Monthly Archives: December 2006

by | 6 December 2006 · 9:04 pm

Corsairs of Malta and Barbary in the 1600s

The corsairs of Malta and Barbary were a mirror image of maritime predation, two businesslike fleets of plunderers set against each other and against the enemies of their faith, but united in motivation, organisation and customs, these being known generically as ‘the custom of the corsairs’. They both kept their vessels clean and fast by careening at least every two months, an essential measure for all pirates which involved completely unloading the ship, guns and all, hauling it down on one side and then scraping or burning off all the weed, barnacles and other marine accretions before making the hull watertight by sealing the seams between the planks and coating them with pitch. Both used the same deceptions, those used by all pirates and privateers such as flying false flags and luring ships into danger by pretending friendship. Both rewarded the vigilant and brave among their crews—the first man to sight a prize, the first ten men to board it. Both usually captured their prizes without a fight by fear and overwhelming strength, neither having any desire to kill any of the captured crews, since dead men paid no ransoms and could not be sold as slaves. Both knew all the likely hiding places aboard a ship and both used torture to discover what could not be found, though this was mild compared to the practice of many pirates, a beating usually sufficing, on the feet by the Barbary corsairs, on the buttocks bent over a gun by the Maltese. And other factors were almost identical, right down to such detail as the small share of Barbary prizes given to the marabouts who prayed for their success and of Maltese prizes which went to the nuns of the Convent of St Ursula in Valletta ‘who pray continuously for victory against the Infidel’.

The corso, Muslim and Christian alike, was underpinned, indeed made possible, by a very sophisticated commercial network of merchants, sea captains and ransom brokers whose activities spread through the whole of the Mediterranean world. [Shall we call them the ‘media’, or the ‘international community’, or ‘NGOs’?] Such men bought the prize goods at auction and then recycled them into legitimate trade, having first taken the precaution of altering the marks on bales so that they could not be identified by their original owners. They were also in the forefront of the ransom business, raising loans for captives, negotiating with their friends, relatives and business partners, seeking out Muslim slaves to exchange for Christians or vice versa, arranging for the passage home of those who had raised their ransoms. Such men could be found in all the corsair centres and in the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria and Marseilles, from where they built up networks of correspondents many of whom were kin. But there was one city which stood out above all others as the financial nexus of this strange world of the corsairs. This was Leghorn [Livorno] in Tuscany, the great commercial entrepot of the central Mediterranean whose slave market rivalled those of Malta and Algiers and whose merchants were in the forefront of every aspect of corsair and pirate business, whether this derived from Christian or Muslim sources. Much of this business was handled by Jewish merchants and bankers, the nearest thing to neutrals in this holy war between Christendom and Islam, who had close commercial relations with the large Jewish populations in the corsair cities of North Africa and in Malta. Jews had no monopoly of such profitable business, however, and they were joined by Greeks and Armenians, two other groups who were able to span effectively the gulf between Islam and Christendom, as well as by Muslim and Catholic merchants throughout the Mediterranean. Such commercial networks were a necessary feature of piracy wherever it should flourish and they were always to be found.

These corsairs are difficult to fit into a history of piracy, since in a legal though not functional sense they were not pirates. They were sponsored by their governments and their captains carried licences which entitled them to rob and enslave the so-called enemies of their faiths. As a result, a career in the corso was perfectly respectable and unlikely to suffer from any shortage of recruits, given the dual motivation of religion and profit. But, legal and respectable or not, the corsairs were a terrible scourge which sowed fear and did an immense amount of damage throughout the Mediterranean and along the western Atlantic seaboard, a scourge which seemed at times as though it would bring the normal rhythms of maritime commerce to a halt. And of course it was a scourge which coincided in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with the great upsurge of English and other Western European privateering and piracy. It was not a good time to go to sea unless you were a predator.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 50-52

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by | 5 December 2006 · 9:36 am

What Giraffes Can Tell Us about Zeitgeist

The December 2006 issue of the Journal of World History (Project Muse subscription required) contains an extraordinary article about the effects of a particular exotic creature in three different times and places.

Renaissance Europe

By the Renaissance, people looked at exotic animals with new eyes. In general there was a great desire for new visual experiences; people took an enormous joy in looking at the unexpected, the monsters, prodigies, and the freaks. Even though people refuse to give a farthing to “a lame beggar,” as William Shakespeare put it, “they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” or a “painted fish.” The emphasis was on the marvelous. When suddenly seeing something that surpassed the expected in beauty, diversity, or abundance, the mind was overwhelmed. People were first astonished, then delighted, and finally excited. Clearly there was something highly addictive in this mixture of emotions. It piqued people’s curiosity, and once they had seen a little, they wanted to see more. Obviously, in terms of height and sheer impact, there was no more marvelous, or more curious, animal than a giraffe….

The giraffe situation improved dramatically in 1486 when a real example of the species was presented to Lorenzo il Magnifico by Al Ashraf Kait-Bey, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt. The Florentines were on good terms with all Muslim rulers, but above all with the Turks because they were at war with the Venetians—Florence’s main Italian rival—and because the Turks favored the Florentines as trading partners in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet this particular giraffe came from Egypt, and this for a particular reason. Since 1467, the Mamluks had been in open revolt against the Turks who occupied their country. The giraffe was an attempt to establish good diplomatic relations with the Florentines in order to make them intervene on their behalf in the inter-Muslim conflict. As far as the Mamluks were concerned, the giraffe played much the same role in their foreign policy as pandas did in the foreign policy of China in the 1970s.

Bourbon France

In 1827, after an interval of some 350 years, another giraffe appeared in Europe, this time in Paris. This giraffe was also a gift from the ruler of Egypt, and it too was a pawn in a diplomatic game. As always, the giraffe produced a lot of excitement wherever it went. Reacting to the tall and composite creature, the French too came to reveal just how they thought about the extra-European world, and this at a time when the country was about to embark on its first imperialist venture. Only three years later, fighting a cruel and genocidal war, France invaded and occupied Algeria. The question is what, if anything, the animal can tell us about these subsequent events….

Making sense of these reactions, it is clear that the giraffe appeared just at the intersection of several interpretative possibilities. Most ordinary Frenchmen reacted much the way ordinary people always have—with wide-open eyes and slack jaws. What was unprecedented, however, was the degree to which this spontaneous curiosity was commercially driven. In the course of the eighteenth century, a mass market was for the first time created in consumer goods, clothes, and knickknacks, and, to fuel demand, this market constantly required new fads and fashions. In the summer of 1827 the giraffe played this part. It was turned into a product that people did not see as much as consume. Like contemporary celebrities, you came closer to it, and experienced it more fully, by means of the merchandise associated with it. Yet, as with all commercial fads, the public’s interest in the giraffe was fickle, and before long they turned to other attractions. Three years after her arrival in Paris, Honoré de Balzac noted, the giraffe was visited only by “retarded provincials, bored nannies and simple and naïve fellows.”

Ming China

The Chinese are interesting for our purposes both for what they could do and for what they did not do. Their overseas explorations preceded those of the Europeans, their convoys were far larger, and, before the middle of the fifteenth century, they ventured farther afield. Then the expeditions suddenly stopped. In a series of increasingly draconian decrees, overseas travel was restricted and eventually outlawed completely. The question is why. Again we have a giraffe to help our analysis along. A giraffe arrived in Beijing in 1414, not long before the first of the antiexpansionist decrees was promulgated….

The animal, when it arrived, was treated as a sign of the benevolence of heaven, and as such it had to be interpreted by scholars before its meaning could become clear. Fortunately Chinese literati were highly skilled at interpreting signs. From the earliest times, scholars had spent much of their time reading the cracks in tortoise shells or the patterns formed by yarrow stems, and a set of imperial astronomers was constantly at hand watching the night sky for omens. Unusual sightings were immediately identified as portents and vested with huge political significance. Whatever happened was quickly interpreted in terms of the established canon. Hence Chinese scholars were never all that surprised.

The giraffe, when it appeared, was treated as such a sign. Checking with their encyclopedias, the scholars determined that it must be a unicorn, a mythological creature that traditionally was said to have a “horn in its head made out of flesh,” “the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse,” and to be of such a gentle disposition that “it only ate grass and never hurt a living being.” As they saw it, this description fitted well enough with the beast standing before them—giraffes, after all, do have horns, a curiously composite body, and a gentle nature. When the Chinese literati, in addition, learnt that the animal in the Somali language was known as girin [now pronounced geri], that settled the matter. To Chinese ears, girin sounded very much like qilin, the Chinese name of the unicorn. [In modern Mandarin, the q is pronounced much like English ch, but in earlier times–and in regional varieties of Chinese–the q would sound more like English k. Sino-Japanese also preserves the k sound in Kirin.–J.]

SOURCE: Erik Ringmar, “Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic,” Journal of World History 17 (2006): 375-397 (footnotes omitted)

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by | 4 December 2006 · 8:42 pm

English Pirates in the Mediterranean, 1600s

There were also Christian havens in the Mediterranean for English pirates with no desire to apostasise or live among the Turks. Foremost of these was Leghorn (Livorno), whose ruler, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was intent on building up a fleet of Christian corsairs to sail under his flag and was more than willing to employ English sailors and vessels of dubious background to harass Muslims. ‘He receives, shelters and caresses the worst of the English, men who are publicly proclaimed pirates by the King.’ Nor was he alone in employing Englishmen to build up a private navy. The Duke of Savoy was also keen to join in the corsair game in this chaotic early seventeenth century and he too was to welcome pirates, making his ports of Nice and Villafranca ‘an asylum and refuge for all scoundrels, offering safety to everyone of whatsoever sect, religion, creed, outlawed for whatsoever crime’, as the Venetian ambassador in Savoy reported to his masters in 1613….

These English pirates of the Mediterranean were fairly short-lived in their impact on the shipping of the region, but they had a certain style. A captain might be described as ‘a person of some consideration in his way’ and many were indeed gentlemen dressed in the height of fashion ‘in purple satin’ or in ‘black velvet trousers and jacket, crimson silk socks’, a perfect model for the noble or gentleman corsair of later fiction. With the passage of the years their crews became fairly polyglot as men of the Mediterranean were added to their original English crews, especially Greeks who were the best pilots for the Adriatic and Levant where most of their prizes were taken. Most observers were impressed by the strength and armament of the English ships and by the fighting valour of their crews. They were also amazed by the pirates’ destructiveness as they ransacked prizes and by ‘the indifference with which they lose their ships’, both in wrecks and battles, characteristics which we will find again in the pirates of a century later. The English also had a reputation, shared with the Dutch, for blowing up their ships to avoid capture. In 1611, for instance, the Spanish Admiral Don Pedro de Toledo captured a Turkish pirate ship, but its English consort, ‘being wont to seek a voluntary death rather than yield, blew up their ship when they saw resistance useless’. Blowing up their ships or at least threatening to do so would become standard pirate practice.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 29-30

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by | 4 December 2006 · 6:15 pm

Coal Ships as the Royal Navy’s Nursery

By the time of the industrial revolution, Britain already had a relatively sophisticated transportation network. This was partly because of its accommodating waters, but partly because of its coal. As the heaviest and bulkiest of daily necessities, coal was the nation’s cutting edge cargo, the one that kept forcing it to find new ways to move things.

It was noted in the 1600s that “it is the great quantities of Bulksome Commodities that multiplies ships and men,” and commodities didn’t get more bulksome than coal. And so, as the coal trade grew in the latter half of the 1500s and in the 1600s, so did the nation’s shipping fleet. Already in the early 1600s, more ships were used to move coal than everything else combined. England would no doubt eventually have developed its shipping industry without the impetus of the coal trade; but London’s growing dependence on coal left it no choice in the matter, and surely accelerated the nation’s maritime investment. Once they had built the ships, the ports, the sailing fleet, and the skills required for the coal trade, the English found it much easier to expand their maritime trade to other commodities and other locations. According to one historian, “the coal trade may be regarded, in short, as a magnet which helped to draw Englishmen to seek their profit and their livelihood in ocean commerce.”

The expansion of England’s private fleet would prove vital not just commercially but militarily, too. Despite being an island nation, England had not always been a maritime power. Henry VIII built its first real Royal Navy, but it was not strong, and in times of trouble, the nation had to commandeer private vessels: Elizabeth I’s navy was more powerful than her father’s, but even so, it needed the help of dozens of armed merchant ships to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588. England’s coal ships were particularly important for national defense, and by the early 1600s it was axiomatic that the coal trade was the “chief nursery” for English seamen. Although there were more vessels involved in fishing, they were smaller and of less use to the navy. The sturdier coal ships, with their larger crews, were a vital national asset and could be called up quickly when needed. And when called upon, there was no refusing; the coal ships and their thousands of crew members were pressed into service, by force, many times in English history. In fact, in times of war, those involved in the coal trade demanded additional wages because they ran such a high risk of being forced into the navy.

Paradoxically, the coastal coal trade was another reason a navy was so important in the first place. London and the south of England had become dependent on this fragile lifeline to the north, subject to attack by pirates and foreign powers. The navy was frequently dispatched to escort the coal vessels, in convoys, down the English coast. Still, the coastal coal trade was seen not mainly as a vulnerability but as a national asset, and it came to enjoy what one historian called “an almost superstitious reverence” as the source of England’s naval strength. There were even those in the 1600s who opposed trying to find inland coal supplies closer to London because it would have choked off the precious coastal trade.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 85-87

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by | 3 December 2006 · 3:03 pm

Mongolia Extends Its Reach in the Pacific

Korea-blogger The Marmot, who keeps a weather eye out for Mongolia (where his in-laws reside), has noticed some unusual signs of Pacific outreach by that landlocked nation.

In August, Mongolia hosted a military contingent from Fiji for joint exercises in global peacekeeping. The Fiji military has posted photos from Mongolia on its website. Let’s hope they weren’t teaching the Mongolian military how to stage a coup. I wonder if any Mongolian sumo scouts have their eyes on any likely Fijian recruits. The Pacific is no longer adequately represented in Japanese sumo.

Also in August, Flickr photographer Joe Jones in Hakodate snapped the stern of one of the growing number of ships registered in Mongolia, homeported in thoroughly landlocked Ulaan Baatar. A 2004 article in the New York Times explains the origins of Mongolia’s bluewater fleet.

Mongolian flags are not expected to become a common sight at American docks. But it was an unexpected twist of fate that brought Mongolia, a nation of nomadic herders, to the high seas.

In the 1980’s, a Mongolian university student known only as Ganbaatar won a scholarship to study fish farming in the Soviet Union. But the state functionary filling out his application put down the course code as 1012, instead of 1013. As he later told Robert Stern, producer of a documentary on the Mongolian Navy, that bureaucratic error detoured him from fish farming to deep-sea fishing. Upon graduation, he was sent to work with the seven-man Mongolian Navy, which patrolled the nation’s largest lake, Hovsgol. The lone ship, a tug boat, had been hauled in parts across the steppes, assembled on a beach and launched in 1938. After the collapse of Communism here in 1990, Ganbaatar wrote Mongolia’s new maritime law, which took effect in 1999.

The registry opened for business in February, 2003. Perhaps to play down any negative connotations of being landlocked, the glossy color brochure of the Mongolia Ship Registry shows Mongolia surrounded on three sides by a light blue blob that, on closer inspection, turns out to be China. One clue to the international intrigue behind the registry may be in plans to reopen the North Korean Embassy here this fall.

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by | 2 December 2006 · 8:49 am

Michelle Wie: From Prodigy to Novelty to Joke?

It’s sad to watch the slow train wreck that Michelle Wie’s phenomenal young career seems to be turning into. She can fire all the coaches and caddies she wants to. But she can’t fire her parents.

Japan Times sportswriter Jack Gallagher says it’s Time for Wie to take a break from playing against men.

I was afraid this was going to happen.

Last week’s calamitous outing by American teenage golf prodigy Michelle Wie, at the Casio World Open in Kochi, has reignited the issue of parents pushing their children — often prematurely — into the sporting spotlight.

After carding rounds of 81 and 80 in the JPGA men’s tournament, Wie missed the cut and found herself in next-to-last place, some 27 shots behind the leader.

In the 36 holes she played, Wie did not have a single birdie, while making 15 bogeys and one double bogey.

The showing had people once again scratching their heads and wondering if she would be better off trying to rack up some victories on the LPGA Tour before taking on the men again.

Though it is admirable that the 17-year-old Wie, who nearly everyone agrees is both beautiful and powerful, keeps on trying, her recent results while playing against men show a continuing trend of diminishing returns.

But the worst signal of a train wreck ahead is the following story in The Onion.

HONOLULU—In an announcement that has rocked the world of professional golf, longtime men’s golfer Michelle Wie said Monday that she is planning to participate in the LPGA’s season-opening SBS Open next February, which would make her the first woman to enter such an event since 32 women competed in the ADT Championship last weekend. “I have accomplished everything I am capable of accomplishing on the men’s tour,” said Wie, who finished second-to-last and missed the cut by 17 strokes in the men’s Casio World Open earlier this month. “I’m looking for a real challenge—one within reasonable limits that I actually have a legitimate chance of surmounting. This will inspire girls everywhere to break society’s barriers and begin playing sports against other females.” Wie, however, said that while she had achieved a comfort zone on the men’s tour, she is worried that the women of the LPGA will regard her with coldness, anger, and resentment for trying to join their tour.

via Japundit and Foreign Dispatches

UPDATE: Michelle Wie has come a long way since I posted this. Good for her!

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by | 1 December 2006 · 6:05 pm

Latest Filipino Migrant Labor in Hawai‘i: Hotel Workers

Today’s Honolulu Advertiser carried a front-page story by Lynda Arakawa about a new wave of migrant labor coming ashore in Hawai‘i: Hotel workers from the Philippines. And this is happening on the 100th anniversary of Filipino immigration to Hawai‘i.

Twenty-five workers from the Philippines arrived at Kona International Airport yesterday in what could foreshadow a new mini-wave of immigrant labor to the Islands.

The Fairmont Orchid Hawaii arranged with the U.S. Labor Department to bring up to 45 Filipinos here on seasonal work visas through August to help staff the hotel in the face of the nation’s tightest labor market.

A handful of other hotels have also inquired about the process as they are having trouble filling jobs with the state’s unemployment rate at 2.1 percent [emphasis added].

“We’ve done everything we possibly can (to find workers) here on the Big Island and the state,” said Fairmont Orchid general manager Ian Pullan. “And we just have not been able to fill the number of vacancies that we’ve had.”

The arrival of Filipinos to work in hotels comes on the 100th anniversary of Filipino immigration to Hawai’i. In 1906 a group of 15 Filipinos was recruited by the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association to work at the Ola’a Plantation on the Big Island.

The government approved Fairmont’s plan when it determined there was a shortage of American workers for the hotel jobs and that the immigrants would have adequate housing.

The Fairmont is bringing over Filipino workers who are relatives of hotel employees with whom they can stay, Pullan said. He said 25 workers arrived in Kona yesterday, and the hotel is interviewing candidates in the Philippines for 20 more positions. The 45 positions include housekeepers, kitchen helpers, cooks and dining room attendants.

The seasonal work visas expire Aug. 15, but Fairmont may reapply to extend their stay.

This is the first case of seasonal work visas for a Hawai’i hotel, said James Hardway, a spokesman for the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations….

Seasonal work visas are usually given for white-collar jobs such as teachers, doctors or in the technology sector but have also been given for agricultural workers, Hardway said.

The immigrant workers will be given the same wages and benefits as current employees in the same positions. That ranges from about $13 to $18 an hour for the non-tipped workers, said Wallace Ishibashi Jr., a union representative.

The ILWU Local 142, which represents employees at the Fairmont Orchid, has worked with the hotel on the seasonal work visa program and supports it, Ishibashi said. One of the union’s concerns is making sure local workers have job opportunities, but the state’s low unemployment rate has made it difficult to recruit despite the hotels’ best efforts, he said.

“It’s not that we’re not trying to hire local people,” Ishibashi said, adding that drug test failures are another stumbling block.

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