by Ross Kemp
Pirates
ROSS KEMP
MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
MICHAEL JOSEPH
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2009
Copyright © Ross Kemp, 2009
Photography courtesy of British Sky Broadcasting Limited
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-0-14-193193-7
‘Where there is a sea, there are pirates.’
Greek proverb
‘It is when pirates count their booty that they become mere thieves.’
William Bolitho
‘The sea was so vast. The vessels they sailed in were small. Yet still the [pirates] tracked them down…’
Linda Colley, Captives
Contents
PART 1
The Gulf of Aden
1 Them That Die’ll Be the Lucky Ones…
2 Pirate Alley
3 Action Stations
4 The Corridor
5 Distress Call
6 The Pirates Strike
PART 2
The Bight of Benin
7 Chop-chop
8 The Victims
9 The Juju Men
10 A Drop in the Ocean
11 Kidnap Alley
PART 3
The South China Sea
12 The Malacca Straits
13 Lightning Storm Across the Sea
14 Five Little Pirates Sitting in a Tree
PART 4
Djibouti
15 The Pirate of Puntland
Afterword
PART 1
The Gulf of Aden
Map 1. The Gulf of Aden
1. Them That Die’ll Be the Lucky Ones…
Why pirates?
It is a good question, and one a lot of people asked me as I started to make preparations to investigate this dangerous world about which I knew almost nothing. I’d seen the newspaper reports, of course. I knew piracy was on the up. But I was also fresh out of Afghanistan. Over the previous couple of years I’d spent time in that dangerous war zone; I’d had Taliban snipers zeroing in on me, doing their best to kill me. I’d probably have been forgiven for taking it a bit easy.
Life doesn’t work out like that, unfortunately. In January 2009 I was in Kajaki – one of the northern outposts of Helmand Province and scene of some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan. While I was there, a Marine by the name of Travis Mackin lost his life in an improvised explosive device strike near where I was accompanying his colleagues during an attack on a major Taliban stronghold. I suppose it goes without saying that I was impressed with the professionalism and tenacity of the Marines I met on that trip, and honoured to be accepted into their confidence. What I didn’t know at the time was that in another part of the world the final act of a crime on the high seas was being played out, where the Royal Marines had been deployed in a very different conflict to that which the men at Kajaki were enduring. That crime was the hijacking of an oil tanker, the MV Sirius Star.
The Sirius Star is a big boat. A very big boat. It’s classed as a VLCC – a very large crude carrier. You can say that again: well over 300 metres long, it can carry 2.2 million barrels of crude oil. How much that amount of black gold is worth depends on the value of oil, but even back then, with the world economy in free fall, the Sirius Star’s cargo would have been worth at least $100 million. As it set out from Saudi Arabia in November 2008, it was carrying about a quarter of that country’s daily output of oil.
On 15 November 2008 the Sirius Star was heading south, 400 nautical miles from the coast of Kenya. Its destination: the United States. Its route: round the southern tip of Africa, past the Cape of Good Hope and then north-west across the Atlantic. It’s easy to imagine that as the vessel passed through the waters off the eastern coast of Africa, its crew, while not being blasé, would at least have been reasonably confident of the ship’s security. Sure, piracy was already a problem, but the incidents had generally taken place further north, in the Gulf of Aden. Moreover, ships of this size were generally safe. Surely just getting onto the boat would be nigh-on impossible. You’d need a brass neck, balls of steel and a very long ladder to attempt to hijack such a massive vessel. Wouldn’t you?
If these were the thoughts of the Sirius Star’s owners and crew, they were mistaken. Because on that Saturday morning, at about 08.55, the boat was boarded by Somali pirates. They didn’t mess around. By 09.02 the pirates had control of the bridge. The Sirius Star was so weighed down by its massive load of oil that its freeboard – the height between the deck and the waterline – was low. The crew, including two Britons, were taken hostage and the ship was diverted from its original course, back up towards the Somali coastline. A couple of days later the pirates opened up communications with the ship’s owners. They demanded a ransom of $25 million. The hijackers clearly knew the value of their haul, and were prepared to milk it for every last cent.
The eyes of the world were on the Sirius Star, but the hijackers held their nerve. They even released an audio tape to Al-Jazeera, the Middle Eastern news network. ‘Negotiators are located on board the ship and on land. Once they have agreed on the ransom, it will be taken in cash to the oil tanker. We assure the safety of the ship that carries the ransom. We will mechanically count the money and we have machines that can detect fake money.’ These pirates, then, were well organized and professional. They knew what they were doing.
The hostages were not mistreated. One of the Britons, Peter French, even managed to conduct an interview by phone. ‘Our families don’t have too much to worry about at the moment,’ he said. ‘Apart from the inconvenience of being locked up, our life is not too bad.’ Nothing like a good British stiff upper lip. But if I were in his position, I imagine I’d be giving a great deal of thought to what would happen if the ransom wasn’t paid. Would the pirates continue to be quite so considerate, or would they find a use for the automatic weapons they were carrying? As one of the pirates stated when they captured the vessel, ‘We do not want long-term discussions to resolve the matter. The Saudis have ten days to comply, otherwise we will take action that could be disastrous.’
Disastrous for whom, I wonder…
The British government announced that there was no way they’d pay the ransom: giving in to hostage-taking was just an encouragement for people to do it again. The Sirius Star ’s Saudi owners took a mor
e pragmatic view. Not only were the 25 crew members their responsibility, they also had 100 million bucks to protect. And so the ransom negotiations started. They were long and drawn-out. On 25 November the pirates reduced their demand to $15 million. By January, it had come down even further. On 9 January 2009 the ship was released after the pirates received 3 million dollars. Sounds like a lot of money, but just think about what the shipowners had to lose…
A small plane dropped the ransom onto the deck of the Sirius Star by parachute. The pirates presumably checked the notes using the machines of which they had boasted, then they left the ship as swiftly as they had boarded it. The ending, however, was not a happy one for the Somali hijackers. Days after they left, their small boat apparently got into trouble in a storm. It capsized and five of the eight were drowned. A rumour later stated that the body of one was washed ashore with $150,000 in cash shoved into a plastic bag. What happened to the remaining three isn’t clear. I guess they wouldn’t be parading their presence any more than they had to – stepping into Somalia and announcing you have hundreds of thousands of dollars can’t be good for your health. But I would later be told – totally unofficially, of course – that a team of private mercenaries had followed the hijackers, retrieved a large proportion of the money, capsized their boat and left the pirates for the fishes. Fact or rumour? Who knows…
The hijacking of the Sirius Star was significant for lots of reasons. It was the first time such a big ship had been successfully pirated. It also marked an escalation in the pirates’ field of operations – previously they had been confined to a much smaller area. The Somali pirates now roamed an area of about 1.1 million square miles, and there simply aren’t enough military vessels in the world to patrol that amount of sea successfully.
I knew none of this in January 2009. I was busy with other worries, like how to avoid rocket-propelled grenade attacks from the local Taliban in Helmand Province – a very good way of keeping your mind occupied. But when the time came for me to say goodbye to 45 Victor Commando in Afghanistan and return home to London, it was clear that the piracy problem was current. It was happening now. There was no time for me to put my feet up. If I wanted to investigate pirates, to find out what was behind these attacks occurring in various hot spots and maybe even meet some of these people who were wreaking havoc and terror all round the world, the legwork would have to be done immediately.
And one thing was sure: the pirates weren’t going to come to me. I was going to have to go to them.
All little boys want to be pirates. Why wouldn’t they? The pirates of our imagination are romantic figures. They engage in acts of great daring. They seek out buried treasure and make their enemies walk the plank. If they’re the Johnny Depp kind of pirate, they might even get the girl. And then they disappear, ready to plunder another day. The pirates we read about in books are villains, certainly. We know that. But, like highwaymen, perhaps we imagine that they’re the acceptable face of villainy. That’s why people don’t mind their children dressing up with eyepatches and cutlasses.
I knew, of course, before I set out on my quest to track down some real-life pirates, that they aren’t like that any more. That the pirates hijacking ships around the world armed with the kind of weaponry I’d previously seen in major war zones were not going to be of the yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum kind. But in fact they never were like that. Not in the real world. Successful pirates have always relied on the threat of force to achieve their ends, and the threat of force is only effective if people know you’re willing to carry those threats out. Before I set off to learn about and meet modern-day pirates, I decided to learn something about the reality of their predecessors. Maybe if I knew something of the past, I’d learn something about the present. The stories I came across were unsettling, to say the least.
Our image of historical pirates is massively influenced by one book, huge in its time – a bestseller of the day. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), with its well-known anti-hero Long John Silver, is probably the most important source of all our ideas of what pirates used to be like, if not of the reality. The story of Jim Hawkins, the treasure map and Long John Silver’s piratical mutiny aboard the Hispaniola is probably the most famous pirate story of all time. It’s thanks to this book that we think of treasure maps, parrots, wooden legs and desert islands; it’s thanks to this book that little boys grow up under the misapprehension that X always marks the spot… As with many writers, Robert Louis Stevenson allowed himself plenty of licence in the story’s telling. Real-life pirates were no more disposed to search for chests of buried treasure than anyone else – in fact they would steal whatever they could get their hands on, and their loot was as likely to be made up of cargos of rope or sugar as it was pieces of eight and gold doubloons.
That said, Stevenson knew what he was talking about, and we can learn a lot about the real pirates of the day by reading his story. Take Long John Silver, the ship’s cook with a wooden leg. It was commonplace for old sailors and those who had been wounded at sea to join expeditions as the ship’s cook, a role that required a working knowledge of the vessel if not the physical ability to sail it. And for a sailor to be wounded – even to lose a limb – was a pretty regular occurrence. There are plenty of examples of pirates losing arms and legs during skirmishes at sea. Perhaps the most eye-watering is that of a man called William Phillips. He sustained a bad wound to his left leg during a fight between two pirate ships. Unfortunately there was no doctor or surgeon on board. There was, however, a carpenter, and it was decided that he was the man for the job. He used his largest saw to cut William Phillips’ leg from his body – history doesn’t record how long it took, or what sort of inhuman noises the patient made as the saw’s teeth cut through his gristle and bone. We do know, however, that once the leg was removed, the carpenter heated his axe in a flame and used the flat side of it to cauterize the bleeding stump. He burned off more flesh than he intended, but somehow William Phillips survived the operation. When Long John Silver promised, ‘Them that die’ll be the lucky ones,’ perhaps the tortures he had in mind were derived from the day he lost his leg.
Silver’s parrot, Cap’n Flint, is almost as famous as he is, and while the idea of a talking bird on his shoulder sounds fanciful, sailors regularly brought back exotic birds and other animals from their trips abroad. Parrots, it seems, were especially popular, not only because they were colourful and could be taught how to speak, but also because they were a low-maintenance pet on board ship.
And of course Treasure Island is the archetypal story of an inside job. When I conducted my investigation into modern-day piracy, I learned that while many aspects of the story might belong to another age, Long John Silver’s modus operandi is very much alive and well.
Piracy, however, has been around for a lot longer than Treasure Island. Ancient Greek mosaics show images of ships being attacked by pirates, and the Vikings were a piratical nation. The pirates that spark our imagination the most, however, arrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were a rum bunch. Take Edward ‘Ned’ Low. He was a real-life pirate of the Caribbean, and a man with a reputation. He was born in London in 1690 in abject poverty. His family were thieves and pickpockets, and he soon fell into the family business. At the age of about 30, however, Low decided on a career change, joining a sloop – a one-masted sailing boat – bound for Honduras. Low worked honestly as a rigger on that first voyage, but he didn’t stay honest for long. When the captain of the ship told him one day that he would have to wait for his food, Low took exception. He picked up a loaded musket and fired it, missing the captain but shooting a shipmate through the throat. Messy.
Low and his friends – unsurprisingly – were kicked off the boat, and it was then that they turned pirate, taking over another sloop off Rhode Island. It was a short career, but a brutal one. He became noted for his acts of viciousness and torture. On one occasion, when the captain of a Portuguese ship allowed a substantial quantity of money t
o fall into the sea rather than let it be stolen, Low cut off the man’s lips with his cutlass, fried them in front of him then forced him to eat them while they were still hot. For pudding, he murdered the entire crew.
It’s said that Low once announced that one of his victims was ‘a greasy fellow, who would fry well’. To prove his point, he burned him alive. One of Low’s crew later wrote of his time under the pirate’s command. ‘Of all the piratical crews that were ever heard of, none of the English name came up to this in barbarity. Their mirth and their anger had much the same effect, for both were usually gratified with the cries and groans of their prisoners; so that they almost as often murdered a man from the excess of good humour as out of passion and resentment; and the unfortunate could never be assured of safety from them, for danger lurked in their very smiles.’ All in all, he made Captain Hook look like a pussycat.
Ned Low was one of the better-known pirates to emerge from what has been dubbed the Golden Age of Piracy, a period that spanned the 1650s to the 1720s. There were many others, some of whose names have passed into myth. Edward Teach was more commonly known as Blackbeard. Teach was born in Bristol, took to the seas at an early age and spent the first part of his career on privateers. These were armed ships which had permission – recognized by international law – to attack the ships of an enemy nation. A proportion of the loot was handed over to the crown; the rest was kept by the privateers. Originally, privateer licences were intended to allow ships to recoup any losses they sustained as a result of attack by enemy vessels; in time, though, they became a cheap way of boosting a country’s naval forces. Perhaps the most famous privateer was Sir Francis Drake, who during the sixteenth century was the scourge of Spanish shipping. He shared his booty with Elizabeth I, and received a knighthood for his efforts. Privateers could not be arrested for piracy, but in practice many of them were simply official pirates. And it was not beyond the scruples of many of them to turn their hand to acts of genuine piracy.