I Sailed With Chinese Pirates Available Once Again

Posted: June 24th, 2009 | No Comments »

There’s no getting past the fact that pirates are cool. Well, maybe not the current batch of Somali ones, but old time pirates are officially cool and every kid and adult I’ve asked agrees.

So I’m stupid delighted that the fabulous and much plugged (on this blog anyway) Earnshaw Books have republished Aleko Lilius’s I Sailed with Chinese Pirates from 1932. I was also delighted to add a short forward on Lilius who was a fascinating and larger than life character.

Here’s an excerpt from the Foreword to get you in the mood to buy a copy:

Journalist Aleko E Lilius came to the Far East seeking adventures to write about. He found them with lurid accounts of piracy and murder which became his 1930 best seller I Sailed with Chinese Pirates.

Lilius had been born in Saint Petersburg in 1890 though he left with his family for Helsinki before the Bolshevik Revolution. Throughout his long and wide-ranging journalistic career he rather obscured his origins and nationality to add a little spice to his CV and was at various times described as Russian, Finnish-Russian, English, Swedish and American. It’s certainly true that his work appeared in any number of newspapers, magazines and pulp fiction journals across Europe, in England and in the United States usually with the idea of bringing some exotic and thrilling adventures to readers mired in the pre-war Depression or suffering under post-war austerity. His books were internationally known, not least because his wife (and secretary), Sonja Maria Lilius, was multi-lingual and translated them all into English, German and Swedish.

In many ways Lilius was an old-school foreign correspondent; ranging far and wide and often out of touch for months on end leaving his editors tearing their hair out and his audience anticipating his next adventure. Then he would suddenly reappear in one fantastical and thrilling situation after another. Most of the 1920s and 1930s found Lilius roaming around North Africa, Asia and Mexico. In Mexico he was the photographer accompanying the linguist Rudolf Schuller investigating American-Indian languages and dialects; then he appeared in Morocco among the souks and bazaars; then in China sailing with pirates and lodging in opium dens.

While researching I Sailed with Chinese Pirates, Lilius lived much of the time in the Philippines, using his home in Zamboanga as a base to explore the South China Sea region. His time in the Philippines was unfortunately cut short after an accident where Lilius’s Studebaker was hit by a train of the Manila Railroad Company at a crossing. Both his wife and daughter were severely injured. He was to go on to live in America (though constantly traveling) before returning to Finland to end his days as a painter. He died in 1977.

After publishing I Sailed with Chinese Pirates Lilius later went on to other parts of the world and to other thrilling adventures and remained popular with readers. His 1956 book Turbulent Tangier, an account of the chaos of post-war Tangiers featuring gold traffickers, the Smuggler Queen of Tangiers and the last days of French rule, sold well but it was I Sailed with Chinese Pirates that remains his best known tale of adventure. In 1931 the New York Times reviewed the book:

“A meeting with a mysterious woman pirate chief, Lai Choi San, with several thousand ruthless buccaneers under command, is described in the volume I Sailed With Chinese Pirates, which is published today by D. Appleton & Co. Aleko E. Lilius, English journalist, while traveling in the Orient, according to the publishers, succeeded in winning the confidence of this unusual woman, and he accompanied her and some of her desperadoes on one of their expeditions on a junk equipped with cannon. Mr. Lilius’s publishers describe him as the only white man who has ever sailed with these pirates…”

Readers were thrilled, but how much of Lilius’s story should we swallow without asking any questions? Lilius provided graphic portraits of the cut-throat pirates and readers were especially thrilled by the idea of Lai Choi San, the female pirate queen – it seems that Arthur Ransome may have been inspired by Lilius’s account of her when he wrote his Swallows and Amazons novel Missee Lee (1941) where the children come to China and encounter a female pirate queen.

But it’s perhaps useful to remember that Lilius’s first known literary venture was as a screenplay writer for a 1919 Finnish film – Venusta etsimässä eli erään nuoren miehen ihmeelliset seikkailut (In search of Venus-or-the Marvellous Adventures of a Young Man) in which he also took a part and was happy for movie watchers to believe was his own biography. As a prolific freelancer – writing for everyone from the serious and informed Asia magazine and Popular Mechanics to the gossipy and rather lightweight British illustrated newspaper The Sphere through to the American pulp fiction magazine Argosy – he was known for telling good, but tall, tales. This reputation stayed with him while he was living in New York where he was considered a raconteur par excellence, but perhaps not always sticking strictly to the facts. Certainly Lilius liked to indulge in thrilling prose and he certainly felt most comfortable when he was at the heart of the story engaging in some act of daring-do but, still, it appears that everything substantive in I Sailed with Chinese Pirates is actually true and Lilius’s experiences are faithfully recorded.

It should also be noted that Lilius isn’t exaggerating the threat of piracy in the South China Sea and particularly around Hong Kong and Southern China in the 1920s. The area was indeed infested with pirates who menaced both commercial and passenger shipping as well as vulnerable coastal communities. Lilius provides us with a detailed list of ships attacked during the 1920s to prove the point.

I Sailed with Chinese Pirates is a useful history of the period and the lawlessness of the southern China coast in the 1920s but above all Aleko Lilius’s book is an adventure with a capital A. There are facts and eye-witness accounts for the historian but for the casual reader he hits all the notes required to ensure a bestseller – opium dens, casinos with endless games of fan-tan, cutlass wielding pirates and real Spanish doubloons recovered from sunken treasure- Lilius himself described I Sailed with Chinese Pirates as, ‘…a page from the Book of Almost Unbelievable Adventures.’ It’s as thrilling now as it was to his readership in 1931.

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