The largest, most successful band of pirates in history wasn't led by Blackbeard, Yellowbeard, or anyone else with a beard. Dian H. Murray, a Notre Dame history professor, says the seven pirate fleets that ruled the coast of China's Kwangtung province in the early 1800s answered for at least three years to a woman.
Murray has long studied the history of piracy in the South China Sea, including the reign of the great Kwangtung pirate confederation, which at its height employed some 400 junks and 70,000 men. From 1807 to 1810, the group was led by Cheng I Sao, a former prostitute who seized control of the organization after the death of her husband.
The Kwangtung confederacy emerged from the ranks of privateers, or pirate mercenaries, recruited years earlier by rebel emperors in neighboring Vietnam. After their sponsors were overthrown, some of the privateer leaders returned to China and unified the many quarreling gangs of pirates. The organization they formed not only raided ships at sea but profited handsomely from "protection" documents sold openly to fishermen and merchants.
The confederation continually repulsed government efforts to control it, at one point reducing the provincial navy to a handful of vessels, Murray says. In fact, the group's end came not in battle but through a general -- and generous -- amnesty negotiated by Cheng I Sao. The former pirates not only got to keep most of their booty, but many were granted commissions in the Chinese military as pirate suppressors.
Murray marvels at the organizational efforts of the Chinese pirates. She says one of her greatest thrills as a researcher came in 1984 when she discovered in a Beijing archive the group's articles of confederation. Among other provisions, the pact describes procedures for registering vessels, a policy of mutual respect for one another's protection contracts, and the right of the group as a whole to distribute confiscated property.
The Chinese pirates did not always act with what we now think of as decorum, however. Murray writes that crew members were known to cut out the hearts of their enemies and eat them with rice to give them fortitude and courage.
On the other hand, raping, beating or marrying female captives against their will were capital offenses. And fornication, even by mutual consent, was punishable by the beheading of the pirate and the casting of the female captive overboard with a weight attached to her legs.
Murray's many writings on the Chinese pirates include her 1987 book Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 (Stanford University Press).