WHERE PIRATES PREYED

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3449, 24 November 1932, Page 8

WHERE PIRATES PREYED

DARING ROBBERS ON THE SEVEN SEAS. Ever since there has been shippingthere have been various kinds of pirates, privaters (who were often little better), buccaneers, sea robbers, and corsairs of one sort or another. The corsairs of the Barbary Coast, headquarters at places like Algiers and Tripoli, plied their lucrative trade on Mediterranean shipping from the earliest times to a much later date than is generally remembered. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Tripoli corsairs were paid an indemnity by many of the nations, who took this as the only means of securing safe passage for their ships. The United States of America actually waged a war against Tripoli for five years, 1801-1805, because of a refusal to pay an increased amount of indemnity demanded. The frigate Philadelphia went ashore while pursuing a crosair and was captured by the Tripolitans. The sea defences were so storng that it was only by were so strong that it was only by and attacking on the landward side that the place was subdued, writes Boyd Cable in an English paper. Later still Great Britain was driven to attack the corsair stronghold of Algiers after a piece of work that shocked all Christian Europe. At the port of Bona, 337 Christians were landed from two corsairs and driven like cattle to Algiers, sixty dying on the journey. The survivors were served in the usual way—the women and girl children sold to harem life, the men as slaves to private buyers or put to labour on public works. Lashes and starvation were the normal, the torture of the bastinado or beating with canes on the soles of the feet being the punishment for milder offences, and death for such serious one as attempting to escape or insubordination. The common form of execution was by flinging the condemned down a sloping wall set at intervals with sharp hooks, the speed or slowness of death depending on where the hooks caught. In 1816, after the affair of the 357 slaves, the British sent a squadron of warships to demand redress of the Dey of Algiers. His reply was to bring in an extra garrison of 40,000 from the interior, and set every free a'nd slave man at work strengthening the defences. The British fleet sailed in and anchored off the mole, and for nearly twelve hours a fierce battle raged between the guns of the fleet and those of the corsair ships and shore defences. At the end of the time the

Algerian shipping was a blazing mass and the forts pounded to pieces. Sullenly the Dey gave in to the terms demanded, and 3000 Christian slaves were set free. The three-decker Impregnable had fifty killed and 160 badly wounded in the action. Years later her name was changed to the Caledonia and again to the Dreadnought when she replaced the hospital ship of that name lying off Greenwich- There were three of these ships in succession, but now they have been replaced by the Seamen's Hospital there, still generally known as the "Dreadnought" Hospital. The pirates to be contended with in clipper ship days were mostly those | of the China Seas and Eastern waters, and a more merciless and bloodthirsty lot of cut-throats seamen have never had to face. They rarely took prisoners or gave quarter, and they fought with the ferocity of wild beasts. The opium clippers were sought with special eagerness, on account of the fortune each carried either in the opium cargo or the silver bars and dollars for which it had been sold. The coastal waters are a maze of islands and broken and indented shore line where the pirate parahus could lie in hiding ready to pounce out on any passing vessel. Each parahu or junk was crammed with men and carried guns and "stinkpots" filled with chemicals which burned the flesh or suffccated with choking fumes. If a number of these vessels could get alongside a victim there was little hope for her or her crew. It v/as because in speed lay the main hope of escape, that the yachtlike little opium clippers were put on the opium running trade, and it was only in a flat calm that the parahus were able to attack by using long sweeps to row in and fling their crews aboard. With the lightest breath of wind the clippers could "ghost" along faster than the hardest rowing could move the parahus. The number and organisation of the pirate fleets is indicated in the history of one lot commanded by the widow of a chief, who assumed command when he was drowned. She divided her fleet into three squadrons, leading one herself and putting the others under an admiral of the Blue and of the Red. The Chinese Government sent out a powerful navy to find and destroy these fleets. The navy found them, or was found by them, and the meeting ended in the pirates taking or destroying 28 out of the 40 vessels sent after them, capturing 500 guns and killing or making prisoner 8000 men, the pick of the prisoners being re- ! cruited to the pirate force, and the others killed.

After this the admirals of the Red and the Blue fell out and their ships fought a desperate battle under the usual no-surrender and no-quarter rules. The widow pirate stayed out of the quarrel, preserved her fleet intact, and later made very good terms of surrender with the Government, retiring from business after signing a formal treaty. Many women were carried off by the pirates, both as wives and slaves, and these fought just as ferociously as the men, believing, or course, that even in fighting British warships their capture would be followed by torture and death, as it was with them. When the naval cutter Sylvia was attacked by two big parahus, which had made the bad mistake of supposing her for a merchantman, one of the two was driven ashore and the other fought furiously for six hours, refused to surrender even when sinking, and went down under the feet of her surviving fighters. The Sylvia reported that there were many women aboard the paraphus "who furiously assisted in the defence of their vessel." When the prahu sunk, the cutter's boats only with great difficulty rescued fifty women from the water. Steamers came to replace the sailing clippers in the opium running, not because they were faster, but because they could not be caught becalmed. And if they were caught up by the swifter-sailing prahus the pirates soon found they had an effective extra means of defence. The steamer Hecla, after being criopled by gun-fire was attacked by a number of prahus, and at first beat them off. A council was held on the leader's ship, the decks were cleared for action again by the simple process of throwing over the killed and wounded and cutting the throats of some 30 slaves, including a number of women,, and a 'new attack made. The steamer's .engineers by then had connected up- the boiler supply with a hose pipe, and met the attack with a jet of scalding steam and water which literally stripped the flesh from the bones of the almost naked fighters. After this steamers were given a wide berth.