[BITList] Fwd: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague

[Michael Feltham]

Begin forwarded message:

From: enquiries at lloydslist.com
Date: 22 December 2008 09:00:21 GMT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague


The below article was sent to you from Mike Feltham (mj.feltham at madasafish.com 
) with the following message: I thought you might be interested in the  
article below.

Piracy in perspective
Monday 22 December 2008

WHILE the foregoing might in some measure have expended this  
unseasonal anger, there is still a bit left for all these US admirals  
who have been suggesting that, as it is a bit hard to sort out  
Somalian pirates by smoking out their lairs, shipowners ought to do  
more to help themselves.

You can see where they are coming from, as these grey-funnel types are  
very protective of their own assets and guard their monthly allocation  
of helicopter fuel jealously, like management accountants. They have  
always been a little impatient of merchant shipping and its methods of  
operating ships with one man and a dog aboard.

The shipping industry has explained, patiently and at length, the  
difficulties of either arming the crew or buying in mercenary  
protection. Most of this is based on the problems of unsympathetic  
wayports or the grief the ship will get if any sharp-eyed crew  
marksman ever shoots a pirate, or the mate shoots the boatswain.

There are also worries about the pirates merely tooling up to ensure  
that their balance of power and armed capability is always superior.  
Escalation, it is called.

Armed naval parties aboard are another matter, with a great deal of  
historic precedent in the gunners of the Second World War, who were  
there to protect merchant ships, as armed service personnel should be  
both more capable and more legally protected than alternatives.

I wonder whether the Somalian pirates have been reading their maritime  
history. I was slightly worried as I discovered, when reading Richard  
Woodman’s new history, Neptune’s Trident (which I have already  
recommended), that it was British buccaneers, displaced from the  
Spanish Main and the Caribbean by mostly reformed pirates acting for  
the Crown, who seem almost to have established piracy on the Somalian  
coast.

At the end of the 15th century no less a pirate than the frightful  
William Kidd was ranging around the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean  
attacking convoys of merchant ships and subjecting the wretches he  
caught to torture and slow death. By comparison with these blood- 
drenched terrors, the Somalian pirates of today are the soul of  
discretion and decorum, despite being draped around with advanced  
weaponry.

Fortified by this new knowledge, it took all the persuasive powers of  
my wife to prevent me from severely lecturing the hapless proprietor  
of a local children’s bookshop about the disgraceful numbers of books  
about pirates I discovered on her shelves.

‘Savagery’ and ‘deception’ are two words these authors of kiddies’  
books ought to bear in mind as they excise the gruesome bits from this  
age-old practice now being revisited.

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