piracy
- Key People:
- Zheng Chenggong
- Mary Read
- Anne Bonny
- William Kidd
- Blackbeard
- Related Topics:
- maritime law
- hijacking
- Jolly Roger
- wakō
- Barbary pirate
piracy, any robbery or other violent action, for private ends and without authorization by public authority, committed on the seas or in the air outside the normal jurisdiction of any state. Because piracy has been regarded as an offense against the law of nations, the public vessels of any state have been permitted to seize a pirate ship, to bring it into port, to try the crew (regardless of their nationality or domicile), and, if they are found guilty, to punish them and to confiscate the ship.
According to international law, piracy takes place outside the normal jurisdiction of a state, without state authority, and is private, not political, though acts of unlawful warfare, acts of insurgents and revolutionaries, mutiny, and slave trading have been defined as piracy by national laws of various countries or by special treaties.
Piracy has occurred throughout history. In the ancient Mediterranean, piracy was often closely related to maritime commerce, and the Phoenicians appear to have engaged in both, as did the Greeks, the Romans, and the Carthaginians. In the Middle Ages, Vikings from the north and Moors from the south also engaged in piracy. At the conclusion of European wars during the Renaissance and after, naval vessels were routinely laid up and their crews disbanded; the unemployed crew from these ships were often drawn into the service of pirates.
A common source of piracy was the privateer, a privately owned and armed ship commissioned by a government to make reprisals, gain reparation for specified offenses in time of peace, or prey upon the enemy in time of war; its officers and crew were granted a share of the plunder taken from captured vessels. After a war the temptation was great to continue this profitable business without authorization. During the wars between England and Spain in the late 16th century, treasure-laden Spanish galleons sailing from Mexico into the Caribbean were a natural target for privateers, and the distinction between privateering and piracy became difficult to draw.
The so-called “golden age” of piracy occurred in the Caribbean and in the waters off the American colonies in the century after 1650. This was the era of legendary figures such as Sir Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and William Kidd (“Captain Kidd”). Pirate crews came from every maritime country of Europe, and a good number of sailors were African. Among the most successful pirates of South America was Jean-François Duclerc, a Frenchman who preyed on ships in the area around Guanabara Bay (southeastern Brazil between Niterói and Rio de Janeiro). The exploits of these and other pirates later inspired a sizable genre of popular romantic and children’s literature, perhaps best exemplified by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881). In the late 20th century, pirates became the subject of serious historical inquiry. Some scholars portrayed pirate culture as a genuinely subversive radical movement that defied the common distinctions of class and race and kept alive the dreams of 17th-century political radicals long after they had been defeated in England and elsewhere.
Piracy also flourished in other regions. From the 16th to the 18th century, after the weakening of Turkish rule had resulted in the virtual independence of the Barbary States of North Africa, piracy became common in the Mediterranean. Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli so tolerated or even organized piracy that they came to be called pirate states. In the early 19th century these pirate states were suppressed by successive actions of American, British, and French forces.
Although piracy declined dramatically in the 19th century, the practice of hijacking ships and airplanes developed into a new form of piracy in the late 20th century. The affinity between piracy and terrorism became of particular concern after the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner by Palestinian militants in 1985 and after agents of al-Qaeda executed the September 11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. In the last decades of the 20th century, nautical piracy once again became prevalent in the seas of East and Southeast Asia and eastern Africa, where acts of piracy were committed by or in cooperation with criminal organizations involved in smuggling (of guns and drugs) and other illegal activities. These pirates sometimes operated under the protection of state officials in small ports, who received a share of the illicit profits. An upsurge of attacks in waters off the coast of Africa, particularly Somalia, in 2008–09 included the hijacking of ships belonging to several countries and led to the forcible intervention of warships of several navies. These events prompted the Western news media to reexamine the special problems of international jurisdiction posed by such incidents and to address themselves once more to historical lessons learned in the 18th century—above all, the necessity of deploying armed force against pirates and their home bases.
