The pirates currently haunting the coast of Somalia are painted in the media as “rag-tag,” modern day Robin Hood’s armed with RPGs. Which is in part true. But they are not operating out here on the ocean completely alone. The “Globe and Mail” has a great interview with one of the onshore leaders.
“When Gilbert and Sullivan composed their melodies about the pirate king, it was doubtful they had a Somali like Garaad in mind. Yet this former fisherman, the man behind many of the recent hijackings in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, is as close as it comes to pirate royalty in the modern world. In an interview on the breezy patio of a Somali hotel, he explains how he exerts direct control over 13 groups of pirates with a total of 800 hijackers, operating in bases stretching from Bosasso to Kismaayo, near the Kenyan border. Each group has a ‘sub-lieutenant’ who reports directly to Garaad, and none of them make a move without his authorization.
Piracy has a long, romanticized history in the Indian Ocean; this bar in the Seychelles proudly bears witness
“An armchair CEO, Garaad is curiously uninterested in the fruits of his operation. ‘I don’t know the names of any of the ships my men capture, and I don’t care,” he says, “The only thing I care about is sending more pirates into the sea.’ ”
Which is something weighing heavily on the minds of those aboard the passenger ship (sans passengers) as it moves north along the Somali coastline.
DAY 2 – A very strange day. People are too quiet or too loud, on edge, some wide-eyed. Almost everyone seems anxious and pensive. I find my own thoughts and mood drifting throughout the day. Which is highlighted by yet more meetings, more drills, regarding both pirates and fires.
At one we are told that if we are taken hostage to remain passive, neither help nor hinder. Do not have sympathy for your captors, we are told by the Special Forces crew that came on board in Tanzania. Why not be sympathetic, I wonder to myself? A question I mean to ask when this is all over. I think I can guess, but I would like to hear what they have to say, what lessons have been learned.
If there is a fire, we need to assemble somewhere on the higher decks, in either the Lounge or the Dining Room, with our life jackets. The Dining Room would be easier because the Lounge is completely locked down, but that of course depends on where the fire is, which we all intuitively understand.
Tonight we organize to show a movie for the eighty-plus people on board (“Slumdog Millionaire”). At 2030 the Lounge is unlocked and we follow a single route through the ship. Lots of people come and spirits are brightened a bit.
At night the security team makes sure the ship is as dark as possible. Lights are disconnected, portholes covered. There are always three of them on duty at any one time, each joined by one of the Filipino crew. They are constantly watching the horizon. We need to spot the pirates from as far away as possible in order to turn the ship away from them and make them chase us. The idea is to maximize the time it takes for them to get aboard, giving our (hopeful) rescuers the most time we can to reach our ship before the pirates catch up and attempt to board it. Hopefully someone with big guns will be nearby, but I do not think so. The warships are most likely hundreds of miles off the coast of Somalia, near the shipping channel, near the route recommended for safe passage through the Gulf of Aden.
I now remember to carry a small flashlight at night so I can go outside and smoke without falling down a ladder. Outside in the dark one of the security crew, who I cannot make out in the blackness, says to me, “Four days and we are safe.” It’s neither a question nor a statement, more of a hope I guess. I smoke two cigarettes, look at the stars, so many in the dark, and prefer to stay silent. – Dennis Cornejo
Every day dozens of ships – carrying cargo, crews, even passengers – are picking their way carefully around the Somali coastline on the Gulf of Aden, attempting to move from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea. These are currently the most dangerous waters on the planet: In the first three months of the year there have been more than one hundred successful pirate attacks and hundreds more just-unsuccessful.
At risk are both human lives and ships worth tens of millions of dollars. The Somali pirates are putting their lives on the line as well, but they’ve obviously decided it’s a good gamble: Last year this fledgling hostage-and-ship-taking industry collected upwards of $80 million in ransom. Not bad business for the rag-tag pirates who do the hijacking and the gang leaders onshore orchestrating them.
My friend Dennis Cornejo – marine biologist, undersea filmmaker, lover of flora and reptiles – is aboard a passenger ship (sans passengers) making its move through the Gulf of Aden, paralleling the Somali coastline, around the Horn of Africa. If successful, the trip should take five to six days. If unsuccessful, the next we hear from him may be as a hostage, the ship being held for ransom. Follow his reports from the heart of the pirate’s sea.
DAY 1 — Two weeks ago I suggested I should stay on the ship for the repositioning from Tanzania to Egypt so I could get a backlog of work done. That was before the pirates had become so active in the Indian Ocean. Before a ship we had anchored next to at Assumption Island in the Aldabra group (the “Ocean Explorer,” a dive boat based in the Seychelles) was taken by pirates (several weeks later it and its crew are still being held). Before the American freighter “Maersk Alabama” was attacked and three pirates killed by U.S. Navy Seal snipers, followed by increased threats made against Americans.
The seventy-person, mostly Filipino crew is surprised that I am staying aboard and I think a little pleased that it is not just them. After all, I’m a volunteer and they are not. The young women ask me, “Aren’t you scared?”
“Well, I’m a bit concerned,” I answer. “But it will be alright, we have a good plan.” Inside I’m thinking, “Yeah, run like hell and hope for the best.”
Passengers and most of our staff left the ship this morning at the dock in Dar es Salaam and the ship is now being prepared in earnest for the journey around Somalia. They have mounted steel grating around the poop deck; when we’re at sea it will be electrified, with warning signs written in Swahili. Fire hoses have been fixed in place on the lowest open decks, to be fired at once to help keep small boats away from the ship. Hooks have been welded onto the fantail to attach razor wire to, which will be stretched around the ship’s stern and balconies.
While still at dock the boson oversees getting the razor wire in place while the crew spends the morning smearing axle grease on the sides of the ship. As a final touch, before we pull out of port broken glass is added to the grease and razor wire on the fantail.
We have also taken on board a security detail, six Special Forces agents from the U.K. Ex-military they have all previously worked as “security contractors” in other dangerous parts of the world, like Iraq.
After the ship leaves Dar es Salaam and enters the open sea we have our first security briefing. If pirates attack the ship or it is believed that an attack is possible – if a suspicious boat is seen on the horizon or skiffs are fast-approaching — the general alarm will be sounded, followed by a broadcast of “Pirate attack! Pirate attack! Pirate attack!” All of us that are not involved with defending the ship, which is most of us, are to proceed below deck to the Crew Mess where we will be ticked off the manifest to wait it out.
Other than that, it is to be work as usual, except that no one is allowed on deck, except the deck crew. The only exception is a small area behind the Bridge. Most of the ship is off limits because the doors are to be kept bolted shut at all times. The idea is to put as many locked steel doors between the pirates and us as possible. If even one door is left unbolted the pirates can be deep in the ship very quickly and then we are lost, we are hostages heading for Somalia.
Tonight I thought it might be a good idea to show a movie, but was told that people were too tired. Which turned out to be true, but they were more than just tired, they were anxious. They gathered in small quiet groups around the ship, awkward, intimate and scared, trying for normal. – Dennis Cornejo
After the Perfume River in Hoi An and the souks of Marrakech, Zanzibar rounds out the trio of ‘most-exotic’ places on the globe that I’ve long wanted to spend not days, but weeks. While these are very real places – crowded, often hot, occasionally dirty – they have set themselves up in my mind, mostly through books, as mysterious, romantic.
Walking the tight streets of Stone Town, the centuries-old market on Unguja, the main island of Zanzibar, the place lives up to the reputation built in my mind. The earliest visitors here were Arab traders who are said to have arrived in the 8th century; pirates swarmed its coastline beginning five to six hundred years ago. I walk into its earliest building, the mosque at Kizimkazi, which dates back to 1107. Hints of its human influences – Assyrians, Sumerians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Indians, Chinese, Persians, Portuguese, Omani Arabs, Dutch and English – are visible everywhere. Some, particularly the Shirazi Persians and Omani Arabs, stayed to settle and rule. With this influence, Zanzibar has become predominantly Islamic (97%) – the remaining 3% is made up of Christians, Hindus and Sikhs.
For centuries the Arabs sailed with the Monsoon winds from Oman to trade primarily in ivory, slaves and spices. The two main islands, Unguja and Pemba, provided an ideal base for the Omani Arabs, being relatively small, and therefore fairly easy to defend. From here it was possible for them to control 1,000 miles of the mainland coast from present day Mozambique to Somalia. Most of the wealth lay in the hands of the Arab community, who were the main landowners, kept themselves to themselves, and generally did not intermarry with the Africans.
This was not true of the Shirazi Persians who came from the Middle East to settle on the East African coast. The story goes that in AD 975, Abi Ben Sultan Hasan of Shiraz in Persia (now Iran) had a terrible nightmare in which a rat devoured the foundations of his house. He took this as an omen that his community was to be devastated. Others in the Shiraz Court ridiculed the notion, but Sultan Hasan, his family and some followers obviously took it very seriously because they decided to migrate. They set out in seven dhows into the Indian Ocean but were caught in a huge storm and separated. Thus, landfalls were made at seven different places along the East African coast, one of which was Zanzibar, and settlements began.
Widespread intermarriage between Shirazis and Africans gave rise to a coastal community with distinctive features, and a language derived in part from Arabic, which became known as Swahili. The name Swahili comes from the Arab word sawahil, which means ‘coast’. The Zanzibar descendants of this group were not greatly involved in the lucrative slave, spice and ivory trades. Instead, they immersed themselves mainly in agriculture and fishing. Those Shirazis that did not intermarry retained their identity as a separate group.
This day we get lost in the narrow market streets, modern-day stores selling much of the same factory-made “antiques” to a booming tourist crowd, and emerge in the real Zanzibar, a sprawling open-air market. Even in the late afternoon as the sun begins to disappear on a hot, hot day it is packed with people weighing fruits and vegetables, eyeing shell fish and giant jack’s, for the home table.
It’s a beautiful end to a first day on the so-called spice island; from here, its north, into the heart of what is increasingly becoming “the pirate’s sea.” So … stay tuned!
Walking the dusty streets of Ibo island it felt like I’d fallen back a century. If it wasn’t for the polyester t-shirts worn by most of the kids I imagine the place doesn’t look much different today than when the Portuguese were still here and the selling of slaves from its beaches was a not-so-distant memory. One thing that has survived intact is an unusual-if-beautiful music, a blend of throaty singing and traditional drumming. At moments it appeared as if the women singers were in a trance, or hypnotized, their movements simultaneously jerky and yet somehow elegant.
Last week the World Wildlife Fund released a report warning that blue fin tuna – one of the most popular fishes we know, especially among sushi lovers – will be completely fished out around the globe in the next three years. I read its report early in the day and later that night, floating off the coast of Mozambique, watched a stunning video with an Indian Ocean sailor and guide – Guy Esparon – showing in no uncertain terms exactly why tuna is not long for this ocean.
A Seychelles-born guide and naturalist who has sailed around the world on every imaginable craft and along the way become an adopted-son of the aboriginals in western Australia, Guy is truly a man of the sea. I watched his eyes well up as the video images played, of half-ton tuna being snared in one-mile-long, 600-foot tall nets strung behind seiners. Millions of tons of blue fin are taken each year from the Indian Ocean alone, generating $700 million. It’s big business, but one that would now seem to be short-lived if the WWF predictions are correct.
Here’s the reports conclusion: “Over fishing will wipe out the breeding population of Atlantic blue fin tuna, one of the ocean’s largest and fastest predators, in three years unless catches are dramatically reduced.” The report was released on the eve of the European fishing fleets starting the two-month Mediterranean season.
“For years people have been asking when the collapse of this fishery will happen, and now we have the answer,” said Sergi Tudela, Head of Fisheries at WWF Mediterranean. The fish, which can accelerate faster than a sports car, are a favorite of sushi lovers. Demand from Japan has triggered an explosion in the size of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean fleets over the past decade and many of those boats use illegal spotter planes to track the warm-blooded tuna.
“Blue fin tuna is collapsing as we speak and yet the fishery will kick off again for business as usual. It is absurd and inexcusable to open a fishing season when stocks of the target species are collapsing,” added Tudela.
The WWF report cited data showing the average size of mature tunas has more than halved since the 1990s, which has had a disproportionately high impact since bigger fish produced many more offspring. It concludes that the only way the blue fin can be saved is by a complete halt to fishing in May and June as the fish rush through the Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean.
Standing at the edge of the Indian Ocean with Guy on a dark, dark night it’s hard to imagine the last blue fin may soon be caught, perhaps not far from where we stand. But it won’t be too surprising if it happens. We are a rapacious species, with an increasingly heavy demand for fish of all stripes. While it would be sad if the blue fin were wiped out, it will not come as a big surprise. And it won’t be the last fish species to disappear in our lifetime.
I often ask audiences to define paradise. While responses vary, a high percentage involves some combination of white sand beach, coconut palm and blue-blue sea scenario. It’s so pervasive I’ve long been curious where the notion first originated. Honeymoon brochure? 1940s movie? Similarly, as I travel and explore I keep running into places touted as “paradise on earth.”
A couple islands in the Seychelles make that list, dating back to the mid-1700s when one of the first visitors to Praslin, Charles (Chinese) Gordon, went away convinced he had seen the site of the original Garden of Eden. Having spent yesterday – a gray, humid day – exploring it and nearby La Digue, it’s clear how legends get started.
When Asia split off and drifted away from Africa, breaking up what 160 million years or so ago was the single continent of Gondwanaland, it left in its trail a couple hundred granite “droppings” scattered across what we now know as the Indian Ocean. This makes the Seychelles different from most island groups around the world, which are volcanic. The Seychelles are remnants of continental drift. Characterized by boulder-covered hills and hard mountains as high as 2,700 feet above sea level they are surrounded by narrow coastal plains and extensive coral reefs.
Out of the 115 islands in the group, 42 are granite; the rest are made up of coral and washed-up rubble. While they are chock full of endemic wildlife, the people here are all immigrants; there were no indigenous Seychellois, everyone came from someplace else beginning with pirates in the 15th century. From a wildlife perspective, they are among the most protected on the planet thanks to a 1993 law guaranteeing its people the right to a clean environment. As a result the country holds a record for the highest percentage of land under natural conservation, nearly fifty percent.
Of the 75 endemic plants here, the most famed is the coco de mer. The trees grow for 200 to 400 years. The male fruits are long and slender, while the female fruits often weigh upwards of forty pounds, are the world’s largest seed and are nicknamed the “love nut” due to their suggestive shape. They got their name from Maldivians, a thousand miles away. When the nuts washed up onshore those faraway locals were convinced they must have come from underneath the water, thus “coco from the sea.” I asked my guide Marianne if anyone ever gets hit by falling, forty-five pound coconuts, which would definitely addle you, and she smiles. “The only time people get hit is at night. Because the male coconut and female coconut are love making then and sometimes they fall.”
I spent the morning in the beautiful Vallee de Mai, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1972, packed with the tall trees. Dark and humid under its canopy, the forest has a primeval feel and is a natural greenhouse fostering tall palms of a half-dozen varieties, as well as jackfruit, kapisen, ferns, vanilla and philodendron. The wet and dark also nurtures endemic black parrots and blue pigeons, kestrel and swiftlets, fruit bats, geckos, tree frogs, skinks and rare chameleons, sizable snails, slugs and freshwater crabs. Standing next to twenty-foot tall palm leaves with lizards scampering over my feet it all feels very … prehistoric.
Twenty minutes away by local ferry is La Digue. The fourth largest island in the Seychelles means it is not very big, just three miles by two, home to 2,500 people. From a coastal plateau it culminates in the Nid Aigle (Eagle’s Nest) a thousand feet above the sea. But few come to La Digue for its heights but rather for its meandering boulder-strewn beach – Anse Source D’Argent – which is invariably included on every “best beach” list ever published.
I bike to the end of the island and then pick my way along the beach as the sun sets, scrambling around gigantic granite boulders curved by time and weather tumbling into the sea, sloshing from small crescent beach to small crescent beach of talcum powder pink sand, barely cooled off by plunging into the thirty degree Celsius waters. I keep my eyes open for a sign directing me to the Garden of Eden, but instead discover only a corral of thirty giant, one-hundred-year-old tortoises. By day’s end rather than Eden, I’m beginning to wonder if the place didn’t share roots with “Jurassic Park.”
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