CHINESE PIRATES.

Waikato Times, Volume 116, Issue 19352, 4 September 1934, Page 8

CHINESE PIRATES.

THEIR SUBTLE WAYS. TRADITIONAL PROCEDURE. "There be land-rats and waterrats," said Shylock, speaking of pirates. 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.

He boards the vessel he is going to •seize as a third-class passenger. In the clamorous, blue-clad, bundlecarrying throng at the dockside he and his colleagues are indistinguishable ■from their law-abiding fellow-travel-lers. They lake 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 'tl\e foreigners who look down on them from the heights of the llrst-class accommodation. They merge without any difllculty at all into the intricate and emigmatic pattern of the Chinese crowd. Who is lo know that, hidden in their bundles or their clothes, they have weapons—a Mauser or a Luger automatic, perhaps an old sword? Act Between Ports. 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. That is the traditional procedure—a procedure so long established that it lias naturally called into being a complementary set of precautions which are regularly adopted by Chinese —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 the 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. But they are normal only in the South, Bias Bay, north of Hong Kong, has always been the worst danger spot, and there continual vigilance on the part of lI.M. warships is still necessary to ensure that piracy, though it may be an hereditary trade, is not a profitable one. But as you go up the coast past Swalow, Amoy, Foochow, the danger decreases. As far north as the Gulf of Chihli 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. ■ Carried No Grilles. The Shunlicn, the vessel which was taken recently and on which five Europeans were captured, carried no grilles. Jl would 'in any case have been virtually impossible lo erect them efl'eciively on a ship of her type. She is a new boal, larger and more commodious than most plying the China coast, and not designed in such a way that she can he, splil up into crimelight compartments. Her officers were surprised unarmed, and acquitted themsclcs well in a hopeless situation, where a false step might have meant promiscuous shooting. There was nothing to do but lo submit lo the pirates. There were several women on board the Shuntien, including Iho wife of the British Consul at Tsingtao. To the Western mind it may seem surprising that the 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 lowclass Chinese no woman is worth anythin" like as much as a man, and lie knows that a female prisoner is twice as much bother as a male, being weak, foolish, and easily sick. As for what might be called the "worse Ilian death" considerations, the chances of a Chinese pirate being attracted by a while woman arc—outside melodrama —infinitesimal.