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5.4  Piracy

When the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean it was their determined policy to control passage within it from a number of strategic ports including Goa and Hormuz. To effect this policy all ships were forced to take letters of safe conduct or cartaz from the Portuguese at a price.  Ships sailing without them could be seized on sight. The Portuguese would also plunder ships as they saw fit with or without a cartaz. Yet the Portuguese were unable or did not bother to stem the tide of piracy as effectively as that of the former kingdom of Hormuz and continue the flourishing trade that safe passage enabled.^[1]  Gupta in India and the Indian Ocean 1500-1800 states that Portuguese policy actually had the effect of increasing piracy.^[2]

Incidently the capture of Hormuz island in 1622 by the Persians aided by the English gave rise to an argument in England. In 1624, the Lord High Admiral of England, the Duke of Buckingham, declared that as the East India Company had plundered Hormuz without letters of marque, then they had acted as pirates and as a consequence were fined a total of £20,000. In itself the Duke of Buckingham’s statement would appear to be a simple political manoeuvre to extract some monies from the East India Company both for himself and the King. However there was another possible objective that did not involve money. The company’s ships had been impounded in case they should be required for use against the Spanish armada that was being prepared at the time. In the end the ships were released and the monies paid.^[3]

Kursan means in Arabic ‘privateering, piracy’ and stems from the Italian word ‘corsale’. The Arabs called a pirate, ‘liss al-bahr’, and it is likely that the adoption of the word kursan about the 9th century would indicate the need to distinguish privateering from piracy. However having adopted the word they used it to denote two distinct forms of activity which are often confused even by Europeans.^[4] Piracy is a robbery on the high seas and a private enterprise. Privateering is defined as a private vessel commissioned to seize and plunder an enemy’s ships usually with the more or less explicit connivance of the authorities.^[5] A government official T’ang Shu (1497-1574) living in the Ming dynasty when tributes or favours were supposed to be the only form of trade, was far more blunt and declared the following:

 

Pirates and merchants are identical with each other. If trade is allowed, the pirates will become merchants. If trade is forbidden, the merchants will become pirates.^[6]

 

The Joasmees on the Trucial Coast,^[7] essentially the same peoples who had aided the Persians in their invasion of Oman in 1737 and dealt with by Ahmad ibn Said in 1747, had recovered and in 1787 were at war again with Oman before suffering further losses under Hamad, grandson of Ahmad ibn Said, with the loss of Khor Fakkan. In 1790 the Joasmees captured an English vessel, the Beglerbeg, “bound from Bengal to Bushire which was taken off the Mussendom [Musandam] where she remained on the rocks for many years”.^[8] At the beginning of the nineteenth century Omani interests in the Persian Gulf were widespread as Vincenzo Maurizi indicates:

 

The customs of Mascàt are farmed to a rich Beniani at a rent of 180,000 dollars annually; 5,000 are paid for liberty to export salt from the mines at Ormuz, while Kesm, Larek and Bender Abasi, produce an equal sum, which, though small, is indeed rendered heavy by their extreme poverty, but the Sultan derives his chief revenues from the provinces immediately under the jurisdiction of Mascàt.^[9]

 

 During his reign Al Sayyid Sultan ibn Ahmad (1793-1804)^[10] had obtained possession of Bandar Abbas, the islands of Ormuz and Kishm, and Gwadur and Charbar on the Makran.^[11] Sayyid Sultan who had been on a visit to Basrah in 1804^[12] to collect Kânûn and was returning to Muscat when he was attacked by three boats belonging to the esh-Shuaihiyyîn, a tribe of the the el-Háwalah of Julfar in the gulf of Lenghee and killed. As Robin Bidwell explains in his introduction to the History of Seyd Said:

 

Meanwhile in about 1744 the religious reformer Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab had sought refuge with the family of Al Sa'ud in Najd and his preaching inspired followers to spread his message, if necessary by force. He taught that all who refused to conform were unbelievers and that their property might legitimately be taken from them by those of the true faith. This launched the Wahhabis, as their enemies called them, on a career of conquest and the Omanis, as Ibadhis, were a natural target. The Wahhabis moved on that country but Sultan bin Ahmad managed to keep them at bay, partly by force and partly by the payment of tribute. The Qawasim tribesmen of Ras al-Khaymah and the north-facing shore of Oman accepted the suzerainty of the Al Sa‘ud and started a series of attacks upon shipping which they considered as holy war but which their victims naturally regarded as piracy.^[13]

 

A certain Shaik Abdullah who had for some time also opposed the Wahhabis and the Qawasim and had protected many places from attack including Bassora which he had managed to keep open whilst under siege, managed by virtue of monies to obtain the body and bury it on Lingah.^[14] Sayyid Sultan was succeeded after a struggle between various factions of the family by his son Sultan Sayyid Said ibn Sultan Al Busaidi. Vincenzo Maurizi (‘Shaik Mansur’) who was in Muscat and met Said ibn Sultan in 1809 reports:

 

… he also possesses several three-masted ships which in time of peace are sent to India as merchantmen; while in time of war, they receive on board a considerable number of troops, and exercise in the Persian gulf ... altogether, public and private, the city of Mascàt possesses forty square rigged vessels, from 300 to 700 tons, which are almost all English prizes purchased at the Isle of France during the late war ....^[15]

 

 In 1805 the Qawasim attacked the Shannon and Trimmer, English trading brigs belonging to East India Company’s Resident at Basrah, Samuel Manesty.^[16] It was during this period that the Qawasim were labelled by the British as ‘pirates’ and the Arabian or Trucial coast became the ‘Pirate Coast’. This theme continued in Sir Arnold Wilson’s book The Persian Gulf published in 1928 and Sir Charles Belgrave’s book The Pirate Coast published in 1960 and consequently emerges in many other publications in the same manner. In 1986 this matter was addressed by Sul?an Mu?ammad Al-Qasimi in his book The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf in which he argues that that the East India Company was determined to increase its share of Gulf trade by all possible means and principally by the accusation of piracy and the need to fight it. In his book, structured in five sections, the Arabian Gulf in the eighteenth century, the accusations of ‘Piracy’ (1797-1806), the attack by the British on Ras al-Khaimah (1809), negotiations and treaty (1814) and the destruction of the Qawasim (1819), Al-Qasimi places emphasis on the machinations of Captain, rising to Brigadier General, John Malcolm envoy of the then Governor General of India Earl of Mornington and Captain David Seton the British Resident in Muscat and at one point discusses Malcolm’s proposal for a base in the Gulf first raised in 1800 and then again in 1808. Al-Qasimi  states that Malcolm based his argument to his superiors not only on the necessity of a base for trade purposes but also as a defensive measure to protect India against European that is French plans.^[17]

Kelly infers that the Qawasim had been kept in place by the “maritime supremacy held by Muscat” because “within weeks of Sultan’s death the Gulf was up in arms” and that “What distinguished the attacks in 1804-5 from the earlier ones was the tinge of religious fanaticism which accompanied them”.^[18] By 1808 Qawasim attacks had increased with several British vessels included and the sheikh of Rams, Husain ibn ‘Ali, the Wahhabi vice-regent was now demanding tribute from the Bombay government to pass up the Gulf. Seton’s concern’s about the grip of the Wahhabi in the north and the possibility of the same happening to the rest of Oman persuaded Malcolm that “British intervention was necessary to curb the Qawasim and help preserve Muscat’s independence”.^[19]

The British expedition against the Qawasim left Bombay on 14 September 1809 and attacked Ras al Khaimah on the 11-13 November, Lingah on the 16 November, Luft on the island of Qeshm 26-27 November and Shinas south of Khawr Fakkan on the 2 January 1810 leaving the latter untouched as no Qawasim vessels were found and Sultan Sayyid Said ibn Sultan Al Busaidi was not anxious to inherit the fort. Negotiations and treaties were discussed and agreed in 1814 but without much foundation and in 1819 another British expedition completed the destruction of Ras al Khaimah in 1819.