CHINESE PIRATES

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 September 1934, Page 10

CHINESE PIRATES

THEIR SUBTLE WAYS ! "There be land-rats and waterrats,” said Shylock, speakin ,r of pir- ' ates. The Chinese variety is a combination of both. He dispenses with the romantic paraphernalia which we associate with robbery on the high ■ seas. He flies no- skull and crossbones. • One very good reason for this is that he has nothing to fly it from. He has no ship, writes Peter Fleming in the “News-Chronicle.” Ho boards the vessel he is going to seize as a third-class passenger. In Hie clamorous, blue-clad, bundle-carry-ing throng at the dockside he and his colleagues uro indistinguishable from their law-abiding fellow-travellers. They take their places, squatting on the crowded lower deck, smoking, talking, drinking tea, and eating little cakes, bargaining with the attendants who hawk them, playing with the children, making jokes about the foreigners who look down on them from the heights of the first-class accommodation. They merge without any difficulty at all into the intricate and enigmatic pattern of the Chinese crowd. Who is to know that, hidden in their bundles or their clothes, they have weapons—a Alauser or a Luger automatic, perhaps an old sword? Between one port and the next they take their chance. The ship is overrun, the officers surprised, junks materialise, or are met at a rendezvous. Loot and captives are taken ashore, corpses—if any—committed to the sea. The pirates and their prisoners disappear into the marshes and the little hills along the China coast. I That is the traditional procedure—|u procedure so long established that • it has naturallv called into being a complementary set of precautions which are regularly adopted by ChinI cr.e—and foreign-owned vessels. An armed guard; high 'spiked grilles which isolate the steerage from the officers’ quarters, the engine-room, and the few first-class cabins; barbed wire twisted round tho rigging to prevent the pirates climbing up it; weapons in the cabins of the white officers —these are normal items of a ship’s equipment. i But they are normal only in the < South. Bias Bay. north of Hong Kong, < has always been the worst danger i spot, and there continual vigilance on i

tho part of H.AI. warships is still necessary to ensure that piracy, though it may bo an hereditary trade, is not a profitable one. But as you go up the coast past Swatow, Amoy, Foochow, the danger decreases. As far north as the Gulf of Chilli piracy is not regarded as even epidemic. Last year the capture of four officers from the Nanchang established what was almost a precedent in those waters. There was no reason to foresee the recurrence of such an outrage. The Shuntien, the vessel which was taken recently and on which five Europeans were captured, carried no grilles. It would in any case have been virtually impossible to erect them effectively on a ship of her type. She is a. new boat, larger and more commodious than most plying the China | coast, and not designed in such a wayi that she can be split up into crime-! right compartments. Her officers were]

surprised unarmed, and acquitted themselves well in a hopeless situation, where a false step might have meant promiscuous shooting. There was nothing to do but to submit to the pirates. There were several women on board tho Shuntien, including the wife of tho British Consul at Tsingtao. To the Western mind it may seem surprising that tho pirates, who so deftly organised and audaciously carried out their exploit, did not include one or more of the women among their captives. But in the eyes of a low-class Chinese no woman is worth anything like as much as a man, and he knows that a femalO; prisoner is twice as much bother as a male, being weak, foolish, and easily sick. As for what might be called the “worse than jleapj” considerations, the chances of .a/Gllinese .pirate being attracted by a white woman are —outside melodrama —infinitesimal.