Here is part two of the history of piracy in Southeast Asia written by Dr Lee English and edited with permission by BorneoHistory.net. Dr Lee English earned his doctorate from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Dr English uses the term “marine predator” for pirate however I prefer the term pirate to avoid confusion among my many readers. This is part two of the essay.
The turbulence of the Ming-Qing Dynastic wars of the mid-seventeenth century saw over 3,000 Ming loyalists flee the Qing to settle along Vietnam’s sparsely populated coastline, where they made their living through fishing and piracy, intermarried with local women, grew out their hair in the manner of rebels and outlaws, and integrated into larger Vietnamese society while maintaining a unique identity centred around Ming loyalism and customs.
Other Ming pirates such as Deng Yao, Chen Shangchuan, and Yang Yandi created fortified strongholds on the island of Longmen in the Gulf of Tonkin to directly challenge the Qing as cohesive military forces while simultaneously expanding their commercial interests and political sphere of influence around the Gulf of Tonkin and Mekong Delta “where pirate commanders became immersed in the complex web of political alliances and competition between Vietnam, Siam, and Cambodia.”
This group lasted until 1683 when they were soundly defeated by the Qing and Longmen Island was incorporated into the Qing’s “inner ocean.” Yet the coastal borderlands with Vietnam remained, in Qing eyes, a “turbulent sea frontier.”
Governments were unable to quell piracy. Local strongmen and regional authorities were known to support the pirates in resisting Qing rule. For instance, in the 1660s a pirate groups led by Yang Yandi and Xian Biao received protection and support from Phan Phú Quốc, a supreme leader in Hải Nha, who refused to extradite them to the Qing.
Around the same period, Zheng Zhilong and his descendants maintained a private maritime empire that reached deep into Southeast Asia, carrying out a system of trade and extortion between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
Dissidents from the Qing leaders would again play a major role in the region. Pirates from the Southern Chinese Coast allied with the Tay Son regime in Vietnam from about 1790 to 1802, operating from their bases on Hainan Island, Giang Binh, and Hai Phong on the Sino-Vietnamese frontier.
They launched pillaging raids along the Qing coast in spring and returned to plunder their hosts’ enemies along the coasts of Vietnam and in the Gulf of Siam during autumn, with a period to refit in between.
In the late 1790s, there were even reports of them allying with Bugis pirates to extend their operations to the Sunda Strait, robbing both Dutch and native trading vessels. Much of this raiding was aimed at taking captives who could be sold in the brisk slave trade maintained by raiders and traders in the region throughout the early modern era. Even after the fall of the Tay Son, their former maritime mercenaries continued their excursions on the Vietnamese coast, Malay Peninsula, and Philippine Islands until the fall of the Guangdong Confederation in 1810.
One notable example of this was a mixed and well-organized gang of sixty to eighty Qing and Malay maritime predators who attacked a Malay boat and murdered the entire crew near the port city of Malacca in 1806. According to dispositions taken from pirates imprisoned after the operation the Qing half of the gang were from Guangdong, and were new to the area. Seasoned raiders worked for a larger organization run by respectable businessmen in Malacca.
A brief period of relative reprieve from the intrusion of these northern pirates was not to last as poverty and famine exploded into the chaos of multiple anti-Qing uprisings. The increased presence of foreign imperialists led many more mariners of the Southern Chinese Coast to return to a life of piracy in Southeast Asian waters.
In the late 1820s, John Crawford reported that Qing pirates operated between the Gulf of Siam and the Java Sea, where they abducted hundreds of young men and women to sell in Siam.
The fallout of the First Opium War (1839- 1842) and British anti-pirate expeditions in the 1840s and 1850s only worsened the pirate situation in Southeast Asia, as many pirates fled the British patrols into more southern waters.
For example, the Dai Nam Thuc Luc (Veritable Record of Vietnam) records over forty separate maritime raids on ships and towns along the Vietnamese coast by such pirates between 1839 and 1849.
In 1857 an Englishman by the name of Edward Brown was abducted by a band of pirates who forced him to train them in the use of modern weapons and assist in attacks on passing junks during the several months he spent with them.
While this group did most of their violence in Vietnamese waters, they regularly returned to Hong Kong to refit, sell their booty, and enlist gang members.
The Malay Archipelago also saw a surge in pirates by raiders from the Southern Chinese Coast during this period. While they occasionally attacked Western merchant ships, their primary targets were the smaller and less well-armed native trading vessels.
This predation came in waves; the first arose in the 1850s as a result of the upheaval of the Taiping conflict and was largely focused on the Strait of Malacca and the east side of the Malay Peninsula; this was primarily because Singapore was such an excellent home base for pirates, both geographically and because of easy access to a flourishing arms industry as well as a market for easily disposing of pirate goods.
It did not go unnoticed that the centre of British maritime power in Southeast Asia was supporting an industry of pirates while Britain was actively trying to suppress it. Attempts to clamp down on piracy in Singapore and constrain the gun trade were sluggish at best, as there were concerns that such efforts could damage Singapore’s economy.
They were also known to recruit European renegades to act as gunners and pilots. Such was the effectiveness of their attacks that it disrupted the foreign trade of the great economic centres of Singapore and Batavia, though as with Hong Kong, this did not stop unscrupulous merchants in Singapore and the surrounding islands from outfitting raiders despite government attempts at suppression. This surge in predation ended in the early 1860s alongside the introduction of regular steamship patrols in the region.
A second, smaller surge occurred in the 1870s, mainly around the island of Penang and the state of Perak, which in turn became connected to a rise in coastal and riverine predation in northern Vietnam in the 1860s and 1870s.
Pirates were increasingly cracked down on in both Malaysia and Southern China the political and military weakness of the Nguyen regime combined with the favourable terrain made it a perfect location for pirates to flee to, as well as collect slaves to sell as domestic servants in Qing territory or as labour to colonial plantations, mines, and other workplaces around the world.
As with the Indian Ocean, the entrance of European trading companies and empires greatly changed the scale and nature of maritime predation in the region, and the practice reached its peak in the region between 1750 and 1860, a time period when it was on the decline in most other places.
The seventeenth century saw Dutch, English, French, and Danish pirates repeatedly strike indigenous, Chinese, Japanese, and Arab trading vessels around Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula.
Notably in the 1620s the British and Dutch East India Companies joined forces to attack Chinese traders operating around Manilla.
While European writers considered pirates to be an accepted and intrinsic practice to cultures in the region, there was in fact a strong sense among local mariners and rulers that they were unwelcome thieves and interlopers.
In particular, for the Orang Laut and other sea peoples around Johor, the Dutch invasion of Riau in 1784 and the establishment of British settlements in Penang (1786), Malacca (1795), and Singapore (1819), contributed to a period of crisis and conflict lasting from 1784 to 1836, further supported by constant battles between the Malay and Bugis and innumerable smaller scale battles between villages.
It is also worth noting that in the sixteenth century, the Spanish depicted their conflict with the Moro raiders in Malaysia primarily in terms of religion, arguing that Islam promoted piracy against nonbelievers. By the second half of the eighteenth century and especially throughout the nineteenth century they increasingly labeled their Muslim opponents as generic pirates.
Extracted from and with permission:
English, Lee Tides of Law A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA, 2024 The entire dissertation can be read on Proquest type in Tides of Law