Marvelously fluttering around the margins of the mediascape during the past few days has been news of a hijacking by a group of Somali pirates of some heavy old world war-fighting technology. Piracy on the high seas is certainly something that excites the imagination filled with tales from yesteryear’s maritime literature and folk stories told before bed. However, knowledge of the sort of gritty reality of modern piracy is, like many of the unpleasant things in life, curiously absent from that font of common sense that we all draw from.
The Strait of Malaca, pictured above, accounts for approximately 40% of annual maritime piracy
Interestingly, the International Maratime Bureau, part of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Commercial Crimes Services, maintains an international piracy monitoring center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In this role they investigate incidents of piracy and armed robbery at sea and in port, publish weekly reports of piracy incidents, and maintain a google mashup of attacks (as pictured above).
However, to discover a bit of greater resolution when it comes to the sorts of statistics that one finds meticulously maintained by the IMB, one would suerly not be doing themselves a disservice to consider the person of one F. Max Hardberger ((really quite a marvelous name)). Hardberger, through his ‘asset recovery’ firm Vessel Extractions , is one of a special breed of repo men that work for ship owners and insurance companies to recover hijacked ships:
If a repossession is requested, Hardberger and his team quietly enter the country involved. They seek out friendly officials and trusted local contacts such as ship agents who tend to a vessel’s logistical needs in port.
“You need to pick up clues about the ship and what is said in the bars, at the ship chandlers and in the local whorehouses,” Hardberger said. “Crews are not that sophisticated and talk about their orders and departure times. You can really keep track of a vessel this way.”
Hardberger said he does not carry a firearm, though he has hired bodyguards, as he did with the Aztec Express. Stealth and trickery are the preferred methods. [link to entire LA Times profile of Hardberger]
While Hardberger and others like him place an exiciting and romantic inflection on piracy through his fantastic adventures, it is also interesting to consider what an account from the crew of a hijacked ship would look like:
Everything seemed fine that spring afternoon as Captain Ken Blyth watched over the loading of his ship in Singapore. He was skippering the Petro Ranger, a medium-size tanker with a $1.5 million cargo of jet fuel and diesel oil bound for Ho Chi Minh City. It was a three-day turnaround…When the Petro Ranger finally slipped its berth, it was just another cargo vessel amid the daily parade that makes Singapore the busiest port in the world. Not far outside the harbor is the Horsburgh Lighthouse, the last outpost of domestic law. From Horsburgh on, you pass into the only true frontier of the 21st century: international waters — the no-man’s land of the new world economy. Not technically owned or patrolled by anyone, these waters are the last place on earth where you are truly alone.[Link]
However, if one does actually steal a ship and wants to disappear without a trace, this following video may be of some interest