Turbulent Waters: Sea Raiding in Early Modern South East Asia

Abstract

Between 1500 and 1860 piracy in South East Asia was a multinational enterprise, involving European, American, Chinese, Japanese, and indigenous sea raiders. Although Western pirates occasionally made their way into South East Asian waters, they never posed as much of a threat to the prosperity and stability of the area as the buccaneers had done in the Caribbean. Their presence virtually disappeared in the archipelagos by the early eighteenth century. Chinese and Japanese pirates also sporadically infiltrated the area during the entire period, and indigenous forms of piracy continued and expanded throughout the whole region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Keywords:

• piracy
• maritime raiding
• slavery
• South China Sea
• South East Asia

Late in the summer of 1579 a plunder-laden Golden Hind slowly sailed its way across the unfamiliar Pacific Ocean homeward bound for England. When Francis Drake finally made landfall some two months later his reception on the nameless island was less than friendly. After the islanders tried to loot his vessel, a furious Drake christened the place the ‘Island of Thieves’. Drake, however, was neither the first nor the last European to encounter larcenous natives in the Western Pacific and Malay Archipelago. In the eyes of many European explorers and traders, bloodthirsty pirates and savage headhunters infested the turbulent waters of South East Asia. To the indigenes, however, it was the European interlopers who were the thieves and robbers. They not only stole native goods and lands but also assaulted native cultures.

Although the earliest recorded incidents of piracy in South East Asia date from the fifth century, it reached its heyday between 1750 and 1860. The region was ideal for pirates – rich and busy trade routes inadequately protected by strong states and navies, a maze of islands crisscrossed by narrow straits that created commercial bottlenecks, and coasts lined with dense mangrove swamps that provided safe havens for outlaws. As Adam Young has explained, ‘Piracy waxed and waned over the centuries according to the flow of local and global trade, and the power of regional polities to control this trade and exert their influence in the region.’1 Besides the European enclaves, the entire region was divided into numerous rival kingdoms and tribal groups, whose incessant warfare assured that no single power dominated the region or its sea lanes. In fact many local polities actually supported marauding as a means of wealth and power. Piracy kept pace with the expansion of trade and colonization. Numerous indigenous and foreign peoples actively engaged in sea raiding: Muslim Malays, Bugis seafarers, Iranun and Balangingi slave traders of Sulu, and Sea Dayak headhunters of Borneo, as well as Chinese, Japanese, and European traders, renegades, and outlaws. Piracy, which followed regular annual cycles according to the rhythms of monsoons and commerce, was an integral part of the social, political, and economic life of South East Asia.

Yet before the appearance of Europeans in South East Asia, Western notions of piracy were unknown in the region. As John Crawfurd noted in the 1850s, ‘there is no name in Malay and Javanese, or indeed in any other native [South East Asian] language, for piracy or robbery on the high seas.’2 Indeed the terms ‘pirate’ and ‘piracy’ were European constructs that came with colonization. Fundamentally, for Western merchants and officials anyone who operated outside the colonial trading system or who opposed them was a pirate. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese and Dutch, who attempted to monopolize the spice trade, believed it their right and duty to suppress as pirates both indigenous and foreign interlopers. Piracy frequently was used as an excuse for intervention and extension of European power and culture in South East Asia. The suppression of piracy therefore became a crusading and civilizing mission intricately entwined with colonialism.3

In the colonial era, for most Westerners ‘pirates’ were an exoticized and treacherous ‘other’. The terms ‘Malay’ and ‘Illanun’ (Iranun) became synonymous with pirate. Many Europeans would have agreed completely with the Dutch official, C. T. Elout, who wrote in 1820 that the Malays ‘are all pirates’. Three years later, John Anderson, a Malay Translator for the British Government, explained that ‘the inhabitants on that Coast [Sumatra] are addicted to piracy’.4 Similarly, to the Spanish in the Philippines, native sea raiders were simply ‘Moros’ – infidel Muslims or Moors who, like the Barbary corsairs of the Mediterranean Sea, had to be eradicated for the sake of Christianity, civilization, and trade.5 In the colonial mindset, I would suggest, Moros, Malays, and Iranuns came to symbolize all that was brutal, threatening, and sinister.

What Europeans labelled piracy, however, carried certain connotations that may not have been conceived by the natives of South East Asia. The modern notion of ‘piracy’ developed in the West out of a particular set of historical circumstances of intense commercial rivalries and warfare among the emerging European nation-states of the early modern period. Piracy was defined as any act of robbery on the high seas or on shore, but emanating from the sea, committed for private gain by individuals not holding a commission from a ‘civilized state’.6 As Anthony Reid has pointed out, because Europeans did not consider Asian polities as legitimate or civilized states, therefore their maritime conflicts were automatically labelled as piracy and had to be suppressed as such. Yet for European states, which were de facto civilized, any statesponsored maritime raiding was labelled privateering and therefore legitimate.7 Such hypocrisy must have been obvious to most Asians.

For many South East Asians, actually, raiding was a way of life closely tied to war, slavery, and trade. Throughout the region intertribal warfare was an important aspect of society and warfare was related to maritime raiding. While viewed as a criminal act by Europeans, raiding was actually a respectable profession pursued not only by individuals but by entire communities and even kingdoms. It was a common means for warriors and chiefs to increase their power and prestige. Unlike in the West or in China, maritime raiding did not necessarily involve criminality or rebellion against society. Raiders were not antisocial dissidents living on the fringes of society. Rather, they were often respectable members of their communities and, in fact, many were popular heroes, admired for their courage and moral fortitude. One such hero, Raja Ismail, was born into nobility in the Siak Sultanate in the mid-eighteenth century and sought his fortunes as a sea raider. His power and authority were firmly based on raiding.8 According to Sultan Husain of Singapore, what Europeans called piracy ‘brings no disgrace’ to Malay rulers.9 Piracy enabled communities to work outside colonial administrative jurisdictions and patterns of trade, thereby allowing them a degree of independence. In this area of the world, Richard Leirissa has suggested that piracy was a type of trade based on theft rather than exchange.10

This article, which is based on various primary and secondary sources in English and Chinese languages, explores three forms of ‘piracy’, or more aptly ‘maritime raiding’, between 1500 and 1860 in South East Asia: Western, East Asian, and native South East Asian. Although Western pirates and freebooters occasionally made their way into South East Asian waters, they never posed as much of a threat to the prosperity and stability of the area as the buccaneers had done in the Caribbean. Their presence virtually disappeared in the archipelagoes by the early eighteenth century, as European governments began to earnestly suppress piracy around the world. Chinese and Japanese pirates also sporadically infiltrated the area during the entire period. Indigenous forms of piracy or maritime raiding continued and even expanded throughout the whole region during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Western pirates, privateers, and adventurers

Beginning with the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century, not only European explorers but also outlaws, renegades, and adventurers scattered throughout the Orient from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific Ocean. They were joined by Western pirates, some working out of their home countries or American colonies, while others operated from bases in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere in Asia. By the late seventeenth century Madagascar and its satellite island, St. Mary's, had become infamous pirates retreats for the likes of Henry Avery, William Kidd, Samuel Burgess, Thomas Tew and others.11 Some Europeans, mostly deserters and runaways from the burgeoning colonial service, went native and joined forces with indigenous sea raiders in South East Asia. They routinely served as gunners, pilots, and even as commanders on Asian vessels. These explorers, renegades, and pirates left an indelible mark on the maritime history of the East in the early modern era.12

Francis Drake entered the Pacific Ocean in 1577 as an interloper and a pirate. At the time virtually the entire Pacific had been claimed by the Spanish, while the Portuguese had claimed the Indian Ocean and much of South East Asia as its own. Yet neither country was ever strong enough to keep others out. Drake was the first Englishman to cross the Pacific and to challenge the Iberians. His voyage clearly showed that the riches of the East were at the mercy of anyone daring and able enough to take them. Although his motives for crossing the Pacific remain unclear, plunder was undoubtedly on his mind. The Golden Hind was a floating arsenal, armed well beyond the needs for carrying on peaceful trade. While most of his loot had been taken from Spanish ships and settlements on the Pacific coast of America, after his unfriendly encounter on the Island of Thieves, Drake continued to the Philippines and then on into the Celebes Sea where he attempted unsuccessfully to rob a Portuguese trading ship. In the Spice Islands (Moluccas), he tried to cheat the Sultan of Ternate out of his duty on six tons of cloves, although he ultimately paid for them with silver he had stolen from the Spanish. Drake returned to London in 1580 with a boatload of booty – silver, gold, jewels, and cloves worth perhaps £600,000, possibly earning for his investors a staggering 4,700 per cent profit. The queen, too, likely received a share worth £300,000, an amount that exceeded a year's Exchequer receipts. And this was at a time when England was nominally at peace with Spain and Portugal.13

Drake was not alone. Throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European pirates and privateers continually pillaged shipping in South East Asia. Any vessel was a potential target. In this era of empire-building, as Pérotin-Dumon and others have argued, war and commerce went hand in hand, and ‘when the two elements were combined in a predatory and aggressive trade, it was piracy’.14 In 1565 the Spanish explorer Miguel Lopez de Legazpi attacked ‘Moro’ trading ships off the Philippine coast. During his circumnavigation of the globe in 1586 to 1588, the Englishman Thomas Cavendish captured a Manila galleon and several years later another expedition plundered Portuguese ships in the Straits of Malacca.15 In 1600, during the Dutch war of independence against Spain, the explorer and merchant, Oliver van Noort entered South East Asian waters intending to plunder Spanish galleons as well as Chinese trading junks and other native craft. After he was driven away by a makeshift Spanish flotilla under Antonio de Morga, van Noort completed his circumnavigation of the globe and returned to Holland a hero. Three years later, his countryman Jacob van Heemskerk attacked a Portuguese carrack, the 1,400-ton Santa Catarina, on route from Macao to Goa, and carried away a cargo of Japanese copper, American silver, and Chinese silks and porcelains valued at 1,200,000 pesos. Although Heemskerk was a Dutch admiral and Portugal and the Dutch Republic were at war at the time, nonetheless, to his victims he was nothing more than a freebooter.16

During the seventeenth century, Dutch, English, French, and Danish sea rovers repeatedly robbed indigenous, Chinese, Japanese, and Arab trading vessels around Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula.17 In the 1620s the heavily armed ships of the British and Dutch East India Companies joined forces to attack Chinese junks trading at Manila. By the last half of the seventeenth century some 250 pirates, many originally Caribbean buccaneers, were operating in Asian waters from bases on Madagascar, Réunion and other islands.18 During the mid-1680s the buccaneer William Dampier was aboard several pirate ships that robbed Spanish and Portuguese vessels between Manila and Malacca.19 In 1683 the English freebooter Samuel White had organized a fleet of native craft, sanctioned by the King of Siam, to pillage shipping in the Bay of Bengal and off the coast of Aceh. The last important pirate of this epoch was Robert Culliford, who sailed out of Madagascar in 1696 to plunder his way across the Indian Ocean to the Straits of Malacca. That summer, off the coast of Burma, he plundered several Muslim vessels and a Portuguese merchant ship carrying gold and silk valued at £12,000.20

After 1700 the number of Western pirates, other than those who had gone native, had greatly diminished. The effects of European suppression campaigns were being felt even in the far corners of South East Asia. Privateering replaced piracy as wars continued in Europe and overseas. In 1708 Bristol merchants organized a privateering enterprise with two ships and a complement of 333 men, with Woodes Rogers as commander and William Dampier as chief pilot, to seek out and capture Spanish vessels in the Pacific and beyond. Among their prizes was a Manila galleon that was captured off the coast of California.21 During the Napoleonic Wars the eastern seas swarmed with French privateers seeking out British merchant ships. The on-and-off conflicts among the European powers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries made firm distinctions between piracy, privateerning, and outright warfare problematical in South East Asian waters, as elsewhere around the globe.

Chinese and Japanese pirates

The situation in South East Asia was further complicated by the persistent presence of Chinese and occasionally Japanese pirates in the region over the entire period. They came in several waves. First, the century from 1550 to 1650 was a time of sporadic raids by Chinese and Japanese pirates, mostly the so-called wakō, who combined trade with piracy. The second wave peaked in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, when Chinese pirates joined forces with Tay Son rebels in Vietnam to conduct regular raids in Chinese and South East Asian waters. This was followed by a period of intermittent forays that continued until the start of the third wave of Chinese pirate activity in South East Asia, which lasted from the 1830s through the 1850s (see figure 1).

Figure 1 Maritime raiding in the South China Sea, about 1750–1860

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a time of change and instability not only in the West but also in Asia. In China, the Ming Dynasty pursued a rigid closed-door policy that criminalized sea merchants, and at the end of the century the country was mired in a destructive dynastic war that lasted until 1683, when the Manchus finally consolidated their authority over all of China. During much of this same period, Japan was embroiled in a century-long civil war that ended with the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603. Under these troubled conditions, disgruntled Chinese merchants and masterless Japanese warriors took to the sea as pirates and smugglers. During these two centuries a number of South East Asian trading ports, such as Hoi An, Malacca, Pahang and Manila, became thriving emporia frequented by Chinese and Japanese smugglers and pirates. As long as they caused no trouble, local rulers and merchants encouraged their business.22

In the mid-sixteenth century, members of the wealthy Xu family from Huizhou, who were involved in the Malacca trade and had Malaccan wives, turned to smuggling and piracy when the Ming government imposed strict prohibitions on overseas trade. Xu Dong, in particular, co-operated with Japanese and Portuguese adventurers on combined trading and raiding ventures in South East Asia. Other smuggler-pirates, such as Li Guangtou and Lin Jian, collaborated with the Xu family in South East Asia, South China, and Japan. Lin Jian, for instance, had established his headquarters in Pahang, where he controlled a large fleet of junks that regularly plied the South China Sea both for trade and for plunder. In 1547, in conjunction with Xu Dong, Lin led a fleet of 70 junks from Pahang to pillage the Zhejiang coast.23

After Xu Dong fled China in 1548, one of his subordinates, Wang Zhi, grabbed control of the Xu syndicate and became the most powerful merchant-pirate in the South China Sea. Before moving his base of operations to Japan, Wang earlier had been active as a merchant-pirate in Siam. After surrendering to the Ming government, however, instead of receiving a pardon, he was beheaded in 1559.24

Lin Feng was another important Chinese pirate who operated in the seas between Guangdong, Taiwan, and the Philippines in the 1570s. From bases on Taiwan, Lin's fleets sallied forth with the monsoons each year to plunder shipping across the entire South China Sea. In 1571 and 1572, after raids on the Guangdong coast, he sailed to Luzon where he established a fortified trading base. Two years later, in command of a fleet of over 30 junks, he pillaged Hainan Island and afterwards assaulted the Spanish stronghold at Manila. For nearly a year he challenged Spanish authority in the Philippines, until finally being driven away by an armada under Juan de Salcedo. Over the next decade Lin remained active in the region, until disappearing from the historical record in the late 1580s.25

Japanese pirates also appeared in South East Asian waters where they attempted to mingle trade with plunder. In the 1550s Vietnamese officials reported the activities of Japanese pirates on their coast. In 1585 a Japanese merchant-pirate named Shirahama Kenki arrived in Cochinchina in five large ships and plundered several coastal villages. Four years later, when he tried to return as a ‘lawful merchant’, Vietnamese officials apprehended him and threw him in jail.26 Also in the 1580s the Spanish reported Japanese pirates who repeatedly harassed shipping and towns in the Philippines from bases on Luzon. In 1582, for example, Japanese pirates in ten ships attacked coastal settlements, wounded many native inhabitants, and stole food and other items. In that same year, Juan Pablo de Carrion described an encounter with a wakō fleet in Cagayan Province. Several years later, the Spanish governor reported that the problem of Japanese pirates was getting out of hand; recently, he complained, Japanese pirates attacked the islands every year.27

In the turbulent Ming-Qing dynastic wars of the mid-seventeenth century over 3,000 Chinese, fleeing the Manchu invaders, settled on the sparsely populated coast of Vietnam where many of them subsisted as pirates and fishermen. Letting their hair grow long (like outlaws and rebels) and marrying Vietnamese women, they stubbornly held on to their Ming loyalism and Chinese customs, while at the same time integrating into Vietnamese society.28 About the same time, Zheng Zhilong and his son, Zheng Chenggong, were building their maritime empire in the South China Sea. From bases, first on Xiamen and later on Taiwan, they carried on a triangular trade mixed with piracy and extortion in China, Japan, and South East Asia. The success of the Zheng syndicate's vast network depended on its connections and support from the overseas Chinese communities that had spread throughout South East Asia, such as the Ming loyalist communities in Vietnam mentioned above. It was said that all ships sailing in this wide zone were liable to attack unless they paid tribute to the Zheng family. Only the death of Zheng Chenggong in 1662 saved the Philippines from attack after the Spanish authorities had refused him tribute.29

From about 1790 to 1802 Chinese pirates co-operated with Tay Son rebels in Vietnam on regular seasonal raids up and down the coast from Wenzhou in South China to Saigon in South Vietnam. Following the monsoons, each year in the spring pirates set off from their bases on Hainan Island, Giang Binh, and Hai Phong on the Sino-Vietnamese frontier to plunder towns and shipping on the China coast, and then after returning to their bases and refitting in the autumn they set sail for raids along the coasts of Vietnam and Gulf of Siam.30 In the late 1790s, there were even reports of Chinese pirates, who occasionally allied with Bugis raiders, extending their activities to the Sunda Strait, where they robbed Dutch and native trading vessels. Much of this piracy involved the kidnapping of people and the trafficking of them as slaves. The Chinese actually carried on a brisk slave trade in South East Asia in the early modern era.31

After the Tay Son Rebellion was crushed in 1802, Chinese pirates continued their excursions on the Vietnamese coast, Malay Peninsula, and Philippine Islands, until the huge pirate leagues in South China were suppressed in 1810.32 To give one specific example, in 1806 a well-organized gang of Chinese and Malay pirates, numbering about sixty to eighty men armed with swords and firearms, attacked a Malay boat and murdered the entire crew near the port city of Malacca. According to the depositions of arrested pirates, the Chinese gang members came from Guangdong and were ‘newcomers’ to the area. They appeared to be seasoned pirates. Their leader was a man known only by his alias, Tua ania, which means something like the ‘Bully Tua’ or the ‘Newcomer Tua’ in local dialects. The gang belonged to a much larger piratical syndicate run by ‘respectable’ businessmen in Malacca.33

After a respite of several years, another surge of Chinese piracy in South East Asia began in the 1820s and lasted until the 1860s. John Crawfurd reported that in the late 1820s Chinese pirates, who operated in waters between the Java Sea and the Gulf of Siam, repeatedly kidnapped hundreds of young men and women and sold them into slavery in Siam.34 The disturbances of the Opium War (1839–42), followed by the suppression campaigns of British warships in the 1840s and 1850s around Hong Kong, drove many Chinese pirates into South East Asian waters. Between 1839 and 1849, the Dai Nam Thuc Luc (Veritable Record of Vietnam) recorded over forty separate incidents of Chinese pirates plundering towns and ships on the Vietnamese coast. Most of these pirates followed the same seasonal patterns as the earlier marauders – leaving bases on the Sino-Vietnamese border in the fall to plunder the south.35 In many cases, too, pirates continued to call at Hong Kong to sell their loot and recruit gangs. In 1857 Chinese pirates abducted a British seaman, Edward Brown, off the Vietnamese coast and held him for several months. During his captivity, the pirate chief forced Brown to train his men in the use of modern armaments and to assist on several attacks on passing junks. Although most of the actions took place in Vietnamese waters, the pirates regularly returned to Hong Kong to refit, sell their booty, and enlist gang members.36

Not only Vietnam but also the whole Malay Archipelago suffered from the surge in Chinese piracy at this time. Although pirates sometimes attacked Western merchant ships their chief targets were the smaller and poorly armed native trading vessels. Occasionally European renegades joined with the Chinese pirates as gunners and pilots. Chinese piracy became such a huge problem that it disrupted foreign trade at the great entrepôts of Singapore and Batavia. Nevertheless, as was the case with Hong Kong, unscrupulous merchants in Singapore and on many of the surrounding islands continued to outfit pirates despite the government's attempts at suppression.37 It was not until the early 1860s, with the stepped-up campaigns of Western steam warships, that Chinese piracy in the whole region was brought under control.38

South East Asian raiders and warriors

What about indigenous forms of piracy? According to Drake the inhabitants of his Island of Thieves – most likely Palau or Yap in the Eastern Caroline Islands – were unrelenting and incorrigible larcenists. While they brought out trifles on pretence of honest trade, their true intentions were to steal whatever they got their hands on: ‘for if they received anything once into their hands, they would neither give recompence nor restitution of it, but thought whatever they could finger to bee their owne’. Successive waves of natives came out in canoes to the Golden Hind and when Drake and his men rejected their supplications, the islanders hurled stones at the foreigners. To rid his ship of these unwelcome visitors Drake fired his guns, killing perhaps 20 natives (see figure 2).39

Figure 2 Pacific islanders attacking a Western ship (from de Bry, Collection des Grands and Petis Voyages)

Other European explorers had similar experiences in the Western Pacific and Malay Archipelago. In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan happened upon another group of islands that he called the Ladrones or the ‘Pirate Islands’, which make up the Marianas, after the natives stole one of his boats. On another island, wrote Antonio Pigafetta, ‘the inhabitants … entered the ships and stole whatever they could lay hands on, so that we could not protect ourselves’.40 Later Borneo natives kidnapped members of Magellan's crew. Likewise when other Spanish explorers visited Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, they found the natives to be devious and treacherous, earning one small cove on the island's southern tip the name ‘Deceitful Bay’.41 And opposite the island of Balambangan, off Borneo's northern tip, there was the infamous ‘pirates' point’.42

What are we to make of these native pirates? As William Lessa explained, ‘The aggressive and thieving actions of the islanders were not the result of a sudden transformation of character brought on by the foreigners’43 Robbery and violence had existed long before the Europeans had arrived, and were, in fact, closely related to the endless inter-tribal wars among the islanders. Treachery, deceit, and thievery were all instruments of political policy. Chiefs, kings, and sultans organized forces of maritime warriors and they also allied with sea raiders, whom they relied upon to rob and debilitate their enemies. Maritime marauding was one of the key strategies used by political leaders to expand their prestige, wealth, and power. The seizure of scarce and valuable resources, particularly slaves and weapons, was a major motive for wars. The accumulation of slaves, not territorial aggrandizement, was the basis of political power and wealth; warriors needed weapons for slave raids. As a result piracy tended to be rampant during wartime but diminished during peacetime. Distinctions between warfare and piracy became meaningless.

The dynamics of indigenous piracy or sea raiding changed dramatically in the second half of the eighteenth century, as did the number of incidents. Piracy surged at a time of economic vitality across the whole region as South East Asia was drawn into the emerging global economy. In some areas raiding became closely tied to the burgeoning China trade, as well as to European expansion and colonialism. Trading and raiding were interconnected and related to the commercial rivalries and network-building between Asian and Western traders who sought to obtain export commodities to trade in China. As the Chinese economy grew so too did the demand in China for South East Asian products, especially culinary exotics like birds' nests, sharks' fins, and sea cucumbers, as well as for pepper, pearls, tortoise shells, and tin. European traders also actively sought these same local products to trade in China. Because there was always a shortage of labourers to procure these products, slave raiding became a big business. The unrelenting need for slaves perpetuated raiding and war.44 Piracy went virtually unchecked for nearly a century between 1750 and 1840, not only because many native polities fostered raiding, but also because European governments were occupied with problems back home, particularly the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815).

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Sulu Archipelago was one of the major centres for South East Asian sea raiding. Its towns and villages, which were built up mainly on piles above the water for easy access to boats, were notorious as pirate lairs and black markets.45 Iranun and Balangingi raiders, and their Tausog overlords, created a highly organized, large-scale operation which extended throughout insular South East Asia and to the shores of Thailand and South Vietnam. Sulu sultans and datus (chiefs or nobles) supported raiders for a percentage of the booty. For instance, in 1775 after Sulu pirates pillaged a British warehouse in Balambangan, the sultan received a share amounting to 45 pieces of artillery and gunpowder, plus a ‘contribution’ of 3,000 pesos from the raiders.46

Marauding cruises were regular, annual undertakings, dubbed by their victims as the ‘Pirate Winds’.47 In the winter during the north-east monsoons raiders set sail from their Sulu bases for the Celebes, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, and Malacca, and in the autumn they returned home with the south-east monsoons (see map 1). Sometimes cruises lasted up to three years. They sailed in double-decked prahus up to 100 feet long with 50 to 80 fighters and 100 oarsmen. Accustomed to sailing in fleets of 20 to 50 vessels, and occasionally as many as two hundred vessels, their fleets could have several thousands of men. Warriors were armed with knives, swords, spears, flintlock rifles, swivel guns, and even brass cannon (mostly between 6and 24-pounders) that they had procured from European and Chinese merchants.48 The warrior-raiders were mostly freemen and viewed marauding as a hereditary and honourable profession. The rowers were slaves, who were only expected to fight in emergencies.49 In 1798 one fleet, which consisted of 25 ships with 500 fighters and 800 rowers, captured 450 people who were sold into slavery; included among the captives were three Spanish priests, one of whom was sold for 2,500 pesos. In 1812, during his six-month stay in Sulu, J. Hunt, the Lieutenant Governor of Java, noted that a thousand people had been kidnapped and sold into slavery in this single market.50

Captives, who were sold as slaves, were the chief source of booty as well as of regional trade. They were important to the economy both as a unit of production and as a commodity of exchange. According to Owen Rutter, ‘slaves were more lucrative than loot, and easier to dispose of’.51 The capital at Jolo, called the ‘Algiers of the East’, became ‘a pirate mart and a clearing town for slaves’.52 In fact, by the end of the eighteenth century, Jolo was the largest slave market in the region and the hub for long-distance slave raiding. Perhaps half of its population was slaves. Between 1770 and 1870, an estimated 300,000 slaves were trafficked by raiders in Sulu. While many slaves were put to work harvesting, procuring, and processing jungle and marine products for the China market, others worked as agricultural and domestic labourers. A large number of captives were simply traded as commodities in areas outside the Sulu Archipelago, while others were retained by the raiders as oarsmen. Chinese settlers in Malaya were always eager buyers of female slaves, which they took as mistresses. Elderly and infirm captives often were sold to headhunters in Borneo for human sacrifice. Jolo was an open market where European, Chinese, and Bugis merchants came to trade, and where raiders could sell slaves and booty and refit their ships. Trading, slaving, and raiding overlapped and complemented each other.53

Another important raiding base was centred around Singapore on the islands of Riau, Galang, and Lingga, which were the traditional core of the Kingdom of Johor (see map 1). Piracy was as ancient in this area as elsewhere in the region, and was pursued for many of the same reasons, namely war, slavery, and trade. Groups of Malay Muslims, such as the Orang Laut (often labelled as ‘Sea Gypsies’ in European sources), were nomadic seafarers who spent most of their time on ceaseless trading and raiding expeditions throughout the archipelagos.54 As one writer explained, ‘The ordinary Malay trader was a merchant and pirate by turns, as opportunity served.’55 Raiding was a normal part of the life cycle. Edward Presgrave, the Registrar of Imports and Exports at the British colony of Singapore, reported in 1824: the Orang Laut gathered agar-agar, seaweed, tortoise shells, and other marine products each spring to sell to European buyers for the China market, and then in the summer they set out on raiding expeditions in the Straits of Malacca as far north as Kedah. By early autumn they returned home to dispose of their booty and ‘pass listless lives’ until the cycle began again in the following spring.56 As in Sulu, local princes supplied the Malay raiders with weapons and opium and in return they claimed ‘shares of the plunder, the female captives, the cannon, and one-third of all the rest of the booty’.57 In the nineteenth century Iranun raiders sometimes co-operated with Malay pirates and used Lingga as a forward base for inter-regional raiding operations on the western Malay Peninsula. They abducted people to sell into slavery and plundered trading vessels, which carried valuable cargoes of edible marine products, pepper, and weapons.58

From the 1760s onward there emerged an intricate clandestine trading network, which involved raiders and merchants. Booty was brought to the markets at Riau, Lingga, Galang, and later, after its founding in 1819, Singapore, where Western, Bugis, and Chinese traders exchanged foreign commodities – textiles and opium from India and ceramics from China – for stolen goods. Galang, for example, was an important marketing centre for the pirate trade, dealing not only in the slave trade but also the buying and selling of booty and the outfitting of raiding vessels. A Malay merchant, who had been abducted by pirates in the mid 1820s, described how the raiders brought their stolen goods (rice, ebony, and sundry piece goods) and thirty-nine captives to Galang to sell; the captives were sold to Chinese traders who lived on the island.59 The illegal trade became so important and lucrative that in 1782 English merchants actually provided a vessel to raiders so that they could plunder ships carrying pepper in the Sunda Strait.60 Apparently they had no scruples about obtaining valuable cargo through plunder and illicit trade.

Piracy surged in the region between 1784 and 1836. For the Orang Laut and other sea peoples in Johor this was a time of crisis following the Dutch invasion of Riau (1784), and the establishment of British settlements at Penang (1786), Malacca (1795), and Singapore (1819). Adding further to the general malaise was the insistent warfare between Bugis and Malays, as well as endemic tribal conflicts. In this anarchy native trading vessels suffered the most, especially the smaller, poorly armed vessels from Cochinchina (southern Vietnam). Occasionally raiders also attacked Western vessels, usually when at anchor or becalmed; the brutality towards Western sailors was sometimes horrendous.61 The mounting disturbances became particularly worrisome to Europeans at Singapore who feared continued attacks on native shipping – what they labelled ‘piracy’ – would destroy the commerce of the port. In 1823, according to Sir Stamford Raffles, although the attacks on Western vessels were rare, they were ‘extremely frequent on native vessels, and afford serious obstacles to that intercourse by which the productions of the neighbouring nations are collected at this emporium, and our wares and manufactures disseminated in return’. The British colonial government reported a few years later that the shores and islands between Singapore and Malacca were ‘infested with piratical praus’. Some ten years later, according to British and Dutch reports, the problem of piracy in the Malacca Straits had actually increased.62

In the eyes of the colonial powers piracy was a barbaric custom that Europeans had a duty to suppress for the sake of commerce and civilization. In one writer's view, the Malays were ‘Barbarous and poor, therefore rapacious, faithless, and sanguinary. These are circumstances … which militate strongly to beget a piratical character.’63 Another writer saw indigenous piracy as ‘abhorrent to humanity and the principles of all civilized governments’. In Raffles's formula, the British were the ‘parents’ and the indigenes the ‘children’, whereby ‘humanity demands our interference’ in eliminating piracy.64 On the one hand, natives had to be encouraged to adopt the ‘industrious habits’ of the West, and on the other hand, Western navies had to implement aggressive campaigns against the pirates and their supporters.

Beginning in 1836 the British and other European powers began to adopt effective piracy-suppression campaigns, not only around Singapore but elsewhere in South East Asia. Perhaps the most effective measure was the deployment of steam gunboats to the region and their relentless destruction of pirate vessels and strongholds. Whenever possible the subdued pirate communities were forcefully resettled in new areas away from their original power bases, where they were expected to engage in the legitimate pursuits of agriculture and commerce. By 1860 their campaigns had become so successful that piracy ceased being a serious problem in South East Asia for about a century.65

Conclusion

In South East Asia, as elsewhere around the world, piracy was intricately linked to both trade and war. ‘The prize of piracy is economic,’ according to Pérotin-Dumon, ‘but as historic phenomenon, the dynamics that creates it is political’.66 Indeed, European colonial states defined piracy chiefly in political and cultural terms according to their own interests. Their sharp legal distinctions between illegitimate (piracy) and legitimate (privateering) forms of maritime raiding would have been lost on most South East Asians. For the latter, sea raiding, or what the colonialists called ‘piracy’, was fundamental to statecraft and political power. Raiders were warriors and heroes, not criminals. As Raffles explained at the start of the nineteenth century, among South East Asians, raiding ‘is considered as an honourable profession, especially for young nobles and needy great men’.67 Often too it was a legitimate, state-sponsored enterprise deeply entwined with trade, war, and slavery. Only gradually and grudgingly did indigenous rulers come to accept Western notions that ‘piracy’ was a crime that needed to be eliminated. As a legal concept and a cultural construct imposed by Western colonialists, piracy in any form became a stigma of backwardness and barbarism. Its suppression therefore became an important and necessary component of modernization.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Akiko Sugiyama, Li Qingxin, Ota Atsushi, and the two anonymous readers for their helpful comments and suggestions. He also wishes to thank the University of Macau for research grants that helped fund this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert J. Antony

Robert J. Antony is a research professor in history in the University of Macau, specializing in Asian maritime history, with a focus on piracy. Representative publications include Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley, 2003), Pirates in the Age of Sail (New York, 2007), and Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas (Hong Kong, 2010).

Notes

1 Young, ‘Roots of Contemporary Maritime Piracy in Southeast Asia’, 2.

2 Crawfurd, A Descriptive Dictionary, 353.

3 Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, 351; see also the insightful discussion in Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The Pirate and the Emperor’, esp. 28–9.

4 Cited in N. Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay World, 19, 21.

5 See, for example, Warren, Iranun and Balangingi, 11–2, 72–3, 81.

6 Quote in the 1944 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, cited in Reid, ‘Violence at Sea’, 19.

7 Ibid., 19–20; similarly Pérotin-Dumon forcefully argues that piracy was defined by the political interests of imperial powers; see ‘The Pirate and the Emperor’, 26, 28–9, 31.

8 See, for example, the detailed descriptions in Hashim, Hikayat Siak.

9 Cited in Reid, ‘Violence at Sea’, 19.

10 Leirissa, ‘Changing Maritime Trade Patterns in the Seram Sea’, 112.

11 See, for example, the testimonies of John Dann (1696) and Adam Baldridge (1699) in Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, 165–70, 180–5.

12 See Scammell, ‘European Exiles’, 641–2.

13 First-hand accounts of Drake's voyage around the world are in Penzer, The World Encompassed.

14 Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The Pirate and the Emperor’, 29; see also Antony, ‘Introduction: The shadowy world of the Greater China Seas’, 9.

15 Scammell, ‘European Exiles’, 650.

16 See the detailed discussion in de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas; also see Borschberg, ‘The Santa Catarina Incident of 1603’; and van Veen, Decay or Defeat?, 190–1.

17 See, for example, the comments of Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, 350–1.

18 Scammell, ‘European Exiles’, 651, 653.

19 See Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World.

20 On White see Collis, Siamese White; on Culliford see Rogoziński, Honor Among Thieves, 105–8.

21 On this privateering venture see the first-hand account by Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, especially ch. 13.

22 See Antony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea, 22–7; and Chin, ‘Merchants, Smugglers, and Pirates’, 49–50.

23 Zheng, Chouhai tubian, 322–3.

24 Matsuura and Bian (eds.), Mingdai Dongya haiyu, 40–1; and Chin, ‘Merchants, Smugglers, and Pirates’, 50–1.

25 Matsuura and Bian (eds.), Mingdai Dongya haiyu, 49–51.

26 Tuan, Silk for Silver, 21.

27 Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, vol. 6, 182–3; vol. 34, 384–5.

28 Xu and Xie, Da Nan shilu, 3.

29 See Antony, Pirates in the Age of Sail, 48–9, and translation of a primary source, 111–14.

30 Xu and Xie, Da Nan shilu, 35–6; on the connections between Chinese pirates and Tay Son rebels see Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 32–56.

31 Rutter, The Pirate Wind, 37; see also Ota, Changes of Regime, 125–6.

32 Xu and Xie, Da Nan shilu, 43, 47–8.

33 Fernando, Murder Most Foul, 75–86.

34 Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy, 226–7.

35 See the numerous official reports in Xu and Xie, Da Nan shilu, 205–62.

36 Brown, Cochin-China, 20–102.

37 Report, 1856–57, 68–9.

38 Report, 1861–62, 8.

39 Penzer, The World Encompassed, 64–5.

40 Cited in Lessa, Drake's Island of Thieves, 117.

41 Account of Captain Carteret, Commander of the sloop Swallow in 1766, in Voyages in the Southern Hemisphere, 616.

42 Forrest, A Voyage to New Guinea, 374.

43 Lessa, Drake's Island of Thieves, 254.

44 For several first-hand documents on Sulu slave raiding, see Antony, Pirates in the Age of Sail, 146–8; and for a detailed discussion on Sulu maritime raiding, see Warren, The Sulu Zone.

45 ‘Malay Pirates’, 244–5; and Rutter, Pirate Wind, 28–9.

46 Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido.

47 Rutter, Pirate Wind, 28.

48 So lucrative was the gun business by the early nineteenth century that manufacturers in England actually began producing custom-made firearms for Sulu customers.

49 Rutter, Pirate Wind, 33–5.

50 Hunt, ‘Some Particulars Relating to Sulo in the Archipelago of Felicia’, 51.

51 Rutter, Pirate Wind, 49.

52 Ibid., 29.

53 For a concise overview of slave raiding and markets, see Warren, ‘Slave Markets and Exchange’.

54 ‘Malay Pirates’, 243.

55 Mills, British Malaya, 223.

56 Cited in Tarling, Piracy and Politics, 39.

57 ‘Malay Pirates’, 245.

58 See first-hand accounts in St John, ‘Piracy in the Indian Archipelago’.

59 Ota, ‘The Business of Violence’, 135.

60 Ota, Changes of Regime, 129.

61 See, for example, the case of the British sailor William Edwards, whose tongue was cut out by ‘Malay Pirates’ in 1845, in Antony, Pirates in the Age of Sail, 151–2.

62 See Tarling, Piracy and Politics, 28–9, 69, 80.

63 ‘The Piracy and Slave Trade of the Indian Archipelago’, 145.

64 Tarling, Piracy and Politics, 16, 64.

65 Report, 1861-62, 8.

66 Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The Pirate and the Emperor’, 26.

67 Tarling, Piracy and Politics, 15.