Rus 65 11. Conversion and Containment 71 Part IV. The Worldwide Struggle against Piracy 12. The Buccaneers 81 13. Tortuga and the Pirate Utopia 90 14. Henry Morgan 97 15. The Raid on Panama 105 16. The Infamous Captain Kidd 111 Part V. The Barbary Pirates 17. Crescent and Cross in the Mediterranean 121 18. War by Other Means 129 Part VI. Pirates of the South China Coast 19. Out of Poverty and Isolation 137 20. The Dragon Lady 144 Part VII. To the Shores of Tripoli 21. New Nation, New Victim 151 22. “Preble and His Boys” 160 23. The Marines Go Ashore 169 24. The End of Mediterranean Piracy ... 179 Part VIII. Conclusions and Reflections 25. How Pirates Are Made 185 Contents ix 26. Pirates and Terrorists 190 Notes 193 Bibliography 201 Index 205 PART I GREEK PIRACY If you wish to sail to the isle of Rhodes Just ask a seer, “How should I sail?” And the seer will tell you this, “Select a good ship and avoid the stormy months, And you will come, safe and sound, to the isle of Rhodes ...Unless a pirate captures you on the sea.” 1 Odysseus: Hero and Pirate Pirates (according to the father of history, Herodotus) caused the great war between the Persians and the Greeks: The Persians claimed that Phoenician pirates were the first to provoke the Greeks. The Phoenicians—their cities lay on the eastern shore of the Mediterra- nean—loaded their long ships with goods from Egypt and Assyria and sailed to many places ...and one of those places was Argos—by far the richest city of all the cities in the land now called Greece. At Argos the Phoenicians disembarked and displayed their wares along the harborside for several days, but when, on the fifth or the sixth day after their arrival, they had sold almost everything, and they had prepared their ship to leave, they noticed that a crowd of women had come to the harbor and that one of the women was the king’s daughter. (Her name was Io and she was the daughter of King Inachus.) The women approached the prow of the ship, to examine the Phoenician wares and to bargain, and the Phoenicians, then and there, decided to grab them and carry them off. Many of the women escaped, but the Phoenicians seized Io and her maids, threw them into the ship, and sailed away to Egypt. This kidnapping of princess Io by the Phoenicians was the first and primary cause of the enmity between the two peoples, Persian and Greek, because it set in motion a chain of events: some Greeks—they were probably Cretans [the most notorious pirates]—in retaliation for this kidnapping sailed to the Phoenician city of Tyre and kidnapped princess Europe.ˆ Now that should have been the end of that, one crime balanced by another, but other Greeks committed a second outrage: they sailed in a long ship to the Black Sea, ravaged a kingdom there and stole the golden fleece (which had been their objective from the beginning), and kidnapped princess Medea. Medea’s father, the king, sent envoys to Greece to recover his daughter and to seek compensation for the kidnapping. The Greeks told the envoys that no one had paid compensation for the kidnapping of princess Io and, therefore, 4 FLYING THE BLACK FLAG they would not pay compensation for princess Medea and, furthermore, would not return her. A generation later (the story goes), Priam’s son Paris, a Trojan, who knew of these events, conceived the desire to kidnap a wife from Greece—and he believed that he would never be called to account, because the kidnappers of princess Medea had not been. So he kidnapped Helen. The Greeks sent envoys to demand Helen’s return and compensation. The Trojans replied that when the Greeks kidnapped Medea they did not offer compensation and they did not give her back to those who asked for her and so the Greeks should not expect to be compensated. Up to this point the issue between Europe and Asia was only one of women who had been kidnapped, but the Greeks (the Persians say) put themselves completely in the wrong for what they did next, because the Greeks were the first to turn to war and to cross from Europe into Asia with an army. True, men in general accept as a principle of conduct that kidnapping women is not proper behavior, but, even so, to make a big deal out of a kidnapping is the height of folly; sensible men don’t bother themselves about it, because they know that a woman who does not want to be carried off will not be carried off. “We,” the Persians say, “did not make a big deal out of the Asian women who had been kidnapped, but you Greeks, for the sake of a Greek woman, sailed to Asia with a huge expedition and destroyed the kingdom of Priam.” Piracy is as old as ships and man’s acquisitive nature. Pirates of all eras, and the earliest pirates, too, were driven by one primary motive—to acquire wealth—and one form of wealth was the human being, captured, enslaved, and sold. Sometimes pirates were just pirates and nothing more. Sometimes they were explorers or traders in long ships, as ready to trade with the strong and vigilant as they were to plunder the weak or incautious. Sometimes the plunderers were warriors on their way to the theater of war, or, warriors in the theater of war, who plundered their enemies or the neighbors of their enemies, or warriors on their way home from the theater of war. The myths of Greece give piracy a prominent—sometimes a decisive—role in the events of early Greece (1200–700 bc). If only we could talk with a Greek from the eighth century and ask him about piracy—what was the distinction between a band of pirates and a band of warriors, how did pirates operate, who were their victims, and what was their position in society? And, indeed, we do know such a man, Homer, one of the greatest writers of all time, and he does answer our questions, but he answers them with stories, the stories of “Odysseus the Hero” and “Odysseus the Pirate.” After the sack of Troy the vagaries of the wind carried Odysseus to Ismarus and to people called the Cicones. Some of the Cicones lived by the coast and had the bad luck to be on Odysseus’ way home. They did not have an immediate place of refuge and they were taken by surprise by the Greek raid. Odysseus 5 “We killed the men, and we carried off their wives and so much plunder that every man got a share big enough to make him happy.” Too happy. When Odysseus urged his men to take to the sea, the “blind fools” did not listen to him, they drank huge quantities of wine and they feasted on the shore of the sea, while the survivors were rushing about the countryside and rallying the rest of the Cicones. The inland Cicones marshaled their forces, attacked the raiders, killed some, and drove off the rest, but then the action was over—the surviving raiders escaped to sea and were free to raid elsewhere. No nation existed, strong enough to pursue raiders by sea and destroy them in their homeland so they could not raid someone else. The lesson for the raiders, of course, was raid and run. After the fight with the Cicones, Odysseus happened upon a beautiful island with freshwater springs, wild goats that had never been hunted, a good harbor with a beach on which to draw up his ships, and no human inhabitants; his men wanted to stay there and recover from their tribulations, but he had seen that the mainland was inhabited and he told his men, “I want to investigate these men, who they are, are they violent men and ferocious, or men who know justice and are kind to strangers and reverent to the gods.” He took one ship and one crew. When they landed they could see a big cave at the very edge of the sea and a vast pen constructed of gigantic slabs of stone and tall pines and oaks and in the pen were flocks of sheep and goats. “As we were to learn, a giant man lived here; a man who had little to do with his fellow men, a godless man, who chose to live off by himself and to tend his flocks away from his neighbors.