Defeating Piracy
The Manchester Museum, housed in one wing of the splendid Victorian buildings of Manchester University, is well worth a visit. I chiefly go there because of the splendid collection of objects from Kahun, the village of the pyramid builders excavated by Sir Flinders Petrie. This has a particular interest for me, as I think it highly likely that the inhabitants of this village were Jews enslaved by the Egyptians before the Exodus.
Others may be more interested in the mummies on display, which became famous through the Manchester Mummy Project, when they were subjected to an array of modern investigative techniques which told us more about those individuals than was known about any other ancient Egyptians. Less well-known - and relegated to an upstairs gallery that you have to persevere to find - are a couple of reconstructed heads, including the head of Phillip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. Marks on the skull were interpreted as evidence of the arrow wound in the eye recorded in the historical sources and the reconstructed face is disfigured accordingly. (It just goes to show that the museum authorities do not have a clue about what is interesting to the general public, that on my last visit to the museum this fascinating head had been removed to storage and replaced by some anonymous Neolithic who was doubtless more interesting from the technical point of view, but might just as well have been a shop window mannequin for all I cared about it.)
However there is one exhibit which always makes me feel a bit nervous. It is a boat, about twenty feet long, hanging from the ceiling on thin steel ropes. Not only do the thin ropes seem too frail for the boat, but wood has a tendency to rot and I don't want to be standing underneath when the thing finally comes crashing down! Known as the Kyrenia Delta merchant ship, the original was found off the coast of northern Cyprus and is dated to 300 BC. Not only did it show various interesting things about ancient ship-building techniques, but the fact that the wreck still contained a good deal of its cargo was able to tell the archaeologists all sorts of things about where it had come from and where it was likely going.
Among all the exhaustive information on the display boards around the ship, however, is one snippet that is easily overlooked: the original timbers had a number of gashes which were consistent with being caused by embedded javelin or spear heads. This led the archaeologists to speculate that the boat was attacked by pirates who disposed of the sailors with a fusillade of javelins, looted the valuables and then sent the boat and its cargo to the bottom.
I wish that more details were given: how many of these marks are there? Are they all on the one side of the boat? What does their direction and the depth of penetration tell us about the battle - if battle there was? How was the boat sunk - if, indeed, it was sunk deliberately? and finally, why would the pirates leave any of the cargo behind and, indeed, why would they sink a valuable boat which could have been towed ashore and used as a fishing boat?
That is not to suggest that I doubt the existence of pirates in the Mediterranean. Plutarch, in his "Life of Caesar", tells a fascinating story about the time when Julius Caesar was captured by pirates off the coast of Turkey.
First, when the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar burst out laughing. They did not know, he said, who it was that they had captured, and he volunteered to pay fifty. Then, when he had sent his followers to the various cities in order to raise the money and was left with one friend and two servants among these Cilicians, about the most bloodthirsty people in the world, he treated them so highhandedly that, whenever he wanted to sleep, he would send to them and tell them to stop talking.
For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner. He also wrote poems and speeches which he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged. They were much taken with this and attributed his freedom of speech to a kind of simplicity in his character or boyish playfulness.
However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them. He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into the prison at Pergamon. He then went in person to Marcus Junius, the governorof Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners. Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case.
Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined that he was joking.
These pirates were not finally stamped out until 67 BC when Pompey led a huge Roman fleet against them and one by one reduced their lairs, sinking their ships and capturing the men, women and children. In three months he eliminated the pirates who had previously brought maritime trade to a virtual standstill, though it is interesting to note that he neither killed nor enslaved the twenty thousand prisoners, but dispersed them throughout the Mediterranean, settling them in places where they could gain a living by honest toil.
There is, of course, nothing new under the sun. The gilded masts and purple sails of the pirates of ancient times are paralleled by the expensive cars and luxury houses of the Somali pirates of today. The respect in which the ancient pirates were held, so that even nobles joined them, is exactly what is happening today in Somalia. It remains to be seen whether the modern world has the guts to adopt the same solution: overwhelming force, total military defeat, followed by clemency and reconstruction, for I greatly fear that there is a good deal of truth in the complaints of the Somali pirates, who protest that they were driven to piracy by Western fishing boats that denuded their waters and Western cargo ships that dumped poisonous waste in the sea simply because there was no government in Somalia to protest against these actions.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
