Piracy was in the eye of the beholder; what European colonials called "piracy" was often seen as perfectly normal trading and raiding by some local Southeast Asian peoples. Nevertheless, because of the region's complex maritime geography, piracy became a potent (and disruptive) force in 19th century Southeast Asia, much as it remains so today. Piratical attacks occurred from the South China Sea down to the waters of the Java Sea, and up again through the notorious Straits of Malacca. The rewards for piracy were enormous: ship holds of passing traders were filled to overflow with spices, coins, horns (used for medicine) and rare woods (all seen here.) The punishments for piracy were equally extreme, however; hangings and summary executions were not uncommon. Rarely, we can get a glimpse of these patterns through the people most effected: accounts of SE Asians caught as slaves.

Books:

Sherard Osborn,
My Journal in Malayan Waters.
London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1861.

Sherard Osborn was a Captain in the Royal Navy; he participated in the blockade of Kedah, a sultanate on the West coast of the Malay Peninsula, in the mid-nineteenth century. His Journal, first published in 1857, and then again in 1861, recounts his struggle with Malay "pirates" off of these coasts. Osborn, though a man of his times, was also a keen observer of Malay, Chinese, and Siamese life, the three ethnic groups mixing in Kedah at mid-century.

Grace Fox,
British Admirals and Chinese Pirates, 1832-1869,
London: Kegan Paul, 1940.

Grace Fox describes in her book the world of the "China Station," the Far Eastern Command of the British Navy. The suppression of piracy in the South China Sea, stretching from China down to Southeast Asia, was one of the primary duties of the Royal Navy in the East. At the time of Fox's narrative, England was becoming ever-more enmeshed in Asia trade circuits, especially through her prosecution of the illegal opium trade to China.

Aleko Lilius,
I Sailed With Chinese Pirates,
London: Arrowsmith, 1930.

Aleko Lilius was another Western adventurer sailing in Asian waters who made a living on is colonial descriptions of regional piracy. Lilius knew how to draw his readers in; he described "an atmosphere saturated with the nauseating, body-warm smell of blood and the pungent reek of opium. I have heard the clinking of the shiny fan-tan cash and also of heavy gold coins, real Spanish doubloons from uncovered hoards. I have heard the groaning of tortured prisoners, too."

Rounseville Wildman,
Tales of the Malayan Coast: From Penang to the Philippines,
Boston: Lothrop,1899.

Wildman was Special Commissioner of the United States for the Straits Settlements and Siam; later, as American Consul General, he also spent much time traveling through the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines. Wildman saw the White Raja of Sarawak, James Brooke, and the American Admiral George Dewey of the Asiatic Squadron, as heroes for their roles in stamping out Asian "piracy."

Charles Grey,
Pirates of the Eastern Seas,
London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, 1993.

Charles Grey was a soldier and amateur scholar of early European interactions with Asia, especially the 17th century. His lists of the fates of individual Western crewmen at the hands of Asian "pirates" provide an in-depth, personal reckoning of the human dimension of the "contact period." He retired to Lahore, Pakistan, to write these histories of contact and confrontation.