Hooked: Fascination with pirates starts young

Passengers aboard the cruise liner Seabourn Spirit heaped praise on the captain for saving them when the ship was attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. They admired his coolheadedness, his quick thinking, his defensive shrewdness, his clever evasive action. On the other hand, those of us who keep close track of the piracy business refer to him as Capt. Knucklehead. What was he doing there in the first place? Did he have no idea of the danger he’d bumbled into? We did. We did because we never miss the Weekly Piracy Report published by the Commercial Crime Services Division of the International Chamber of Commerce. It is our life’s blood. The Seabourn Spirit incident was the 28th off that ever- more lawless East African country since March.

Pirates had fired on a ship 220 kilometres off the coast two weeks before. The week after that they were ranging twice as far out to sea. ‘‘ Five speedboats flashed lights at a tanker underway and chased her. One boat came close on port beam. Crew switched on deck lights and ship moved further from the Somali coast and boat gave up chase.’’

That week’s report began with urgent bluntness. ‘‘ Ships are advised to keep as far away as possible from the Somali coast.’’ But despite this, there was Capt. Knucklehead’s touristladen vessel quite early Saturday morning scarcely 130 kilometres from shore. The pirates didn’t really need speedboats. They could have waded out to it. The Weekly Piracy Report is invariably the best reading on the Internet ( icc- ccs. org), and I wish I could say that we devoted followers click on it because we are appalled by the terrible occurrences it describes, by the brazenness of the pirates, the viciousness of their attacks, but I’m not so sure.

Certainly they’re thugs and gangsters, but their recklessness tweaks some antisocial boy- child that lurks with a rakish sneer in an uncharted cove of our drearily insular hearts. Somehow the terse, ship’s- log prose of the itemized rundown sets sparks flying in our imaginations: ‘‘05.11.2005, around 0225 UTC, in position 02:59N-048:01E. Six heavily armed pirates in two boats chased cruise ship Seabourn Spirit underway. They fired with rocket launchers and machine guns causing damage to ship’s side. Master took evasive manoeuvres and sailed away from coast. Pirates aborted the attempt and fled. One crew sustained injuries to his hand.’’ For some reason, that’s far more enchanting than the accounts of passengers ordered by the captain to huddle clear of shattering glass and bullets and rocket-propelled grenades in the dining room. (‘‘ Nobody lost it, but there were a lot of frightened people,’’ noted one.)

Although there was one nice touch. Before they were ordered to take cover, one of the passengers, as tourists will, tried to take a few snapshots of the threatening watercraft racing alongside, prompting the pirate with the ‘‘ bazooka’’ — the RPG launcher — to take a shot at him.

‘‘ I could tell the guy firing the bazooka was smiling,’’ he said. Of course he was. To us piracyreport followers, it goes without saying.

Yes they’re in it for the money. But also they’re having fun. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Guelph and was a product of the Guelph school system that I’d only ever thought of piracy as an enterprise designed to provide me with literary escape and never considered it as a career path.

I now realize it would have been more exciting — and a heck of a lot more glamorous — than break-and-enter and stealing cars, which were the only outlaw ventures any of my now long- ago classmates went into that I know of, none of them very successfully. ( These were the days when dope was nowhere but in movies and sordid paperbacks, as opposed to everywhere.)

I don’t even know how you’d get started. Is a particular skillset necessary (‘‘ No, my lad, put the grenade in the launcher the other way around, or you’ll be sorry. It’s how I got this hook’’)?

Could it be something you just drift into? If that’s the case, it sounds a lot like politics. Isn’t it odd that the politicians who run our lives aren’t required to have any kind of training at all? They simply hang around with likeminded individuals and, when the chance comes along, pounce on it.

I’d never suggest that pirates and politicians have anything besides this in common, but wouldn’t it be kind of disturbing if that’s how it worked with, for example, ophthalmologists? Slinger’s column appears Tuesday and Thursday.