Return of the Pirates

Regular readers will know I’m interested in pirates and piracy (in fact a new book I’m working on with my colleague Sam Chambers on oil transportation issues features a chapter on the resurgence of piracy) and wrote this year in the Asia Literary Review about the history of piracy in the South China Sea. Now while it is Somali pirates that are getting all the headlines it is important to remember that piracy continues to be a problem in the Straits of Malacca, the Singapore Straits and up into the South China Sea. While myself and Sam sailed on a VLCC oil tanker last autumn researching the book close to the Riau Islands up into the Sea our vessel was on night time anti-pirate lock down and in the day or so we passed through the southern portion of the South China Sea several container ships and a bulk chemicals carrier not far from us were attacked and robbed by pirates.

Now it seems that after a few years of seeming decline acts of piracy in the South China Sea are on the rise again. Perhaps the pirates of Asia are being inspired by the audacity, seeming impunity and cash rewards being garnered by the Somali pirates? Perhaps they feel they’re rather letting the side down and being eclipsed by the Africans or perhaps the massive multi-navy effort around the Horn of Affrica, off the Somali coast, up around the Nigerian coast and in the Straits of Hormuz are meaning that the South China Sea is being somewhat overlooked by the authorties?

Anyway, according to the venerable and ancient Lloyds List (the world’s oldest newspaper) recently a Singapore-flagged tug became the seventh vessel to be attacked by pirates in the South China Sea this year, attacked by five pirates armed with knives on August 2 at 0130 hrs local time while transiting the South China Sea. Pirates attacks were regular occurances in the 1920s and 1930s in the South China Sea as you can read in the recent republication of Aleko Lilius’s 1932 I Sailed with Chinese Pirates (which I contributed a foreword to). Recently I came across a couple of photographs of pirate actions in the South China Seas around the late 1920s/1930s so this seemed like a good time to put them up.

The first photo is taken on the deck of the burnt out tug and you can see just how total the damage was.The second photo is of the tug after it ha been attacked and burnt by pirates somewhere off the South China coast around Bias Bay, a notorious area for pirates (now where China has situated a couple of nuclear power stations in Guangdong province) – the junk is taking survivors from the tug while the picture is taken from a Royal Navy patrol ship that responded to the incident. The third photo is of the pirates believed to be responsible for the attack and fire, captured and aboard a Royal Navy ship.