In fiction and films, a pirate wears a patch over one eye, likely following a treasure map marked on the parchment with an ‘X’. Popular belief, though unproven, says the eye patch helped pirates adjust their vision to the dark, ready for the gloom below deck once it is swapped for the other side. And the ‘X’, according to literary scholar Raphael Zähringer, can be traced to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the 1883 novel that gave readers Long John Silver, the famous one-legged cook with a parrot that screeches “Pieces of eight!”
Twenty-first century pirates are far from this picture.
On November 2, Indian Navy commandos, some of them dropped by an Indian Air Force C-17 transport plane, freed 20 crew members of an Iranian fishing boat – Azini – about 3,000km from Mumbai in the Arabian Sea. Somali pirates had seized the boat on October 29, and the navy said it feared they would use it as a “mother ship”, a captured vessel that ferries pirates and their skiffs (high-speed small boats used to reach and board larger ships). Somali piracy has long run as a business backed by financiers and ransom negotiators.
Pirate networks have grown more active this year. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a division of the International Chamber of Commerce that tracks attacks at sea, counted eight hijackings in the first nine months of 2026, and said Somali pirates were responsible for 94% of all crew taken hostage worldwide.
Pirates in history and story
Historian Thucydides wrote that in early times Greeks and non-Greeks living by the sea “turned to piracy, under the lead of their most powerful men, whose motive was their own private gain and the support of their weaker followers”. This occupation, he wrote, “did not as yet involve disgrace, but rather conferred something even of glory”.
{{/usCountry}}Historian Thucydides wrote that in early times Greeks and non-Greeks living by the sea “turned to piracy, under the lead of their most powerful men, whose motive was their own private gain and the support of their weaker followers”. This occupation, he wrote, “did not as yet involve disgrace, but rather conferred something even of glory”.
{{/usCountry}}Thucydides pointed to the early poets, whose characters routinely ask strangers whether they are pirates. In Homer’s Odyssey, Nestor, the old king of Pylos, asks Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, whether he and his companions roam the sea “even as pirates, who wander hazarding their lives and bringing evil to men of other lands”.
Pirates in Roman times held captives for ransom. Plutarch, the Greek biographer, writing more than a century later, tells how pirates who “controlled the sea with large armaments and countless small vessels” captured a young Julius Caesar near the island of Pharmacusa in the 70s BC. They asked 20 talents, an ancient unit of weight used to count silver, for his release. Caesar, he wrote, “laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was” and offered 50. Once free, he caught his captors and had them crucified.
Cicero, the Roman statesman and lawyer, wrote that a pirate “is not included in the number of lawful enemies, but is the common foe of all the world”. European jurists built on the idea over the following centuries, and pirates came to be described as hostis humani generis, enemies of mankind.
Today the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) lets any country’s warships seize a pirate ship on the high seas and arrest those aboard, whatever their nationality.
The pirates of popular imagination belong to a shorter stretch, from the 1680s to the 1720s, which Royal Museums Greenwich in London says has come to be known as the ‘golden age’ of piracy.
European states blurred the line between trade and plunder by licensing private raiders. Privateers were privately owned armed ships that the Admiralty authorised in wartime, through “letters of marque”, to capture enemy merchant vessels without being prosecuted for piracy. Robert Blyth, a curator at Royal Museums Greenwich, says that “privateering could easily give way to peacetime piracy”.
In September 1695, Henry Every, an English seaman who had taken command of his ship in a mutiny, seized the Ganj-i-Sawai, a Mughal royal ship carrying pilgrims home from Mecca to Surat. His crew tortured and killed passengers and raped many of the women, the Associated Press reported. The loot, according to the indictment at the later trial of his crew, included 100,000 pieces of eight and 100,000 chequins, both coins of the day.
The Mughal court retaliated against the East India Company, according to the literary historian Richard Frohock. Under pressure from India and the Company, England’s government offered £500 for Every’s capture in July 1696, AP reported. Every escaped, and his trail went cold after he reached Ireland that June.
Six of his crew were tried in London later that year. Dr Newton, an advocate, warned the court of “the total Loss of the Indian Trade”, given “the Power of the great Mogul, and the natural Inclination of the Indians to Revenge”, published accounts of the trial show. The jury first acquitted five of the men, the published trial record says, before they were convicted on a second charge. They were hanged in London on November 25, 1696.
The Scottish-born captain William Kidd, who had sailed with a royal commission “to apprehend pirates and to seize French ships”, took the Quedagh Merchant on January 30, 1698, according to the UK’s National Archives. He seized it flying French colours as a ruse, as the ship returned to Surat from Bengal with fabrics and opium among its cargo, much of it owned by “a prominent politician at the Mughal court”.
Kidd was tried and hanged in London in May 1701.
The popular image of these men, as known today, took shape in print. A General History of the Pyrates, published in London in 1724 under the name of a Captain Charles Johnson, gave vivid accounts of their lives, though Royal Museums Greenwich says its author “certainly added or exaggerated details”.
Robert Louis Stevenson began Treasure Island, published as a book in 1883, after drawing a map while painting with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. “I made the map of an island,” he later wrote. Captain Hook first appeared on stage in Peter Pan in London on December 27, 1904, and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean began as a Disneyland ride in March 1967 before growing into a five-film franchise from 2003.
Also read: Iran thanks India for rescuing 20 crew members from vessel hijacked by Somali pirates
How the old networks worked
Golden Age piracy depended on merchants on land. Around 1691, Adam Baldridge, who had left Jamaica after killing a man there, set up a post on Île Sainte-Marie, an island off Madagascar, financed in large part by the New York merchant Frederick Philipse, according to the historian Kevin McDonald.
Pirates working the Indian Ocean exchanged their loot there for rum and gunpowder, among other supplies, and the post also dealt in enslaved people.
Historian Mark Hanna of the University of California, San Diego, argues in his book Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire that piracy flourished at the time because of active support from merchant elites in the North American colonies.
Pirate crews also lived by written rules. Bartholomew Roberts, who captured and stole from well over 400 vessels, ran his ship by a code that gave every man a vote on important decisions, according to Johnson’s General History. Under the same code, a man who lost a limb was promised 800 dollars from the common loot.
Economist Peter Leeson, writing in the Journal of Political Economy in 2007, concluded that such arrangements made pirates “one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history”.
What the law calls piracy
The 1982 UNCLOS defines piracy as “any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends” by a private ship or aircraft against another vessel “on the high seas”. Another article extends this to a country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), so in practice piracy can happen anywhere beyond a country’s 12-nautical-mile territorial sea.
On the high seas, “every State may seize a pirate ship” and its courts may decide the penalties.
The same act inside a country’s territorial waters is “armed robbery against ships”, in the definition of the International Maritime Organization, the UN’s shipping agency, and is a matter for that country.
India had no dedicated piracy law until the Maritime Anti-Piracy Act, 2022, which received the President’s assent on January 31, 2023. It applies to the high seas, which the Act defines to include the EEZs of India and other countries; India’s EEZ runs up to 200 nautical miles from its coast. And piracy is punishable with up to life imprisonment, a fine, or both, and with death or life imprisonment where the pirate causes death or attempts to.
The law faced one of its first tests after the Indian Navy recaptured the Malta-flagged bulk carrier MV Ruen in March 2024. INS Kolkata intercepted the ship about 2,600km from India, all 35 Somali pirates on board surrendered and all 17 crew were brought out unharmed.
In July this year, a special court in Mumbai designated under the 2022 Act convicted all 35, the first successful prosecution under it, news agency ANI reported.
Also read: Two vessels with 22 Indians on board hijacked by pirates near Yemen, Somalia
How it works now
Piracy today is concentrated in a few stretches of water.
The IMB recorded 137 incidents of piracy and armed robbery worldwide in 2025. Of these, 80 were in the Singapore Strait. ReCAAP, a regional anti-piracy information centre for Asia, describes most attacks in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore as “opportunistic theft committed during hours of darkness” by “petty and opportunistic pirates who generally operate in small groups”.
Another 21 were in the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa, where 23 crew were kidnapped in four incidents last year. Kidnapped crew “are removed from their vessel and can be held on shore until their release is negotiated”, the IMB said in 2021.
Somali gangs are the ones known for seizing whole ships and holding their crews for ransom. They staged all eight hijackings the IMB recorded worldwide in the first nine months of 2026.
Their trade took hold after Somalia’s government collapsed in 1991. In the years that followed, foreign fishing fleets were reported to have moved into Somali waters, a grievance pirates have long cited to justify their attacks. Somalia’s long coastline also borders the Gulf of Aden, the route ships take between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.
On land, piracy depends on local backing. A 2013 World Bank report found that “pirates rely on onshore support to conduct negotiations and to secure safe access to coastal territories”, and that “politically powerful local figures capture large portions of the profits”. Recruits, it said, were drawn from communities marked by “pervasive poverty”.
The raids are paid for by financiers. A separate 2013 study by the World Bank, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and Interpol estimated that $339 million to $413 million was claimed in ransoms off the Horn of Africa between April 2005 and December 2012. Financiers took an estimated 30% to 75%, and the men who boarded the ships typically got a standard fee of $30,000 to $75,000, about 1% to 2.5% of an average ransom. Some of the money also went to negotiators, and to traders who sold the pirates fuel and khat, a leaf chewed as a stimulant, at inflated prices.
A retreat, and return
Somali piracy peaked between 2009 and 2011.
In 2009 Somali pirates staged 47 hijackings and held 867 of the 1,052 seafarers taken hostage worldwide, according to the IMB.
In response, foreign navies moved in. The EU launched Operation Atalanta in December 2008, and a multinational task force began counter-piracy patrols in January 2009. Ships adopted Best Management Practices, the security guidance published by the shipping industry, and began hiring armed guards.
The IMB, in 2012, credited “pre-emptive naval strikes”, the hardening of ships and “the deterrent effect of Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel” for a fall in successful hijackings.
By 2023, with attacks rare, the shipping industry lifted its Indian Ocean High Risk Area, the zone where ships were advised to follow its anti-piracy guidance, from January that year.
Pirates seized the Ruen in December 2023, in what Reuters reported would, if confirmed, be “the first successful hijacking involving Somali pirates since 2017”.
By August this year they had hijacked six commercial vessels since April, AP reported, among them the tanker Sibu 1, seized about 136 nautical miles east of al-Mukalla in Yemen with 16 Indians among its 20 crew. Sibu 1 was later freed by forces from Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia.
In September, the Puntland administration said in a statement that pirates had killed five crew members of the tanker Honour 25 before its recovery. Reuters reported that these appeared to be the first deaths at the hands of Somali pirates in more than a decade.
Worldwide, attacks are at historic lows. The IMB recorded 51 incidents of piracy and armed robbery in the first nine months of 2026, the lowest for that period since 1992, even as Somali hijackings rose. Michael Howlett, the IMB’s director, said in the bureau’s nine-month report, released on October 15, that “the recent uptick in Somali piracy activity is a reminder that the threat remains”.
Experts have linked the revival partly to the Iran war, which has raised oil prices and made tankers more attractive targets. The conflicts in West Asia have also pulled naval patrols away from Somalia. The lifting of the High Risk Area advisory in 2023, too, could have stopped ship operators from taking measures such as keeping armed security on board.
For the Azini operation, the Indian Navy said it tracked the boat and used “calibrated non-kinetic measures to contain its movement and prevent its escape”.