Blackbeard in the news.

Aaaarrrr!!! Yar! It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, here today to talk about all things piratical, or at least all the pirate news that’s (apparently) fit to print.

Longtime readers know that our friend Ben, Silence Dogood and I have a fondness for almost all things piratical, as long as they’re historical and/or just good fun. (The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and International Talk Like a Pirate Day come to mind.) While we recognize that today’s pirates are just trying to make a living the way their famous forebears did—plundering, capturing, ransoming, and generally terrorizing all comers on the High Seas—we find it a lot harder to warm up to them. And harder still to believe that they’re getting away with it in today’s high-tech world.

But they are getting away with it, I realized, when my eye was drawn to a prominent portrait of Blackbeard, aka Captain Edward Teach, on, of all things, the front page of this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal. Now, the Journal is best known as a financial publication, and it could be argued that piracy as a general practice is not exactly unknown in the world of high finance. But no, this was an article about piracy in its original sense: robbery at sea. (Check out the article online; it’s great! It’s “Who’s a Pirate? U.S. Court Sees Duel Over Definition” by Keith Johnson, Saturday/Sunday edition August 14-15, 2010, at www.WSJ.com.)

The focus of the article is the ongoing trial in Norfolk, Virginia, of six Somali pirates who’d attacked a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Ashland, this past April. It’s the first U.S. trial for piracy since a blockade runner was hauled in on piracy charges in 1861, during the Civil War. The problem? It appears that a legal definition of a pirate is nowhere to be found.

Apparently, conviction for piracy in the U.S. carries an automatic sentence of life in prison, a downgrade in our kinder, gentler times from the original sentence, summary execution. But the crux of the legal dilemma is this: Are you a pirate if, like the Somalis on trial, you make an unsuccessful attempt to plunder, capture, ransom, and terrorize, or only if you succeed?

To this untrained eye, you’re a pirate if you’re trying to be a pirate, whether you ultimately succeed or qualify for Darwin Award status. But to the legally appointed American defenders of the Somalis, herein lies the loophole that will free their clients from the consequences of their actions. No wonder lawyers have such a bad name. (As in, “What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?” “A good start.”)

Now of course, as with many things, the situation is far more nuanced than it seems. As I understand it, most Somali pirates aren’t hardened criminals, but 18-year-old boys who’ve taken up piracy in a desperate attempt to feed their extended families and communities in a country that’s descended into chaos. But it still seems to me that these lawyers’ efforts would be better directed at trying to establish viable (and legal) means of providing a livelihood for their clients, and Somalis in general, rather than putting such tremendous effort into getting them off on a technicality.

But I’m straying from the point here, which is that the WSJ article contained fascinating nuggets of information about pirates and piracy through the ages. For example, definitions of pirates range from Cicero’s “the common enemy of all” to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1820 definition of piracy as “robbery upon the sea” to a 1982 U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty defining piracy as “any illegal acts of violence, detention or depradation committed for private ends on the high seas.”

The article also notes that “Piracy was the world’s first crime with universal jurisdiction, meaning that any country had the right to apprehend pirates on the high seas.” And the article’s author, Keith Johnson, reminds us history buffs that pirates were responsible for the establishment of the U.S. Navy, after President Jefferson got sick of paying tribute fees to the pirates of the Barbary Coast so U.S. merchant vessels could have safe passage.

Most interesting of all to me was a graphic included with the article that suggests that piracy is enjoying a resurgence all over the globe, not just in Africa but throughout Southeast Asia, in China and Vietnam, in the Americas, in Bangladesh, and even in the Arabian Sea. Over 200 attacks on ships occurred in the first 6 months of 2010 alone, and “an estimated 18 ships and their crews are currently being held for ransom.” I can’t say how many pirate attacks occurred per year in the Golden Age of Piracy, roughly 1650-1720 (or, according to some sources, 1690-1730), but I’d be surprised if it was over 400.

I will say that what today’s pirates have in determination, they lack in style. Where are the hallmarks of the great pirates of yore: Blackbeard with burning flares in his trademark beard and hair; Black Bart, the Great Pirate Roberts, most successful of all pirates, with his extremely dandified outfits and love of ostentatious jewels and a proper high tea; Stede Bonnet, with his refined planter’s manners and utterly ruthless approach to captured ships; Captain Morgan, who conveyed his piratical finesse into a governorship in Jamaica; Jean Lafitte, whose legendary gallantry and Creole savoir-faire was matched only by his bravery. It’s the larger-than-life nature of these pirate legends, and their fictional counterparts, that set pirates apart from common criminals and make them appealing.

Here at Poor Richard’s Almanac, we miss the good old days.

                  You savvy?

                             —RS