A river pirate is a pirate who operates along a river. The term has been used to describe many different kinds of pirate groups who carry out riverine attacks in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America. They are usually prosecuted under national, not international law.
In Asia, river piracy is a major threat even today. The "Yangtze Patrol", from 1854 to 1949, was a prolonged naval operation, protecting American treaty ports and U.S. citizens along the Yangtze River from river pirates and Chinese insurgents. During the 1860s and 1870s, American merchant ships were prominent on the lower Yangtze, operating inland up to the deepwater port of Hankou 680 mi (1,090 km). In 1874, the U.S. gunboat USS Ashuelot reached as far as Ichang, at the foot of the Yangtze gorges, 975 miles (1,569 km) from the sea. In this period, most US personnel found a tour in the Yangtze to be uneventful, as a major American shipping company had sold its interests to a Chinese firm, leaving the patrol with little to protect. The added mission of anti-piracy patrols required U.S. naval and marine landing parties to be put ashore several times to protect American interests.
Currently, in a region known as the "Golden Triangle", river piracy, combined with illegal trafficking of heroin, poses a major international law enforcement problem. One of the worst criminal cases involving Asian river pirates occurred on 5 October 2011, called the "Mekong River massacre". A Chinese cargo ship hauling nine hundred thousand amphetamine pills, worth more than three million dollars, was attacked and hijacked, and thirteen crewmen were killed. The hijackers were caught and executed by the Chinese government in 2012. [1] [2] [3]
In the Balkans region, of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, the medieval Narentines, of the ninth and tenth centuries, were known for their piracy on the River Neretva.
The Ushkuiniks were medieval Russian Novgorodian river pirates from the tenth to fourteenth centuries, a Slavic version of the Vikings, through fighting, killing, and robbery. In the sixteenth-century reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the legendary explorer and soldier Yermak Timofeyevich, was a Russian Cossack river pirate along the Volga or possibly Don River. Yermak was later pardoned for his crimes and became the "Conqueror of Siberia".
Modern piracy exists on the Danube River in Serbia and Romania. Allegations were made from 2006 that Romanian river pirates had attacked vessels from Bulgaria on the Danube. The Romanian government responded by accusing captains of fabricating stories while illegally selling their own cargo and evading customs. [4] There were further allegations of Danubian piracy on Ukrainian vessels in 2012 [5] but in only one case were there allegations of actual attacks on crews: more properly the incidents amounted simply to theft from cargo vessels.
American river piracy in late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century was primarily concentrated along the Ohio River and Mississippi River valleys. River pirates usually operated in isolated frontier settlements, which were sparsely populated areas lacking the protection of civil authority and institutions. They resorted to a variety of tactics depending on the number of pirates and size of the boat crews involved, including deception, concealment, ambush, and assaults in open combat near natural obstacles and curiosities, such as shelter caves, islands, river narrows, rapids, swamps, and marshes. River travelers were robbed, captured, and murdered, and their livestock, slaves, cargo, and flatboats, keelboats, and rafts were sunk or sold down river.
Toward the end of the Revolutionary War, after their escape from New Madrid, Spanish Upper Louisiana Territory, John Turner and the counterfeiter Philip Alston joined Chickasaw Indian leader, James Logan Colbert and a mixed, roving band of Natchez refugees, Cumberland settlers, and Chickasaw, numbering around 600, made piratical attacks against Spanish shipping on the Mississippi River in 1781 and 1782. [6] [7]
After the Revolutionary War, American river piracy began to take root in the mid-1780s along the upper Mississippi River, between Spanish Upper Louisiana, around St. Louis and the confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo. In 1803, at Tower Rock, the U.S. Army dragoons, possibly from the frontier army post up river at Fort Kaskaskia, opposite St. Louis, raided and drove out the river pirates.
Starting in the late 1790s, Stack Island became associated with river pirates and counterfeiters. In 1809, the last major river pirate activity on the upper Mississippi came to an abrupt end, when a group of flatboatmen, meeting at the head of the "Nine Mile Reach," decided to make a raid on Stack Island and wipe out the river pirates. They attacked at night, a battle ensued, and two of the boatmen and several outlaws were killed. The attackers captured nineteen other men, a fifteen-year-old boy and two women. The women and teenager were allowed to leave. The remaining outlaws are presumed to have been executed.
From 1790 to 1834, Cave-In-Rock was the principal outlaw lair and headquarters of river pirate activity in the Ohio River region. The notorious cave is today within the peaceful confines of Illinois's Cave-in-Rock State Park. In 1797, it was anything but peaceful, as Samuel Mason, who was initially a Revolutionary War Patriot captain in the Ohio County, Virginia militia and an associate judge and squire in Kentucky, led a gang of highway robbers and river pirates on the Ohio. Mason started his criminal organization in Red Banks and was driven out by regulators sweeping through western Kentucky, so set up his new operation at Diamond Island, followed by Cave-In-Rock and later, along the Mississippi River, from Stack Island to Natchez, Mississippi.
During Samuel Mason's 1797–1799 occupation of Cave-In-Rock and after his departure, the name of Bully Wilson became associated with cave; a large sign was erected near the natural landmark's entrance, "Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment." Wilson may have been an alias for Mason, a front man for his criminal operation, or another outlaw leader who ran a gang of pirates in the region. The Harpe Brothers, who were allegedly America's first serial killers, were highwaymen on the run from the law in Tennessee and Kentucky, and briefly joined Samuel Mason's gang at Cave-In-Rock. Peter Alston, the son of counterfeiter Philip Alston, became a river pirate and highwayman at Cave-In-Rock and made the acquaintance of Samuel Mason and Wiley Harpe, following them to Stack Island and Natchez.
From the late 1700s to early 1800s, on the Illinois side of the Ohio River north of Cave-In-Rock, Jonathan Brown led a small gang of river pirates at Battery Rock. The lower Ohio River country was routinely patrolled by the U.S. Army, with troops garrisoned at Fort Massac as constabulary against Native Americans, colonial raiders from Spanish Louisiana, and river outlaws in the region.
Between 1790 and 1820, the legendary Colonel Plug, also known as Colonel Fluger, ran a gang of river pirates on the Ohio River, in a cypress swamp near the mouth of the Cache River, below Cave-In-Rock and Fort Massac and just above the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Plug's tactics were to sneak aboard personally, or have one of his pirates secretly go into the hull of a boat, and dig out the caulking between the floor planks or drill holes with an auger, causing the boat to sink and be easily attacked. The boat and the cargo would later be sold down river.
James Ford, a civic leader and businessman, secretly led a gang of river pirates and highwaymen from the 1820s to the mid-1830s on the Ohio River, in Illinois and Kentucky.
River piracy continued on the lower Mississippi River from the early 1800s to the 1840s. These river pirates were mainly organized into large gangs similar to Samuel Mason's around Cave-In-Rock, or smaller gangs under the operation of John A. Murrell, which also existed from the 1820s to the mid-1830s between Stack Island and Natchez, Mississippi.
The decline of American river piracy occurred over time, starting as early as 1804 and ending by the 1840s, as a result of direct military action taken and the combined strength of local law enforcement and regulator-vigilante groups that uprooted and swept out pockets of outlaw resistance.
From 1866 to 1877, the New York City waterfront was infested with gangs of river pirates along the Hudson and East Rivers. River piracy consisted mainly of pirates stealing goods and cargo from ships in open water and docked along the waterfront piers. Many of the river pirates that formed to these gangs were well organized and consisted mainly of working class Irish Americans and Irish immigrants. The most notorious New York river pirate gangs were the Charlton Street Gang, Hook Gang, and Patsey Conroy Gang.
In the mid-1860s the Charlton Street Gang was led by the female pirate Sadie "the Goat" Farrell. Sadie the Goat modeled herself and her gang after the "pirates of the Golden Age" by flying the "Jolly Roger" flag aboard their ship and making victims walk the plank.
The Charlton Street Gang raided small cargo and merchant ships and operated within the territory of New York City, North River, of New York Harbor, Hudson River, from the Harlem River, as far as Poughkeepsie and Albany, New York.
After the Charlton Street Gang murdered people in pirate raids in the Hudson River Valley, the Charlton Street Gang was attacked and dispersed by local vigilantes in the region. Following this setback the Charlton Street Gang decided to return to New York City and commit only street crimes never to return to river piracy again. By 1869, the gang disappeared from the scene.
The eventual decline of river piracy in New York City began in 1876 when the New York City Police Department under the command of Police Sergeant George W. Gastlin organized the "Steamboat Squad" in which armed police patrols in boats confronted and arrested the river pirates in New York harbor. [8]
An increase in crime at the border between the United States and Mexico on Falcon Lake [ clarification needed ]. The lake is a 60-mile (97 km) long reservoir of the Rio Grande that was constructed in 1954 and is known for river piracy and as a drug smuggling route of the Mexican cartels in the ongoing conflict known as the Mexican Drug War.
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In recent years, river pirate activity on the Amazon River has been on the rise in various countries around that river.
In northern Brazil, due to the lack of investments in security, river pirate activity skyrocketed. Attacks against oil tankers, cargo boats and fishermen became very frequent in this region.
In Colombia, paramilitary groups and drug cartels committed numerous hijackings, and looting of boats and kidnapping are also frequent.
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, vessels used for piracy are pirate ships. The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilisations. Narrow channels which funnel shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as for privateering and commerce raiding.
Cave-In-Rock is a village in Hardin County, Illinois, United States. Its principal feature and tourist attraction is nearby Cave-In-Rock, on the banks of the Ohio River. In 1816, the earliest known permanent white settlers arrived and started building a town near the cave. The town was originally known as Rock and Cave, Illinois, with a post office under this name. On October 24, 1849, the town was officially renamed Cave-In-Rock. Cave-In-Rock was incorporated as a village in 1901. The population was 318 at the 2010 census.
A riverboat is a watercraft designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury units constructed for entertainment enterprises, such as lake or harbour tour boats. As larger water craft, virtually all riverboats are especially designed and constructed, or alternatively, constructed with special-purpose features that optimize them as riverine or lake service craft, for instance, dredgers, survey boats, fisheries management craft, fireboats and law enforcement patrol craft.
The Yangtze Patrol, also known as the Yangtze River Patrol Force, Yangtze River Patrol, YangPat and ComYangPat, was a prolonged naval operation from 1854–1949 to protect American interests in the Yangtze River's treaty ports. The Yangtze Patrol also patrolled the coastal waters of China where they protected U.S. citizens, their property, and Christian missionaries.
James Ford, born James N. Ford, also known as James N. Ford, Sr., the "N" possibly for Neal, was an American civic leader and business owner in western Kentucky and southern Illinois, from the late 1790s to mid-1830s. Despite his clean public image as a "Pillar of the Community", Ford was secretly a river pirate and the leader of a gang that was later known as the "Ford's Ferry Gang". His men were the river equivalent of highway robbers. They hijacked flatboats and Ford's "own river ferry" for tradable goods from local farms that were coming down the Ohio River.
Micajah "Big" Harpe, born Joshua Harper, and Wiley "Little" Harpe, born William Harper, were American murderers, highwaymen and river pirates who operated in Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and Mississippi in the late 18th century. They are often considered the earliest documented serial killers in the United States history.
Wolf Island is an unincorporated community in eastern Mississippi County, Missouri, United States. It is located on Route 77, approximately nine miles east of East Prairie.
Piracy in the Strait of Malacca has long been a threat to ship owners and the mariners who ply the 900 km-long sea lane. In recent years, coordinated patrols by Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore along with increased security on vessels have sparked a sharp downturn in piracy.
Samuel Ross Mason, also spelled Meason, was a Virginia militia captain, on the American western frontier, during the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he became the leader of the Mason Gang, a criminal gang of river pirates and highwaymen on the lower Ohio River and the Mississippi River in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was associated with outlaws around Red Banks, Cave-in-Rock, Stack Island, and the Natchez Trace.
Natchez has been the name of several steamboats, and four naval vessels, each named after the city of Natchez, Mississippi or the Natchez people. The current one has been in operation since 1975. The previous Natchez were all operated in the nineteenth century, most by Captain Thomas P. Leathers. Each of the steamboats since Leathers' first had as its ensign a cotton bale between its stacks.
The Sturdivant Gang was a multi-generational, family gang of counterfeiters, whose criminal activities took place over a fifty-year period, from the 1780s, in Connecticut and Massachusetts, with one branch of the family going to Tennessee via Virginia and a second family branch going to Ohio and finally settled on the Illinois frontier, between the 1810s to 1830s.
John Duff, born John McElduff, or John Michael McElduff, because early court records referred to him as John Michael Duff, was a counterfeiter, criminal gang leader, horse thief, cattle thief, hog thief, salt maker, longhunter, scout, and soldier who assisted in George Rogers Clark's campaign to capture the Illinois country for the American rebel side during the Revolutionary War.
Philip Alston was an 18th-century Spanish-American counterfeiter, both before and after the American Revolution. He operated in Virginia and the Carolinas before the war, and in Kentucky and Illinois afterward. He was associated with Cave-in-Rock and his son, outlaw Peter Alston, and counterfeiter John Duff. He was an early American settler in Natchez, as well as in the Cumberland and Red River valleys in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Diamond Island is an island in the Ohio River ten miles west of Henderson in Henderson County, Kentucky, United States. It has an area of about half a square mile.
Piracy in Indonesia is not only notorious, but according to a survey conducted by the International Maritime Bureau, it was also the country sporting the highest rate of pirate attacks back in 2004, where it subsequently dropped to second place of the world's worst country of pirate attacks in 2008, finishing just behind Nigeria. However, Indonesia is still deemed the country with the world's most dangerous water due to its high piracy rate. With more than half of the world's piracy crimes surrounding the South-East Asia aquatic regions, the turmoil caused by piracy has made the Strait of Malacca a distinct pirate hotspot accounting for most of the attacks in Indonesia, making the ships that sail in this region risky ever since the Europeans arrived. The term 'Piracy in Indonesia' includes both cases of Indonesian pirates hijacking other cargo and tanks, as well as the high rate of practising piracy within the country itself. The Strait of Malacca is also one of the world's busiest shipping routes as it accounts for more than twenty-five percent of the world's barter goods that come mainly from China and Japan. Approximately 50,000 vessels worth of the world's trade employ the strait annually, including oil from the Persian Gulf and manufactured goods to the Middle East and Suez Canal. The success that stems from this trade portal makes the Strait an ideal location for pirate attacks.
Peter Alston was an American counterfeiter, horse thief, highwayman, and river pirate of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is believed to have been an associate of serial killer Little Harpe, and a member of the notorious Mason Gang.
Stack Island, also known as Crow's Nest and Island No. 94, is located in Issaquena County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi River, near Lake Providence, Louisiana and nearly 200 miles north of New Orleans.
The Patsey Conroy Gang or Patsy Conroys were a group of river pirates active along the New York City waterfront of the old Fourth Ward during the post-American Civil War era. For nearly twenty years the Patsy Conroys dominated the area of Corlears' Hook and were one of the last major waterfront gangs to remain in the district prior to the formation of the George Gastlin's Steamboat Squad of New York City Police Department. The Patsey Conroy Gang abruptly disappeared when their leaders Patsy Conroy, Larry Griffin and Denny Brady were imprisoned in 1874.
The West Indies Anti-Piracy Operations refer to the United States Navy presence in the Antilles, and surrounding waters, which fought against pirates. Between 1814 and 1825, the American West Indies Squadron constantly pursued pirates on sea and land, primarily around Cuba and Puerto Rico.After the capture of Roberto Cofresi in 1825, acts of piracy became rare, and the operation was considered a success, although limited occurrences went on until slightly after the start of the 20th century.
Colonel Plug, also known as Colonel Fluger and "The Last of the Boat-Wreckers", who existed sometime between the 1790s and 1820, was the legendary river pirate who ran a criminal gang on the Ohio River in a cypress swamp near the mouth of the Cache River. The outlaw camp of Colonel Plug was supposedly below the river pirate hideout of Cave-In-Rock and the U.S. Army post at Fort Massac, which monitored and policed frontier river traffic just above the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
