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Piracy on the High Seas: Can History Help Defeat Present-Day Pirates?

By Jeff Poor

The threat of piracy on the open seas has been a persistent one throughout the history of maritime commerce. From Blackbeard to Barbary Pirates, the phenomenon has been glamorized in modern pop culture in roles played by Yul Brynner and Errol Flynn.

However, piracy off the coasts of Somalia and the Horn of Africa has recently captured the public’s attention and has created several questions. Is this a real and continuing threat to the United States and its commerce? If so, can we learn how to deal with this nautical danger by looking at how the country dealt with it throughout history? Are there commercial, diplomatic or legal channels that could be used to solve piracy? If not, would the use of U.S. military force be an appropriate way to deal with it?

On Oct. 20, these questions and many others were posed at a daylong forum hosted by the U.S. Naval Institute at its 2010 History Conference in Annapolis, Md., Piracy on the High Seas: Can History Help Defeat Present-Day Pirates?

Understanding Somalia

To get a grasp of how to deal with this is problem, it’s important to understand the mindset of the modern-day pirate and what their rationale is when committing these acts. This should be examined through a non-ethnocentric view according to Dr. Martin Murphy, author of Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money: Piracy and Maritime Terrorism in the Modern World. He explained to the audience the societal norms of the Somali culture is different from American culture and that is important to respond effectively to piracy.

Dr. Martin Murphy  To view a slideshow of the 2010 History Conference, click here.

“At the top level, we’re dealing with people who know exactly what they’re doing,” Murphy said. “They understand that as far as we’re concerned, this is a criminal activity. They understand the consequences of what would follow from that if they’re caught. But equally Somali society does recognize the difference between what’s right and wrong—what’s right and wrong to them is not what’s right and wrong to us. They feel free to do this because it’s a part of the traditions of Somali society. If you need a camel, then you might take it. You know you’re going to face some consequences for that.”

But he also contended that not understanding this and taking aggressive action by means of invasion would backfire and make the Somalis more determined with their quests.

“I don’t agree that we can just go in there and throw our weight around because there are consequences to that,” he continued. “We’re dealing with a xenophobic society that takes very badly to having people come in and try to teach them what they think they know. They have effectively rejected invasions before and to go into Somalia and to raid the sites and try to kill people will in fact, the danger as I see it, tend to unify the clans against and make the task that much harder.”

Blackbeard to Barbary Pirates: Making Their Mark on History

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it and that is a reason why having a general understanding of the history of piracy is important. Rear Admiral Joseph F. Callo, USNI historian and author of John Paul Jones: America’s First Sea Warrior, explained the importance of history in a general context.

“History is really how we form conclusions about the lives we live and the societies that we live in and those conclusions lead us to actions and plans and history plays a very important role in that context,” Callo said. “It is history, but not history for its own sake.”

However, Callo challenged people to not look to come away with something they didn’t already know about piracy, but to think about it in a different way. He proposed technology and piracy as one example and said some of the same innovations from centuries ago are still employed today.

“How many of you have thought, for example, about the technology of piracy?” he said. “And there is a technology of piracy, just as there is a technology suppressing it. There is a technology to pursue. And if you roll back in history, for example, and think about the pirates in the Caribbean and one place in particular that I happen to know pretty well, in the British Virgin Islands, a little anchorage called Soper’s Hole, where there was an incredible vantage point to see all the seagoing traffic in the vicinity before they could possibly see you—now what came out of that particular anchorage was something called a flyboat and it’s very interesting because other than the means of propulsion, they are very similar to the boats attacking major merchant ships today.”

But history also reflects how once-powerful navies, like the British Royal Navy handled their problems with piracy. Dr. Virginia Lunsford, associate professor at the University of Virginia and author of Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age of the Netherlands, referred to Murphy’s remarks and explained the British had formulated such a game plan.

Dr. Virginia Lunsford and RADM Joseph Callo, USNR (Ret.)  To view a slideshow of the 2010 History Conference, click here.

“He said he feels, and I would agree, that the foremost lesson we can draw from studying historical piracy is in understanding the society and the culture of the group we’re dealing with,” Lunsford said. “That’s the key historical lesson and I echo that.”

Frederick C. Leiner, an attorney and the author of The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War against Pirates of North Africa, also contrasted modern-day piracy to that of his field of expertise, the Barbary pirates. He advised against labeling the geographic regions the Barbary pirates existed as “state-sponsors of terrorism,” but explained the motivations of the pirates weren’t so much political as they were economical, which “transcended time.” That was evident in the way the United States dealt with the Barbary pirates in its infancy.

“The United States experienced Barbary piracy on and off over a 30-year period from 1785 to 1815,” Leiner said. “But the Barbary pirates were the scourge of Europe for centuries before the United States existed. In 1785, the newly emergent United States sent its merchant ships all across the globe and particularly in Europe and the Mediterranean and in that era, Algiers seized two of our merchant ships. And that, followed several years later by 11 more merchant ships.”

But with that, many Americans were held captive in Algiers and that warranted a response from the young U.S. government and the Navy founded out of a need to deal with piracy. But, that wasn’t the first solution the U.S. government attempted in its dealings with the Barbary pirates.

“What is not very well known, however, is the first way we dealt with Barbary piracy was to pay them off,” he continued. “And lest you think that some cowardly person took over Washington, well in those days in Philadelphia, it was no one other than George Washington who insisted on paying the premium. It was nearly $1 million, which may not sound like a lot of money today but it was 12 percent of the federal budget.”

But as much as policymakers can reflect back on history to understand and devise solutions for contemporary piracy issues, finding the right solution doesn’t apply the exact same method. Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Armstrong, an active duty naval helicopter pilot who has served as an amphibious search-and-rescue and special warfare pilot and an advanced helicopter flight instructor, explained to the audience today’s issues are unique and warrant their own solutions.

“I think it’s good to draw lessons from history,” Armstrong said. “But as we kind of commented on, there is no really exact parallel so everything should be taken with a grain of salt.”

Piracy’s Impact on International Commerce, Law & Diplomacy

The consensus of many of the featured speakers at the “Piracy on the High Seas: Can History Help Defeat Present-Day Pirates?” conference is that any sort of military force used to contain piracy probably wouldn’t have a lasting impact and would be too costly. Therefore, other means should at least be explored.

Panelists (from left): Eric Wertheim, CAPT Mark Tempest, USNR (Ret.), Robert Gauvin, and LCDR Claude Berube, USNR  To view a slideshow of the 2010 History Conference, click here.

Lieutenant Commander Claude Berube, a professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy, raised a few key issues as to what is the role of the United States when it comes to piracy. He contended that the United States doesn’t engage in the amount of maritime commerce that it once has and asked whether it does have a role in policing the world’s seas for piracy, or should that be a coalition or the industry itself.

“What’s the appropriate response?” Berube asked. “Should there be a response? Is containment sufficient? What about sustainment? Can we as a coalition sustain this indefinitely if we assume piracy off Somalia will be with us for many years?”

So faced with those various dilemmas, Berube observed the solution to piracy would have to be a land-based one, whether it is commercial, legal or diplomatic.

“I think many of us would agree there has to be a land-based solution, especially off of Africa in any shape or form,” Berube continued. “Absent that, our best options are to mitigate the effects at sea to secure the global maritime commerce.”

Robert M. Gauvin, executive director of piracy policy for the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters, explained there is already a lot of work partnerships globally in place to take on piracy that is often missed.

“We are involved across the world and it’s not really recognized how much the federal agencies work together when it comes to piracy,” Gauvin said. “There are working groups at the U.N. levels. There is work being done at the maritime safety committee at the International Maritime Organization in London, which of course is the U.N. of maritime dealings when it comes to international treaties. And here in the United States, as well as abroad, the U.S. flag is represented by the United States Coast Guard.”

But he also explained that more importantly it was important to cooperate with the various domestic agencies in the U.S. government.

“Our biggest job is to work interagency,” he said. “The Department of State, Department of Justice, the U.S. Coast Guard, Federal Maritime Administration—work together specifically looking at what the U.S. government can do to support the U.S. maritime commerce.”

As far as diplomatic efforts go, one of the clear distinctions between today’s Somali pirates and the Barbary pirates of centuries past was made by Capt. Mark Tempest, an attorney in admiralty and maritime law. He explained the Barbary pirates were actually privateers, what he called “nation-state piracy,” meaning they were acting with the backing of the governments of the time. And that, according to Tempest, takes on a whole different set of circumstances that differs from pirates who aren’t acknowledged by a government.

He explained there were various other “low-grade” examples of piracy that have always existed that amounted to a little more than sea robbery and how they were dealt with, especially in the Far East. But they were a distant cry from what would have passed for piracy in the days of Blackbeard.

“Those things do exist, but they’re very mild compared to what we would call ‘classic piracy,’ where Blackbeard would go out and all those guns and the all the romantic stuff where he was seizing a bunch of Spanish galleons with a bunch of gold.”

“But that was somewhat historically inaccurate,” Tempest explained.

“Blackbeard got loads of flour,” he said. “He got tea. He got cotton. He didn’t get gold. It was just the way piracy operated back then. But what happens is, in those days—we’ll go back to the law here a little bit—if you were a privateer or a navy ship and you captured another vessel, any vessel, you didn’t sink it. God forbid you would sink it. You would take it into port and have a prize court. The court would decide. The admiralty judge actually got a chunk of the revenue of the ship. But he would decide the effort you undertook to capture the ship.”

“But then privateers realized they could do this without the need for an admiralty judge, keep that for themselves and a rogue brand of piracy was born. But this isn’t quite the coalition of clans that have plagued the starving people of Somalia,” Tempest pointed out.

According to Eric Wertheim, a Proceedings magazine columnist and author and editor of The Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World, “There is good news and bad news here,” Wertheim said. “The good news is there is a legal framework here internationally in dealing with piracy through the U.N. Commission on Laws and the Sea, through international law, through each individual country’s domestic legal system there is a framework. The bad news is it is a very, very complicated process, and there are challenges at every single level about this process that comes beginning with the decision to dispatch forces across the ocean to the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden. And if you look at some of the countries that are involved—many of the countries are extremely reluctant to get involved.”

But beyond that he explained there were inner-conflicts in some countries with their navies and their government and as the problem is international, dealing with it could mean that some navies that traditionally have never work with other countries and may have had no prior dealings with those countries will have to work together with varying rules of engagement.

Somali Pirates: Not the Threat to Commerce Barbary Pirates Once Posed

Is piracy a threat to the global system of maritime commerce? Or is it just a phenomenon that has captivated the attention of many just because of sensational headlines and news stories? According to Stephen M. Carmel, senior vice president of Maersk Line, Ltd., there’s no argument because these Somali pirate threat impacts very little in the way of global commerce. In his keynote speech to the conference, he called piracy an “existential threat” to U.S. commerce.

“The Somali pirates are irrelevant,” Carmel said. “They do not in anyway impact foreign commerce of the globally dominant U.S., do not directly cost the U.S. economy a cent, and directly threat few U.S. citizen seamen. To the extent U.S. citizen seamen are at risk from pirates, it is due to U.S. foreign policy and cargo preference laws, not in the form of foreign commerce critical to the U.S. economic role.”

Stephen Carmel  To view a slideshow of the 2010 History Conference, click here.

Carmel also played down the political motivations of the Somali pirates because they are acting in financial interests, not political interests. He said hostages taken by the Somali pirates were for pure ransom and they were not horribly mistreated compared to the Barbary pirate “business model.”

“The primary business model of the Barbary pirates was not hostage for ransom, although that was clearly a lucrative one,” Carmel said. “It was slavery. The hostages taken by the Barbary pirates—usually Europeans and Americans ended up as slaves, either directly by the pirates themselves for hard labor under horrendous conditions or sold into the North African slave market.”

And according to Carmel, the Somali pirates aren’t even close to posing that sort of threat by those means or the magnitude the Barbary pirates once did, suggesting that any comparisons between the two were faulty. Carmel’s solution: Make individual companies responsible for their own security and the international community responsible for the system itself in the event a disruption like the Barbary pirates were to ever arise again.

“The system is what we should be about protecting,” he added. “The international military community cannot without the help of every individual company. Individual companies need to be concerned with that. The international community does need to be concerned with system stability and that’s something the Somali pirates have not been able to upset.”

Pirates: How Do We Defeat Them?

Knowing the historical precedent and the various rules and customs in dealing with piracy, what can be done?  The panelist at the history conference agreed on one thing—taking direct action to these pirates in Somalia is probably not the most effective way to solve the issue.

Rear Admiral Terence McKnight, former commander of the Expeditionary Strike Group Two, likened capturing pirates to “the car catching the dog,” which poses concerns, he explained.

“The phase of what you do with pirates, how you stop pirates, I don’t think is going to be solved,” McKnight said. “We have a couple of options. We talked about a land-attack version. We can go in there and wipe them out. In my estimation, that is not an option.”

According to McKnight, it would be too difficult to identify the pirates and know which ones you would “wipe out.”

“I think if we put people ashore and we stay ashore, you will see a case where the clans meet up with al-Shabab because they do not want foreign forces on their shore and I think that’s a thing we would have to worry about.” 

“The other option is the possibility—we just completely back out of it,” McKnight continued. “Thirteen thousand vessels go through there a year and 44 attacks in nine months. That is a very small measure to have an extreme force out there.”

He proposed evasive maneuvers, alternative tactics and other means to combat piracy. Training countries locally with smaller ships is an option as well. But a public relations strategy wouldn’t hurt either.

“The other thing we can do is get the press out of the picture,” McKnight said. “If it gets off the front page of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—it may go away.”

RADM Terence McKnight, USN (Ret.) and Capt Zachary Martin, USMC  To view a slideshow of the 2010 History Conference, click here.

Capt. Zachary D. Martin, U.S. Marine Corps, commander of Force Reconnaissance Company, I Marine Expeditionary Force and author of numerous articles in professional military journals also had some remarks about the media.

“What there wasn’t media attention on were my platoons working with the local nations in the area—working with them, working with different countries in the area, training their coast guard, their navy in to how to conduct operations,” he said. “And I think that’s a key component which doesn’t get into the potential for backlash or for increase in politicization or Islamicization of the issue because it is a cooperative measure.”

Laurence Smallman, defense research analyst at the RAND Corporation, remarked, “If we politicize the people who are committing the crime, then we’re going to move from pirates economically, economic-motivated people, to those of a politically motivated people,” Smallman said. “One of the challenges where we either take direct action or think about it, is in deciding what might be the impact of that direct action on the community.”

“If we go ashore, into the fishing communities assuming we think we know who the pirates are, you can bet that shortly after we leave, there will be some other dead bodies that will be there if there weren’t any left there by our direct action.”

And Smallman warned, with direct action—you would force a direct link between these so-called economic pirates and terrorism, making the problem worse.

Related Links:

Naval History Conference 2010

Random Thoughts After a Week Away