Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2002

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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

MOST MODERN PIRACY is practiced against commercial vessels plying regular routes in the Far East, especially the waters of the South China Sea, around the Philippines and Indonesia and the Strait of Malacca, where police and military patrols are few. The International Maritime Bureau, which formed the Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur in 1992, reported 335 incidents in the region last year, but these received no more attention in the press than truck hijackings on far-flung back roads. Elsewhere in the world, piracy is defined as sporadic, unplanned attacks on yachts. It resembles petty street crime, except that the distance from shore gives it a special, ugly menace. Between April 1999 and February 2001 there were at least 13 attacks by pirates on yachts in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, resulting in the hijacking and theft of one yacht and the murder of a British crewman on another. In March 1999 in the Caribbean, off the Mosquito Coast of Honduras, a Dutch family was attacked, their son shot in the abdomen—the third such incident off the Honduran shoreline in five years. There were about 14 other attacks in Caribbean and Latin American waters between March 2000 and March 2001. Worldwide, 56 attacks occurred on yachts in 2001, according to Klaus Hympendahl, a German maritime historian writing a book on modern-day piracy. The "pirates" are usually local men, in local fishing boats; their weapons range from machetes to Kalashnikov rifles.

On a boat you step off the grid of normal travel: you don't know what you'll sail into, but everything will depend on you alone, and what you carry with you.

Anyone with a rowboat can paddle out to an anchored yacht. The boat will generally be out of earshot of help, and the crew will be lightly armed if at all. Moreover, the blitheness, the unconscious ease, the sense of entitlement with which American, European, and Australian sailors will moor a quarter-million-dollar boat off a village in Asia, South America, or Africa and step cheerfully ashore to look for a beer only make it that much more remarkable that piracy is not a thousand times worse.

"Piracy has been a tradition in places like Indonesia, the South China Sea, and the Red Sea for thousands of years," Hympendahl told me, "but not in Latin and Central America." As long as sailors remain rich and locals poor, he says, "The situation is going to get worse."

Voyaging aboard a yacht, you step off the grid of normal travel, with its reassurances and safeguards. The very nature of such travel is to seek out remote, unspoiled places. You don't know what you'll sail into, but everything will depend on you alone, and what you carry with you.

I lived aboard my own small wooden boat in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sailing it between Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean. In those years there were numerous attacks against yachts, and fearing pirates and drug smugglers, sailors headed in droves to U.S. gun stores. Stainless-steel weapons were favored for their resistance to the corrosive saltwater environment. Ruger made a stainless-steel semiautomatic rifle, the Mini-14, which acquired considerable vogue in yachting circles. It fired a bullet with "armor-piercing" capability at great velocity and accuracy over a long range, and was thought an ideal weapon for stopping a boat making for you at a distance; whether that boat was full of pirates or fishermen hoping to sell you crayfish was another matter. In Fort Lauderdale in 1980, after my wife and I watched one night through our portholes as bales of cocaine were unloaded from a boat at the marina where we'd docked, I went into a store and came out with a stainless-steel pump shotgun, a stainless .38 revolver, and armfuls of ammunition.

The pros and cons of carrying firearms on a sailboat can become a more heated topic of discussion among sailors than keel shape or anchor design. Armed, you might protect your property. You might save your own life and those of your loved ones; you might be able to prevent your wife's being raped before your eyes, as a Swiss woman was in a pirate attack off Venezuela in 2000. A warning shot might dissuade pirates from approaching your vessel at all.

Those who oppose carrying weapons point out that a pistol, a shotgun, even an AK-47 is no match for the sort of large-caliber automatic weaponry favored by pirates. Traveling with guns invites major hassles with officialdom when clearing into port; declaring a weapon often means that port officials will confiscate it for the duration of the boat's stay. To not declare a weapon and then have it discovered invites even more trouble, ranging from heavy fines to the seizure of your boat. And having a gun aboard can escalate a bad situation: You invite the possibility that it can be used against you in an attack.

Most crucially, how many sailors—mainly people from law-abiding, middle-class backgrounds—have the lethal cool to kill? In time I realized that I did not, and I got rid of my guns.

Two large-bore rifles were carried aboard Seamaster, as a precaution against polar bears for an upcoming voyage to the Arctic. They were stored, unloaded, in Peter Blake's cabin.

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