Indian Antiquary Vol 48

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 164

160
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[SEPT., 1919
own State or of those of their victims, and, by a kind of legal fiction, their acts have been held to have been committed within such jurisdiction. That it is a legal fiction is, I think, proved by the fact that in many cases States, on the capture of foreign pirates, have requested the consent of the States to which they belonged to their punishment. But there is a whole class of actions held to be piratical which comes under a different category, viz., instances of violence committed underthesanction of the States to which the pirates belonged: such States as the ancient Illyrians, the Barbary States, the petty States of the Malabar Coast in India and of the Malayan or Indian Archipelago, all of which looked upon Piracy as a national or tribal custom and an honourable means of livelihood. Such also, one must confess, are numerous acts of violence committed under the sanction of religion, e.g., the Crusades, the continual warfare between Muhammadans and Christians in the Mediterranean, the Portuguese attacks on Indian and Arab traders, and the attacks on ships belonging to any Muhammadan or Pagan nation by the early European Adventurers in the Eastern Seas, all sanctioned by the laws of the States to which the pirates belonged, though they loudly proclaimed similar acts to be piratical when their own subjects were the victims. Lastly, and for the same reason, certain acts of inhumanity, such as the cruel treatment bestowed upon Protestant seamen by properly commissioned officers of the Spaniards, are considered piratical, for it is held, and rightly, that no commission can cover actions which shock all our feelings of humanity. In these two categories, it is not the illegality of the action but the inhuman nature of it which makes it piratical, and under them, I think, would come the German submarine warfare and the bombardment of undefended coast towns by German warships.
Instances of piracy under all these categories will be found in the record of Piracy in the Eastern Seas. It remains to point out that Piracy was indigenous to the whole coast of Arabia, Western India, the Bay of Bengal, the Malayan or Indian Archipelago and the Chinese and Japanese Seas, but though, according to the Koran, there was a piratical king in Oman as early as the time of Moses, i.e., about 1550 B.C., it is not until some three thousand years later that we can get anything like detailed accounts of particular instances of piracy.
In the following pages I propose to present to the reader a number of extracts, principally descriptions of sea-fights, taken either from old books compiled, if not published, soon after the events described, or from contemporary newspapers or from letters and depositions of eye-witnesses. From these he will be able to gather a correct view of the ways and manners of the pirates in the Eastern Seas, whether they were natives of Asiatic countries or adventurers from Europe or America.
I have found only two instances of the use of the Black Flag in this part of the world, viz., by the pirate Seager (or England) in 1720 and by a Malay prahu (prow) in 1820. The flag used by the pirates was usually the Red or Bloody Flag. This was the flag long recognised by all European seamen as signifying No Quarter' and No Surrender. I have met with no instances of prisoners being made to walk the plank. This particular form of cruelty was apparently limited to European and American pirates.
I.
AN INDIAN PIRATE KILLED BY THE PORTUGUESE NEAR CEUTA, 1519.
The first of these extracts describes a fight which took place, not in the Eastern Seas, but in the Straits of Gibraltar, and is included as showing that natives of India were not wholly destitute of enterprise at a time when the Portuguese were introducing European