Modern Pirates

Reports of pirates go all the way back to the BC era, to be more exact the 13th century BC. These were groups who threatened society at that point and they still do these days believe it or not. Just because the subject of piracy is not mentioned in the news does not mean that is does not go on even today...we are raised to believe that piracy is something of the past, a heroic band of clever outlaws that lived freely and dined on the richest foods and drank the best of wines while they sat on their mountains of gold won in the heat of battle.

Although that is an exciting romantic picture of the pirate, it is just that: an image, a painting, if I may. The life of pirate was not one of heroism, gold and jewels; pirates were those dirty thieves that were undernourished who many times could not even show themselves in a decent town for fear of being hanged, they stole ships and murdered innocent men, many times torturing them before ending their lives. Pirates were not romantic then and they are not romantic now.

Some of the earliest pirates were the Vikings, it has been said that the Vikings were once a peaceful people who loved farming at a time when Greenland was a green fertile place capable of sustaining crops. It got cold and icy though and the Vikings could no longer farm their crops, so in a desperate attempt to survive, they turned to piracy and prospered.

The Viking attacked the coasts all over Europe, they attacked everything form England to the Black Sea and Persia, they were a force to be reckoned with, they were a people to be feared. One thing that greatly helped the Vikings was the fact that there was no real power in Europe at the time to defend the coastal cities, something the Vikings took advantage of I'm sure. It was not only the Vikings that were committing acts of piracy, it was happening all over the world, along Africa and India and even China.

During the 19th century piracy flourished in the Middle East - the Chinese Junkers offered the perfect targets - the pirate fleets grew big and strong, they even began to demand tribute from the villages along the coast...it seemed that they had it all figured out.

When we think about piracy we usually do not think of China and Eastern Europe, usually the word pirates takes our thoughts to the Caribbean Sea, another place where piracy was highly successful, we think of Blackbeard and Henry Morgan....some of us might even envision Captain Jack Sparrow even if he is just a fictional Disney character.

Today pirates no longer fight with a cutlass and they no longer fight other ships with cannons...no, today they have speedboats and machine guns...they usually know exactly where the ship is and where the cargo that they are after is being kept.

Many times they ignore the cargo and go to the ship’s safe where there can be thousands of dollars worth of money, many times they kill off the crew and sale the ship to a port where it can be repainted and renamed, armed with false papers they then sell the ship and make a fortune...sometimes modern day pirates kidnap a person or persons on board the ship and demand ransom for them but this is rare...usually they just want quick money.

Attacking a ship these days can be quite easy because the crews that are working on a ship do not receive any kind of training in guns and they are usually from different countries, all that combined, make it almost impossible to work out a counter attack when they have been boarded by pirates.

I think that it is kind of funny that you never hear about pirate attacks in the news, I mean you hear about everything else, but never pirates, and statistics show that piracy is on the increase; in the 1990's there were about 100 pirates attacks reported a year, now there are over 200 hundred reported a year...it is a growing problem but still, there is nothing being done about it, I wonder why.