Lessons From the Barbary Pirate Wars
Dr. Lambert explained how those brigands, like today’s Somalis, usually kept their hostages alive. It wasn’t out of any enlightened sense of humanity. It was simply good business. They only hanged captives from giant hooks or carved them into little pieces if they resisted. The Barbary pirates used small wooden boats, often powered by slaves chained to the oars, to attack larger European ships. They were crude but effective, like today’s Somali swashbucklers, who in November commandeered a 1,000-foot-long Saudi oil tanker from a dinghy in the Gulf of Aden, a vital shipping lane at the mouth of the Red Sea.
The pirates’ way of doing business was described this way at the time: “When they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth, which usually struck such terror in the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.” The quote is from Thomas Jefferson, then America’s ambassador to France, after he and John Adams, the envoy in London, got the description from Tripoli’s envoy to Britain in 1786.
And that underscores a key point. The Barbary pirates actually had an ambassador — who met with Jefferson and Adams, no less. The pirates worked for a government. The Barbary rulers commissioned them to rob and pillage and kidnap, and the rulers got a cut. It was all official. And open. It was truly state-sponsored terrorism. And the Western nations’ response was to pay “tribute,” a fancy word for blackmail.
If a country paid tribute, the 18th-century pirates would leave its ships alone. Today, shipping companies fork over as much as $100 million in ransoms to the Somali pirates, a strategy that saves their cargoes but also attracts more underemployed Somali fishermen into the hijacking business.
Eventually, though, Americans felt humiliated paying off a bunch of knife-sucking thugs in blousy pants. That’s what led to the Barbary Wars, first in 1801 when Jefferson became president, and again in 1815, when James Madison sent the United States Navy to shell the Barbary Coast. The battles became the stuff of legend — “the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn — and were critical in developing the nation’s young Navy.
The Barbary pirates were finally brought to their knees by their encounters with the Americans, and by the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.
Will this happen in Somalia? Last week — even before a French effort to rescue a family in a separate hijacking ended with the death of one hostage — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the world to “end the scourge of piracy.” But Somali piracy is not an isolated problem. It’s the latest symptom of what afflicts an utterly failed state — a free-for-all on land that has consumed the country since the central government imploded in 1991. As any warlord there can tell you, the violence is almost always about cash. “We just want the money” is their mantra.