![]() With the collapse of government in 1991, the unprotected Somali coast began to attract two kinds of international criminals: illegal fishing expeditions and illegal toxic waste dumping operations. The pirates believe they have a social role to perform, and they have good reasons. These crews go by such names as, “The National Volunteer Coast Guard,” and “The Somali Marines.” The implications of patriotism and self-defense are not meant as irony. One Somali visitor to New York City told a friend of mine, “We don’t like governments and we just don’t want one.”Īmong the armed groups roaming around Somalia, no doubt the strangest are five or six companies of good old-fashioned pirates who have discovered just how easily a leaky dhow or motorboat-full of AK-47 toting ex-fishermen can hijack a huge container ship. Curiously enough however, not all Somalis seem to be pining away for the lost days of central authority. According to the mass media, Somalia is a violent chaos of contending warlords, tribal coalitions, Islamist terrorists and corrupt local regimes. The ancient Land of Punt is now part of Somalia, a “failed State” that has not had a functioning central government since 1991. And, in fact, such tactics are being used even now in such dangerous waters as the Straits of Malacca or off the coast of Nigeria. Under such conditions, some genius was bound to realize that a new golden age of piracy is now possible, that a few determined desperados in a rubber raft can capture and hold for ransom a ship worth millions. In the 21 st century new world maritime order, 80 percent of the world’s goods are now shipped in huge container vessels or tankers, driven by computers and manned by tiny skeleton crews. Johnson” in the early 18 th century) and the Frenchman, Alexandre Olivie Exquemellin. Our “school” proposed that although piracy can be seen simply as primitive predatory accumulation, some pirates were nevertheless engaged in forms of resistance against the State and in the construction of egalitarian utopias on their desert islands and “floating republics.” This is certainly a possible reading of the ur-texts of pirate history such as those of novelist Daniel Defoe (who wrote as a “Capt. I also added a volume to the “social” history of piracy with my Pirate Utopias Moorish Corsairs & European Renegades (Autonomedia, 1995). Burroughs, Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh and Stephen Snelders. The idea of the “radical pirate” as rebel against nascent capitalism was perhaps first mooted by British historian Christopher Hill, and then taken up by a small crew of anti-authoritarian piratologists such as Larry Law, William S. Mission’s ranting and motley crew, or the virtually-anarchist buccaneers of Hispaniola. Thus, I learned that some pirates are merely floating muggers while others could be said to have a “social” aspect, as with Capt. Samui buried the bodies secretly, unwilling to get embroiled with “the authorities” in a hopeless case. These sea-going scum habitually murdered all their victims to eliminate possible witnesses. In 1980, when I was combing the beach on Koh Samui Island (off Siam in the South China Sea), seven corpses washed up on the shore, victims of certain rotten pirates who were then preying on the Vietnamese boat people, poor refugees on leaking fishing boats and even bathtubs. It has its classical periods, its romantic eras, and its vulgar doldrums, but it never dies. Kidd’s treasure (another New York/Madagascar connection), I thought piracy was dead finished, a romance of the distant past. When I was a 10-year-old pirate fan digging the Jersey Shore for Capt. Tew), depending on what he could get away with. Cranston of Rhode Island, who hanged a few pirates and did good business with others (including Capt. Colonial New York City absorbed much of the loot, as did my rascally ancestor, Gov. Tew established their pirate utopias in Madagascar and preyed on Mogul as well as European shipping. In the 17 th century, piracy in the Indian Ocean enjoyed a brief golden era of pre-capitalist globalist excess when freebooters such as Capt. When Sumerians and Harappans and Egyptians sailed to “the Land of Punt” 5,000 years ago seeking apes and ivory, gold and copper, no doubt some proto-Blackbeard on a reed raft was already dogging their wake. The second ship ever built was probably a pirate ship. “The past is not only not dead, it’s not even past.”
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