Aargh! Buccaneer High on the Pirate Life

Fisherman turned bandit after foreigners plundered ocean

By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff

Posted Apr 22, 2009 9:44 AM CDT

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Aargh! Buccaneer High on the Pirate Life — "Sometimes you fail in capturing and sometimes you come under threat by foreign navies, but all we do is venture," a pirate told the BBC. (AP Photo/US Navy)

The pirating life isn’t easy, but the rewards are many and some Somalis see the bandits as heroes, one buccaneer tells the BBC. The man, 25, says he used to be a fisherman, but he signed up with the hijackers after "illegal fishing and dumping of toxic wastes by foreign fishing vessels" emptied the local seas and deprived him of his livelihood.

Piracy "has many risks and difficulties," the man said. "Sometimes you spend months in the sea to hunt a ship and miss. Sometimes when we are going to hijack a ship we face rough winds, and some of us get sick and some die." The man said foreign navies can't stop the pirates, but they will readily disarm and go back to fishing when Somalia gets a strong government that can defend its fish stocks.
(More Somalia stories.)

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