Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

Somehow Somali pirates make the business look less light hearted than Johnny Depp does. The Somali’s are more like real pirates—plundering, ransoming, picking off the unprepared and unarmed and , ultimately, very ready to murder.
Unfortunately, piracy in Muslim waters is nothing new to us. The Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa caused us to create a naval squadron just to patrol the Mediterranean from 1800 to 1830. In the 1830s France created her Foreign Legion to end piracy by colonization.
To get it completely stopped, it took the British in Egypt; Italy in Libya; France in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria; and Spain in the northwest tip of Morocco. Once they pulled out, piracy resumed but on a much smaller scale—like the raid that nearly netted my sister-in-law forty years ago.
Historically, there have been four ways to fight piracy:
1)PAY RANSOM: Mediterranean shipping has a long tradition of doing this. Even the young Julius Caesar had to be ransomed from Albanian pirates. In the 1700s all the major European shipping powers paid ransom to the Barbary pirates as a normal cost of doing business.
When the United States pulled out of the British Empire in 1783, we lost the protection of the British flag. It was open season on American vessels. We were too poor to pay the large “protection fees” demanded by the pirates, so we sent warships and marines.
2) ARM THE MERCHANTMEN: Ships full of merchant seamen trained to use deck guns, rocket grenades and as at home with automatic weapons as were their Eighteenth Century counterparts with cutlasses. After all, no matter how diligent the navy, it cannot be expected to be everywhere at once in a million square miles of ocean.
3) CONVOYS: Make all merchant ships entering the area queue up and wait to be escorted by armed convoy. This will mean forcing ships of all nations to report to specified locations before going on about their business. A technique used by European powers in the Mediterranean in the 1700s.
4) OCCUPATION: Physically occupy the pirates’ home bases in Somalia. This is probably the only effective way to completely shut down piracy. But even the French eventually had to leave North Africa —after 130 costly years. Occupation is expensive and bloody.
Once piracy has become a viable and profitable option for its practitioners—it becomes like an anti-biotic resistant germ tearing through the body; fighting it is like treating a seaborne case of MRSA. There simply is no one magic bullet to stop it.
Realistically we are highly unlikely to invade Somali again. We could continue to pay ransom—shipping companies, up to now, consider it a cheaper option than sailing around the area or, presumably, waiting for a convoy. But for how long? When does ransom become so expensive that it drives shipping rates into the $5 a gallon range for gas?
To work out a protection scheme, to whom do we pay the ransom? To which group or groups? If we buy off one clan, what protects us from the others?
We may find ourselves with no other option but to arm the freighters and oil tankers. But mounted deck guns and lockers full of munitions could violate all sorts of treaties and national prohibitions. If an American freighter is deemed a warship, the heaviest ordinance it may carry down the St. Lawrence River, for instance, is a twelve gauge shotgun. Treaties, and all that.
Some shipping companies and nations may have a real problem with turning their oil tankers into floating weapons lockers. Crew members may decide they did not sign on for combat on the high seas.
The convoy option presents a few international problems. Do you want an American destroyer forcing a Chinese, North Korean or Russian vessel to stop and wait for a convoy? Other national ships may object on purely economic grounds. Hard to enforce. And then do you still try to rush in and rescue ships that refused military escort?
Another option might be to establish floating check points that all ships must pass (with all the attendant problems of forcing them to do this), and then we could staff each passing vessel with a temporary crew of Marines or Seals bringing their own weaponry. As they left the area, the troops could leave, taking their guns with them.
We could limit this—having the Chinese staff Chinese ships, the Japanese staffing their flag vessels—and so forth for the US, Britain, France, India, etc. We could offer a “rent-a-marine” service for ships from nations that do not have military forces in the area.
Eventually, as this gets more bloody and costly, we’re going to have to do something more than we are doing now. Possibly we could bomb all Somali harbors, sinking all small craft in each—and blowing up the mansions successful pirates are building for themselves. This, too, involves international issues.
We better start thinking about “what” now. Captain Jack Sparrow would not have traded the life of a pirate for a job in a new factory. Piracy seems to get in the blood. The old pirate slogan, “A short life but a merrie one” still has its appeal.
We may be stuck dealing with the military and political equivalent of a chronic disease—no cure, but constant maintenance and adherence to a troublesome regimen. Throughout the history of piracy, that has more often than not meant some serious killing.
Rome finally invaded Albania and crucified the pirates who had kidnapped Caesar.