A Naval Context For the Somali Pirates.
Lawrence A. Peskin is on extremely dubious ground in
representing the Barbary States at the time of the Early
Republic as extensions of the Ottoman Empire, and he totally
distorts the reality of the Napoleonic Wars. Turkish
expansionism at sea in the Mediterranean had burned itself out by
the end of the sixteenth century, with the Battle of
Lepanto, and the Siege of Malta, and on land, by the
end of the seventeenth century, with the Siege of Vienna. Turkey
had developed alliances with the Protestant nations of
Northern Europe. It had a commercial treaty with England by 1580,
and in Hakluyt's Voyages, the official history of the
sixteenth-century English Navy, there is an interesting letter
from Elizabeth I, apologizing to the Sultan for an
English pirate who was apparently preying on Levantine
Greeks. Presumably, if the pirate avoided being hanged by
either the English or the Turks, he would have wound up in
Algiers.
Sir George Norman Clark, in his _War and
Society in the Seventeenth Century_ comments
about the Barbary Pirates in their seventeenth-century
heyday, to the effect that the Barbary states
were a sort of Ile of Tortuga of the
Mediterranean. Oddly enough, many of the Corsairs were
Europeans. The situation was that
they were nominally subject to the Ottoman Empire, which,
however, was not able to control them. The
Ottoman Emperors tried all manner of
administrative reforms, but the fact remained that in
these ports, the real locus of
power was with the janissaries (who
shipped on the corsairs), and the corporations of
pirate captains. Both were economically
committed to piracy.
Governors were either ineffective
and short lived, or they were front men
for the pirates. However the Turks understandably felt that
with the balance of power, and so on, they could not
afford to simply abandon the Barbary Coast to the
French and Spanish. Thus, the persistence of
brigandage was a direct result of the
incompleteness of the concert of Europe.
Frederick W. Marks III, in his _Independence on Trial: Foreign
Affairs and the Making of the Constitution_ notes that before the
revolution, the American economy had functioned within the British
trading sphere, stressing commerce with the British West Indies
and Britain itself, commerce which had always been denied to
non-British-Empire traders. Additionally, American ships had
traded into the Mediterranean under the protection of the British
flag. Naturally, on independence, trading privileges in British
territory were withdrawn, to the infuriation of Americans who had
taken for granted that it was their right (under the gospel of
free trade) to trade to the various British possessions. What was
worse, the British government took pains to give
the Barbary Pirates a free hand with American shipping, making
sure that the corsairs understood that American ships were not
under British protection. Americans assumed that
the Barbary Pirates were such manifest international outlaws that
all civilized nations would naturally suppress them without delay.
In short, they had taken as natural universal rights what the
European powers conceived to be the earned privileges of a great
power. Of course, it was also British policy to disrupt the United
States by such means as were possible, short of war. One
might understandably feel that the Barbary Pirates were
acting as mercenaries in British employ.
The reality is that by the time American naval forced got involved
with the Barbary Pirates, Britain and France had fought both
the Battle of the Nile, and the Battle of the Pyramids, both
in 1798, on what was ostensibly Turkish territory. Immediately
thereafter, England had acquired a permanent base in Malta, well
placed to seal off the Eastern Mediterranean from the
Western Mediterranean. Turkey was in decline. Austria had
re-occupied considerable sections of the Danubian region
nearly a hundred years before, in the early
eighteenth century; and under the Russian Empress Catherine
II, Prince Potemkin had just secured a lodgment on the Black
Sea. In 1805, of course, Britain won the
decisive battle of Trafalgar, winning half a century or more
of unchallenged worldwide naval supremacy. However, it still
required the cooperation of the Barbary states as sources of
supply for the British fleets maintaining the
close blockade necessary to keep the French navy
bottled up in its harbors and deny it the actual
experience at sea necessary to rebuild. In 1816, when
the Napoleonic Wars were over, and the Barbary
Pirates' services were no longer required,
the British Navy went in to burn them out. The forces
employed in these naval battles were many times the total size of
the United States Navy. It is hard to say whether merely burning
out the pirate ports would have been a lasting solution. As
events turned out, France invaded and conquered Algeria a
few years later, setting up a colonial society with a
ruling class of White settlers.
The Algerian pirates operated out of a kind of political
no-mans-land, where none of the contending great powers
could afford to dislodge them, for fear of giving an
advantage to the other great powers. To the extent that any
sizable power was behind the Algerian attacks on
American shipping, it was Great Britain, and indeed,
Naval Impressment was one of the major causes of the War of
1812. When England got around to destroying the
pirates, it was at about the same time that England was compelling
the substantial destruction of Spain's overseas empire, and
the elimination of Spain as a significant naval power. Both
fell under the heading of consolidating Britain's new
maritime hegemony.
Piracy per se largely vanished in the age of the steamship.
Steamships were fast enough that they could not be
easily intercepted, save by other steamships. Even official
commerce raiders ceased to be privateers. During the American
Civil War, the Confederate Raider Alabama generally burned
its captures at sea, rather than attempting to
get them to ports where their contents could be sold.
Of course, the Alabama was built in
England, and its crew was predominantly British, with Confederate
officers. The Alabama's depredations favored the British
Merchant Marine at the expense of the American
Merchant Marine. One can question the extent to
which the Alabama's operations were actually covert
operations by Britain against the United States. Henry
Adams, then a junior American diplomat in
London, was always in doubt about the point.
The Civil War was the swan song of
Anglo-American hostility. After that, Anglo-American
relations tended to improve, and there was less tendency to
covert war through proxies.
The trend of the Alabama was carried further during the
World Wars, by the German camouflaged cruisers, such as the
Atlantis, which generally refrained from sinking
captured ships only when they were needed to put the
accumulated prisoners-of-war ashore. The pattern of the naval wars
was that Germany and its European allies tended to
lose their overseas colonies very quickly, as
American-British sea superiority allowed overwhelming invasion
forces to be concentrated against each colony in turn, then
moved on to the next colony. Consequently German raiders rapidly
found themselves operating without bases, ten thousand miles
from home, and separated by the British blockade lines. With
the sinking of the Atlantis, commerce-raiding became
almost exclusively the province of submarines and
occasionally airplanes.
The most formidable commerce raiders during the Second World War
were the German U-Boat "Wolf Packs," groups of submarines
controlled from shore by radio, and supplied with intelligence by
long-range reconnaissance aircraft. The Allies response
was the convoy, a group of ships of similar speed,
going to the same destination, with a substantial
naval escort. The idea was not to defend the whole ocean, but
merely the immediate vicinity of the convoy. It was soon
discovered that certain types of cargo ships did not necessarily
require much in the way of deck access, and could be
converted to auxiliary aircraft carriers. This meant that a convoy
could have its own small air force, good enough to find and sink
U-boats at a considerable distance (ten or twenty miles) from the
convoy.
The Cunard Queens were another case. Hull physics favors big
ships. The Cunard Queens were both big and fast. Their
"vital statistics" approximated those of the Japanese battleship
Yamato, or a modern aircraft carrier, viz, 80,000 tons,
160,000 hp, 30+ knots. They were much faster than a submarine, and
their speed even compared favorably to that of
torpedoes over extended ranges. So the queens were given a
cruiser or so for escort, and sent off by themselves. They had
some fairly strange adventures during the war. The Queen
Elizabeth encountered a freak wave which flooded the bridge-- but
the ship survived, and the Queen Mary collided with its
escorting cruiser-- fatally for cruiser, but not for
the Queen Mary. However, both proved immune to U-Boats.
During the 1967 Middle East war, and afterwards, the Suez
canal was closed off by virtue of having become the front
line of an active war zone. The oil shippers responded by building
bigger tankers, and going the long way around, via the Cape
of Good Hope, a distance of about 11,000 nautical miles
instead of 7000. The greater size and economy of the bigger ships
made up for the longer distance, and indeed, when the Suez canal
was finally re-opened, it had to be dredged out to
accommodate the big ships. In the mean time, the big
ships got bigger, so that they still could not go through the
canal. In a related process, the major oil-producing nations
sought to develop land pipelines leading to the
Mediterranean. Let us carry this a step further. Let
us consider the merits of hauling those kinds of low-value goods
which still travel by sea, the long way around from East
Asia to Europe. All distances which follow are in nautical
miles:
Southampton, UK-Cape Town-Melbourne, Australia, via Cape of
Good Hope: ~11,900
(roughly comparable distance to Singapore or
India)
Liverpool, UK-Manila, Philippines, via Panama: ~14,000
(about the same distance to Shanghai)
Liverpool, UK-Hong Kong, via Quebec and Vancouver (rail
portage across Canada): 8620 sea + ~2500 railroad.
These are routes which keep one thousands of miles
from any hostile party.
The Suez Route:
London, UK-Singapore: 8300
London, UK-Hong Kong, via South China Sea: 9754
London, UK-Melbourne, Aus, via Indian Ocean: 11,053
The distances to Singapore or China via the Cape, or Panama
are greater, but they are not insuperably greater. One can
compensate by building a bigger and faster ship.
By the 1960's, maritime commerce became a relatively limited
aspect of international trade. Passengers travel by air, unless
the process of travel is their objects, as in the case of
cruise ships. In 1960, the economical way to get from the
United States to Europe, for purposes of tourism or
graduate study, was still by an ocean liner, such as one of
the Cunard Queens. By 1972, the economical
traveler flew in one of Icelandic Airlines' DC-8 jets,
landing in Luxembourg, one of the few European airports
which was outside of the international airline cartel's
price-fixing arrangements.
Due to the tariff barriers which were a legacy of the Great
Depression, it was some time before international trade in
finished goods got going again. A serious oceanic trade in
objects of common consumption only really
started in the 1980's, with Reaganomics. This brings
us to the present economic configuration. Under the current
dispensation, the really valuable goods, such as
microprocessors, pharmaceuticals, etc., travel by air,
not by sea. There are mail-order operations which assemble
orders in China, and send them to the United States by air freight
because it is cheaper than running warehouses with
American labor. The next tier of goods down are cargoes
which get moved in containerships, that is, cargoes of a
type where a mere twenty tons is worth enough for special
handling. Here we are talking about goods destined
for Wal-Mart, whose low value is mostly because they have
not yet found a buyer, and may very well have to
be thrown out. Containerships are rapidly reaching the size
and speed of the old Cunard Queens. The same logic of square-cube
law applies to them, just as it applies to an ocean liner. I
think that boarding an 80,000 ton ship hacking down thirty
knots in the middle of the ocean is easier said than done.
For that matter, pressures to reduce delivery times are likely to
lead to container ships being replaced by faster means of
transportation. Where railroads are available, they
tend to supersede container ships, because a well-run
railroad can move goods at 60-70 mph. Significantly, China
is building railroad connections towards Central Asia and
the Himalayas, with a view to strengthening its rail
links to Europe, and rendering them more competitive. Coastal
China is becoming overcrowded in any case, and, once rail links
are in place, there are substantial advantages to moving selected
manufacturing operations to Szechuan or Shensi, only
about 4000-5000 miles from European markets, or perhaps
80-100 hours travel time, at a cost of ten cents per pound
or less. To remain competitive, merchant shippers would
probably have to adopt surface-effect ships, and one has
some difficulty in seeing how a surface-effect
ship could be intercepted by anything slower than an
aircraft. The types of ships which seem to be really vulnerable to
piracy are comparatively small, slow, obsolete merchant
ships hauling low-value raw material for short
distances.
Now we come to the Somali Pirates. Most of the ships
the Somalis have captured seem to be either small ships, or bulk
carriers with very little freeboard. Chemical tankers fall into
both categories. This little Turkish chemical tanker (MV Karagöl)
of 5000-6000 tons, seems to have only three feet of freeboard.
Judging from link cited in the
bibliography below, it looks like the seagoing equivalent of
an English tank locomotive. However, a cruise ship, capable
of twenty knots or so, generally seems to be able to
just outrun the pirates. Such ships have much higher sides than a
bulk carrier, or even a containership. They can generally
come up with a couple of hundred stewards to man the sides in any
case.
Convoys work. They are the proven technique against commerce
raiding. They worked against the German U-boat "wolf packs."
One can arrange meets at sea, about a thousand miles
from the Horn of Africa. Ships regulate their speed to arrive at
the designated coordinates at the designated time, and then they
all proceed together to Suez. The Egyptians collect tolls on ships
going through the Suez canal. They are the obvious ones to be
worrying about the security of the Suez canal approaches,
and I don't see why they shouldn't provide the necessary naval
escort. I expect they could use something like the old American
Asheville class corvettes, or the Russian Stenka, ships of
about two hundred tons with a maximum speed of forty knots
and a single three or four inch gun, plus 20 mm or 40 mm cannon.
Those kind of little ships don't cost too much to operate, but the
gun has a fire director, and it can engage targets at thousands of
yards.
What concerns one is the extent to which Egypt's essentially
internal problems are being presented as a fundamental
international crisis. If the cost of going through Suez increases,
other routes will substitute themselves.
[Peskin disputes Frederick Marks' conclusions about British
encouragement of the pirates, but the pirates would soon had
discovered by trial and error what the actual limits of British
commitment to peaceable navigation were.]
====================================================================
This bibliography is not intended to be definitive. It
is merely the product of a hasty rummaging
through my own shelves and the internet.
The Algerian Pirates and the Napoleonic Wars:
Frederick W. Marks III, Independence on Trial: Foreign Affairs and
the Making of the Constitution, Louisiana State University Press,
Baton Rouge, 1973.
Sir George Norman Clark, War and Society
in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1958.
Irwin R. Blacker, ed., The [Viking] Portable
Hakluyt's Voyages, 1965, see esp. ch 24 and ch. 25.
[Captain] Frederick Marryat _Peter Simple_, 1834. A
quasi-autobiographical novel, gives a good sense of the flavor
of Nelson's navy. Think of Marryat as the
original source for C. . Forester's Hornblower books.
Michael Lewis, The History of the British Navy, 1957.
Background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Pellew,_1st_Viscount_Exmouth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Algiers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Algiers_order_of_battle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Naval_battles_of_the_Barbary_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Nile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aboukir_Bay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Pyramids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Egypt_(1798)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Copenhagen
Alabama and Atlantis:
Captain Bernhard Rogge and Wolfgang Frank, The German Raider
Atlantis, 1956. Memoirs of the captain.
http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org12-1.htm
http://americancivilwar.com/tcwn/civil_war/Navy_Ships/CSS_Alabama.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_auxiliary_cruiser_Atlantis
The War of the U-Boats:
Admiral Karl Doenitz, Memoirs: A Documentary of the Nazi
Twilight, 1959, 1961, abridged translation of Zehn Jahre und
Zwanzig Tage, 1958. The closest thing to an official history
from the German side, given that they lost the war.
Herbert A. Werner, Iron Coffins, 1969. Memoir of a
U-Boat captain.
Fictionalized memoirs. A lot of men seemed to need
psychological distance to talk about it relatively soon after the
events:
Wolfgang Ott, Sharks and Little Fish, 1957,
1958. From the point of view of a U-boat officer.
Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, 1951. From the point of view
of the Royal Navy.
Jan de Hartog, The Captain, 1966. Merchant
Navy.
http://www.maritimematters.com/queen-mary-vintage.html
Bjorn Landstrom, _The Ship: An Illustrated
History_, 1961, p. 282
Suez:
Noel Mostert, Supership, 1974, 1975. A narrative, with
commentary, of a voyage from Europe to the Persian Gulf
aboard a British supertanker, P&O Lines' SS
Ardshiel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal
Somalis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Karag%C3%B6l
http://www.tyneships.co.uk/phpfiles/bigships.php5?ref=2115
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nautica01s3200.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MS_Astor_Kiel2007.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_attacked_by_Somali_pirates
(05/04/2009 11:44 PM)
What American Merchant
Sailors?
Well, as I have said previously, it is deeply problematic to talk
about American-Algerian relations in the eighteenth century as if
England, France, and Spain did not exist. I am not of course
deeply read in the "Algerian Captivity" literature, but I do note
that in Royal Tyler's _The Algerine Captive_, the author pays at
least as much attention to Thomas Paine, and his connection with
Robespierre, as to the political aspects of the Algerians;
and that there is much more sheer moral outrage in the description
of an American slave ship than in any of the Algerian
episodes. Indeed, one could make a fair case that the narrator's
Algerian captivity is presented as divine retribution for having
signed onto a slaver. Note the helpful and
sympathetic mullah, who, failing to convert the
narrator, at least manages to find him a desk job which an
infidel can hold.
The threat of Somali captivity at present is very much
overblown because there are not many American seamen
to exercise it upon. Most of the American Merchant Marine is
employed in the coastal trades, which are reserved to them by law.
It is not really plausible that the Somalis should intercept ships
en-route from Seattle to Alaska. Only a tiny number of
American-flag ships are engaged in overseas
commerce.
---------------------------------------------------
See:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/trans.pdf
Statistical Abstract of the United States
Table 1067, Cargo Carrying U.S. Flag Fleet by Area of
Operations (p. 16 in acrobat file, or p. 684 in
printed book)
--------------------------------------------------------
"Foreign Waterborne Trade" is defined in such a way as
to include a ship which plies the great lakes between a mine
in western Ontario and a mill in Ohio, or a ferry which
operates between Cleveland and Toronto. The actual
size of the foreign trade component of the American Merchant
Marine, as defined according to reasonable standards, is
less than a hundred ships, many of which are de-facto
Navy supply ships.
The Maersk Alabama is in fact a Danish-owned ship, built in
Taiwan, which was transferred to a subsidiary company in 2004, and
"reflagged" as American, in order to collect American government
subsidies, in exchange for employing American sailors. The general
practice of the Danish and Norwegian owners seems to be to employ
a mixture of former Soviet and Third-World sailors, who are
willing to work for far less than Americans would require.
The ship's "regular route is from the United States to Salalah,
Djibouti and Mombasa," ie. to the East Africa / Horn of Africa /
Arabian Peninsula area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Maersk_Alabama
Consulting publications on trade between countries, one can
get a fairly good idea of the Maersk Alabama's usual
cargo. This would probably consist of general cargo to Arabia (in
exchange for oil, carried by tankers), Food Aid to East
Africa / Horn of Africa, and coffee, from the later two
regions, as a return cargo. Presumably, with the war going on in
Iraq, there are some American military cargoes as
well, and I would not be surprised if this had entered into the
decision to reflag the ship in the year 2004. The ship is not just
going about its business in a general way. It is, shall we say,
inserting itself into the region, as an extension of American
military policy.
A bona fide American overseas merchant ship, in the
strictest sense of the word, is something of a mythical
beast. If one goes to the trouble of having goods manufactured in
a Third World country to keep the labor costs down, one does
not ordinarily turn around and start paying American wages
for shipping until one is compelled to do so.
A staple of Victorian pornography was the image of the naked white
woman in the eastern slave market, ogled by a bunch of Arabs.
Of course such images said a lot more about the English and
American audience than they did about actual Arabs.
Something similar can be said about the modern image of the
kidnapped American sailor.
===============================================
SCRAP
---------------------------------------------
One might add that important cargo travels by air. One does
not fly a cargo jet for longer distances than necessary,
because fuel consumption impinges on payload. Rather, one
tries to land the jet every couple of thousand miles, to refuel,
and swap the cargo around. The result is that cargo jets tend not
to stray very far from their national frontiers. Goods coming in
from Asia clear American customs at Anchorage, Alaska, and are
carried onwards by American airplanes.
http://cf.alpa.org/internet/alp/2000/sept00p10.htm
