Pirates ahoy!

Ahoy, me hearties! Shiver me timbers!
There be booty on the Indian Ocean.
Arrrr, there be supertankers sailin’
’boot laden to the gunnels with treasure
– thick, black oozy treasure. Liquid
gold, avast ye! I ain’t never – no, nay,
ne’er – seen owt to match that Sirius
Starrrr…

SIRIUS is the brightest star in the night sky. The Sirius Star is one of the biggest ships on the seven seas: 332 metres (1,090ft) long, carrying two million barrels of crude oil – a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s daily output – worth £70m.

And now she’s been captured by pirates.

These are Somalian pirates using motherships and global positioning satellites as opposed to swashbuckling pirates who sailed in galleons, glugged rum and said “arrrr” a lot.

After prostitution, piracy must be the world’s oldest profession. As soon as man first sailed in a boat, a second man was after him, wanting to seize his valuables or to kidnap him for a ransom.

The word “pirate” comes from Greek and means “one who attacks”. Julius Caesar was one who was attacked. Sailing across the Aegean Sea in 75BC, he was captured by Sicilian pirates. When he heard they were going to demand 20 talents – bags – of silver for his safe release, he burst out laughing and said he was worth at least 50 talents.

So the pirates increased their demand. And got it.

Every part of the world has had its own local pirates. Trade along the North-East coast was hampered by Scandinavian pirates – Vikings – who targeted the ports of Whitby and Hartlepool.

Their last real raid came in 1153 when King Eystein lead Norwegian pirates into Hartlepool harbour. They captured ships and goods and triumphantly carried them home.

However, there was an upside to piracy. In 1526, French pirates sold a captured ship, the Jesus from the Baltic port of Danzig, to the townspeople of Whitby. When King Henry VIII heard, the Abbot of Whitby was summoned before the Star Chamber in London. He blamed “the scarcity of corn” for forcing the townspeople to deal with the pirates.

Some of the most notorious pirates infested the Barbary coast of North Africa – Tunisia and Algeria. The most infamous of them in the 16th Century was “Barbarossa” – redbeard.

His nickname later turned into “Silver Arm”

because when a c a n n o n b a l l removed a limb in battle, he boastfully replaced it with a precious prosthetic.

Some states tried to harness the power of the pirates. The French granted them a “lettre de course” which allowed them to hunt down enemy ships and steal t h e i r cargoes.

These corsairs were dashing, romantic fellows – in fact, they were the original swashbucklers.

They carried a bouclier – a buckler, in English – which was a small shield. To create a fearsome din, they swaggeringly rasped their swords up and down their shields, making a swashing sound on the buckler.

During the late 16th Century, pirates switched their attention to the Americas from where the Spanish were sailing ancient gold back to Europe. The pirates tucked themselves away on a Caribbean island and popped out to plunder whenever a galleon laden with bullion passed by.

Another word entered the English language.

While at sea for weeks, these buccaneering fellows lived off meat they had smoked over a wooden frame. This was an old West Indian technique to create jerky. The frame was, in Carib, a buccan. They were buccaneers.

Queen Elizabeth I was so keen on their spirit that she copied the corsairs and made her best sailors privateers – men like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake were given “letters of marque” that allowed them to chase down enemy ships.

In 1579, off the coast of Lima, Drake captured a Spanish ship carrying £7m worth of Peruvian gold. He followed up with an attack on the Nuestra Senora de la Concepion which carried 26 tons of silver, 80lbs of gold and 13 chests full of jewellery.

Another privateer was Thomas Pinckney, whom regular readers met a fortnight ago. He was born in Bishop Auckland in 1666, but set off for a buccaneering life of derring-do. In 1691 in the Caribbean, he captured a French ship laden with sugar, and with the proceeds bought a plantation. He ended his days as one of the biggest slave-owners in Carolina.

As he settled down, the War of Spanish Succession broke out.

France and Spain took on all-comers. There was a land war in Europe, and a sea w a r a l o n g t h e S p a n - ish Main – the Caribbean coast of the mainland of Central America which Spain claimed as her own.

By 1713, Britain and her allies were victorious, and with no more sea action pending, she laid off her warriors. Suddenly, the Caribbean was awash with unemployed, battle-hardened seafarers. There were no regular navies to keep them in check; the American states – populated by men of dubious legality like Pinckney – had no legal systems to keep them in order.

And so began the Golden Age of Piracy.

These were proper pirates, pirates who terrified their victims with the Jolly Roger, pirates who wore patches when their eye was poked out by the rigging, pirates with peg-legs as their limbs got blasted off by cannonballs.

There was honour among these proper pirates.

They’d spent years under the tyranny of a naval captain, so they democratically elected their leaders and shared out their booty – “pieces of eight” were silver coins cut into eight and divided up.

If they chanced upon a slave ship, they usually welcomed the black cargo as equal crew members.

Blackbeard was the most famous of these proper pirates.

He was a Bristolian whose proper name was Edward Teach or Thatch. He liked to weave canon fuse into his long beard and light it just before he attacked.

With the skull and crossbones flapping in the sky above his head and smoke pouring from his beard, he must have frightened his victims into submission without firing a shot.

Yet the Golden Age lasted barely a decade.

The Royal Navy reasserted its grip on the seas – in 1718, Blackbeard’s severed head was hung triumphantly in the rigging of the RN sloop which had captured him – and the American and Caribbean states started executing the lawbreakers.

Whether these pirates thought they lived through a Golden Age is open to debate. Their lives were short, brutal, drunken and scurvyridden.

Our romantic view of them comes from art and literature. JM Barrie created the idea of walking the plank in Peter Pan. Gilbert and Sullivan slapped on an eyepatch in the Pirates of Penzance.

The biggest influence, though, has been Treasure Island published in 1883 by Robert Louis Stevenson. He created Long John Silver, the quintessential pirate, and treasure maps, black spots and parrots perched on shoulders.

He even took an old nautical description of how a wooden vessel reverberates when it topples over a tall wave – “shivering timbers” – and turned it into a schoolboy shout.

Arrrr, Jim lad, shiver me timbers if them thar Somarrrrlian pirates be leaving such a rich legacy…