Malacca Strait Pirates
October 2007
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
|
Malacca Strait Pirates
|
|
By Peter Gwin
|
|
|
I pressed him on how his team was able to board ships undetected. “We use magic,” he said. “We cast a spell to make the crew stay asleep. We can be invisible, bulletproof.” He pointed to his head. “It’s a power that you learn.” Then how did you get shot, I asked. “They fired twice,” he said. “I resisted the first bullet but wasn’t strong enough for the second.”
Later that night at an outdoor café, Jhonny and I loitered over a few beers, and he revealed that he believed in mathematics, not magic. He borrowed a pen and on a napkin demonstrated how he could reduce my telephone number, or any seven-digit figure, to the number eight using a series of equations. “It looks like magic,” he said. “But it is mathematics.” Numbers, he said, always had fascinated him. As a boy he’d memorized several of these numeric parlor tricks and later taught himself algebra and geometry. At sea he’d come to trust numbers far more than superstitions. They told him how far he traveled, when to turn, how much fuel his ship needed, how hard the wind blew. Numbers were predictable, accountable, reliable—qualities that were hard to come by in Jhonny’s world.
He continued to doodle on the napkin and asked if I’d heard of the golden mean, which he described as a ratio discovered by Greek mathematicians that represents perfect balance. Riau seamen had their own golden mean, he said, which measured the tipping point between working within the bounds of the law versus working illegally. As long as this Malaccan version of the golden mean favored robbing ships, there would be pirates in the strait.
Pirate Training
A few days later, Jhonny, Beach Boy, and I caught a cab to the port. Beach Boy had arranged to show me how a team of jumping squirrels boarded a ship. He said there was an uninhabited island not far from Batam where he occasionally trained.
At the end of a sun-bleached jetty, two muscular young men, “Muhammad” and “Hakim,” waited for us in a wooden pancung. Beach Boy explained that these boats were ideal because their weight and shape let them cut through a ship’s wake, unlike fiberglass boats, which were much lighter and would bounce in rough water.
We sat in the boat, two by two, and I ended up next to Muhammad. His round cheeks and perfect teeth gave him a boyish appearance, but weeks before he had completed a two-year prison term for his role in a shopping trip. “Are you ready to learn how to steal a ship?” he asked.
With the sun beating on our shoulders, Hakim steered out of the harbor and made for a dense forest that appeared to be floating on top of the water, one of the strait’s innumerable mangrove islands. It seemed an impenetrable mass of gnarled roots and tangled limbs, but Hakim found a little cut and piloted the boat into the labyrinth. It was cool inside the mangroves, and we slipped in and out of deep shadows following the watery path until it opened on a cloister of stilt houses. “Assalamu alaikum,” Hakim called out. No answer. He cut the engine. Beach Boy grabbed a limb and held the boat steady as Hakim drew a parang, its curved blade glistening with oil used to keep it razor sharp. With quick, latent blows Hakim chopped out a two-foot section of a root and tossed it into the pancung.
We navigated out of the mangroves and headed for a small island about a mile away. Once ashore, Beach Boy disappeared into its dense jungle. The rest of us remained on the beach, which had a broad view of the shipping channel. Nine vessels chugged through the strait, including a liquefied natural gas tanker that towered over the others like a skyscraper. The Singapore skyline loomed beyond. “A few years ago this was a favorite place to begin an attack. Now there are too many patrols,” said Muhammad, flashing his perfect teeth, “but there are other places.” I asked him why he’d gotten into piracy. “Partly for the money,” he said, “but it is fun, an adventure, like James Bond.”
Subscribe to National Geographic magazine.
|
|
Top
|
|
