Who Was The Most Successful Pirate in History*
Any guesses? Edward Teach, commonly known as Blackbeard? Captain Kidd? Captain Morgan?** Grace O Malley, aka the Pirate Queen? Sir Francis Drake?***
None of them are even close, though Drake has the distinction of capturing what may well have been the largest prize taken in a single raid: the Spanish galleon Cagafuego. The title goes to Cheng I Sao (aka Hsi Kai Ching, Ching Shih, Lady Ching, or Mrs. Ching depending on the vintage and quality of the account you read.), who terrorized the South China Seas in the first half of the nineteenth century--a time when many Chinese women were literally hobbled by bound feet.****
Piracy was a family business in nineteenth century China. Pirate clans lived on their boats--some of them lived their entire lives without setting foot on land. Within the world of the pirates. some women held rank, commanded ships, and fought shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts. Cheng I Sao took female participation in the family business to a new level.
According to popular accounts, Cheng I Sao was a Canton prostitute who married the successful pirate Cheng I in 1801 and soon became his partner in building a successful confederation of pirates from competing clans. When Cheng I died in 1807, his widow took over. She avoided succession struggles by appointing her adopted stepson as her second in command and later marrying him.
At the height of her success, Cheng I Sao controlled 1500 ships and more than 70,000 men, organized in six fleets, each with its own flag and commander. (Talk about a pirate queen!) Her fleets attacked ships of all kinds, from small traders to imperial war ships, and ran a protection racket along the coast.
By 1809, Cheng I Sao was powerful enough to threaten the port city Canton (now Guangzhou). The Chinese government turned to the European powers for help, leasing the 20-gun ship HMS Mercury and six Portuguese men-of-war. Big guns were not enough to defeat the pirate admiral's fleet. In 1810, the Chinese changed tactics and offered the pirates amnesty.
Cheng I Sao decided it was in her best interests to negotiate peace terms with the Chinese empire. She proved to be as effective at the bargaining table as she was on the deck of a ship: the Chines granted her pirates universal amnesty, the right to keep the wealth they had accumulate, and jobs in China's military bureaucracy. Cheng I Sao retired in Canton, where she reportedly lived a peaceful life until her death at 69 "so far as was consistent with the keeping of an infamous gambling house." *****
* If I had my act together I'd have written this post in time for Talk Like A Pirate Day, which was last Friday. All I can say to that is ----aaargh!
** Not just a brand of rum
***After all, a privateer is just a pirate with a license to steal
****They were also barred from holding public office and had limited opportunities for education and employment, but this didn't make China unique.
*****What? You expected her to take up knitting and mahjong?
When Paris Went Dark
When Nazi troops marched into Paris in June, 1940, the city surrendered without firing a shot.*
In When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 , historian Ronald C. Rosbottom explores face-to-face interactions between occupiers and occupied, the effect of the Occupation on daily life in Paris, its psychological and emotional impact on Parisians and its legacy of guilt and myth.
Drawing from official records, memoirs, interviews and ephemera, Rosbottom tells a story that is more complicated than simple opposition between courage and collaboration, though he offers examples of both. He discusses the fine line between survival and collaboration, the distinction between individual acts of resistance and the Resistance and how occupiers and occupied utilized the hide-and-seek possibilities of Parisian apartment buildings. He considers the act of waiting in line both as an illustration of the difficulties of everyday life and as a replacement for forbidden political gatherings. Above all, he describes the Occupation as gradual constriction of Parisian life within ever-narrowing boundaries.
Rosbottom does not limit his discussion to the Parisian perspective. Some of the most interesting sections of When Paris Went Dark deal with the German experience in the city, a complex mixture of tourism, conquest, envy and isolation. His account of Hitler's early-morning tour of the capital soon after its surrender is particularly illuminating about the Nazi Party's ambivalence toward cities in general and Paris in particular.
When Paris Went Dark is an important and readable addition to the social history of World War II.
*I will admit with only the slightest embarrassment that when I think "Nazi occupation of Paris" the images that come to mind are straight out of Casablanca. That will probably never change. Because putting pictures in our heads--accurate or not--is one of the things great art does.
Most of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Edith Cavell: “Patriotism Is Not Enough”
Not all the heroes of the First World War fought in the trenches.
Forty-nine year old British nurse Edith Cavell was the director of the first nurses' training school in Belgium. When Germany occupied Brussels in the first month of the war, Cavell refused to leave. She turned her clinic into a Red Cross hospital and cared for wounded soldiers from both armies.
On November 1, 1914, Cavell took her heroism to a new level when a Belgian resistance worker brought two British soldiers to her door. Hiding Allied soldiers was punishable by death, but Cavell took the soldiers in without question. She hid them for two weeks while plans were made to take them across the border into the Netherlands, which remained neutral throughout the war.
These two soldiers were the first of more than 200 Allied soldiers whom Cavell helped escape from German-occupied Belgium during the first year of the war. Working with a resistance network, she provided medical care for wounded soldiers, hid the healthy until a guide could escort them over the border, and made sure they had money in their pockets for the journey.
Catching Cavell in the act became a priority for the German political police, who assigned an officer to the task full-time. Searches of the clinic became more frequent. (On one occasion she hid a wounded soldier in an apple barrel, covered with apples.)
On August 5,1915, the Germans arrested Cavell. Told that the other prisoners had confessed, she admitted during interrogation that she had used the clinic to hide Allied soldiers. Ten weeks later, Cavell and 34 other resisters were tried for assisting the enemy. Five, including Cavell, received the death penalty.
American and Spanish diplomats tried to get her sentence commuted without success; her execution was scheduled to be carried out the next day at dawn. When an English chaplain visited her that night to offer her comfort, he was surprised to find her calm and collected. Cavell told him, "I realize that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." As he left, Rev. Gahan told her,"We will always remember you as a heroine and a martyr." Cavell answered, "Don't think of me like that. Think of me only as a nurse who tried to do her duty."
Cavell's hope to be remembered "only as a nurse" was idealistic--and unrealistic. The British propaganda office at Wellington House used her story both to increase enlistment in Britain (the number of volunteers doubled in the weeks after her death) and to increase anti-German sentiment in the United States.