Crossing pirate waters by julie bradley how to#

Notably, the briefing lacked advice on how to fend off the bandits or avoid abduction. The slide show turned it into a numbers game with data on ships taken and valuation of cargos heisted so far that year-statistics that made me wonder why the Indonesian and Malaysian militaries were not on top of the situation. In Singapore, Glen and I had attended an anti-piracy briefing designed for people like me, who dreaded the thought of meeting face to face with real-life pirates.

The pirate friendly terrain in the strait wreaked havoc on my ability to sleep as we made our way from Singapore to Thailand. The risk to the pirates was minimal, and piracy was even culturally admired in the ports that harbored them. Just like in the bodice-ripping pirate movies, stealing cargo and ships was a quick route to riches. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century European spice traders lived in terror of Malacca Strait pirates who killed all aboard for the valuable cargo and ship, all staged from the same shores we were passing. Piracy in the Straits of Malacca is an age-old tradition. Envision a bottleneck carrying one-half of the globe’s shipping trade with over 50,000 ships per year transporting everything from computers to much of the world’s oil supply. The narrow route ran 550 miles, roughly the distance between San Francisco and Las Vegas. Their coastlines offered a maze of dense, jungle inlets and coves that favored pirates’ small, maneuverable vessels over slow, hulking ships. Just a slim highway of water, the eastern shoreline of the Straits belongs to Malaysia, the other to Indonesia. Who knew if it would even work…The Strait of Malacca was a natural haven for seafaring bandits. Glen raised his eyebrows at my anti-piracy measure: a six-inch can that was rusty from salt air.