Women at Sea: Lilac Chen Part I

When women came from the far east, or Asia if you prefer, to North America, they were not always well treated and welcomed. Particularly children - both girls and boys - were used as sexual slaves and made into what they may not have been in their home state or wished to be for themselves.

The story of Lilac Chen, whose beautiful name does not resemble her unfortunate life, is an extreme example. Swept from her home and over the sea, she may never have amounted to much. But Lilac, a fighter, a survivor, made more of herself than most of us do. Thanks to the wonderful editors of Victorian Women, c 1981, we know a bit about this amazing child who fought so hard to become an amazing woman:

I was six when I came to this country in 1893. My worthless father gambled every cent away, and so, left us poor. I think my mother's family was well-to-do, because our grandmother used to dress in silk and satin and always brought us lots of things. And the day my father took me, he fibbed and said he was taking me to see my grandmother, that I was very fond of, you know, and I got on the ferry boat with him, and Mother was crying, and I couldn't understand why she would cry if I go to see Grandma  She gave me a new toothbrush and a new washing in a blue bag when I left her\. When I saw her cry I said, "\Don't cry, Mother, I'm just going to see Grandma and be right back." And that worthless father, my own father, imagine, had every inclination to sell me, and he sold me on the ferry boat. Locked me in the cabin while he was negotiating my sale. And I kicked and screamed and screamed and they wouldn't open the door till after some time, you see, I suppose he had made his bargain and had left the steamer; Then they opened the door and let me out and I went up and down, up and down, here and there, couldn't find him. And he had left me, you see, with a strange woman. That woman, it was suppertime, took me to Ningpo, China, to eat, and I refused to eat, I wanted to go home, and then she took me to Shanghai and left me with another woman. That woman never asked me to work and was very kind to me, and I was there, I don't know for how long. Then a woman from San Francisco came, and picked me up and brought me over.  

And the horror has only begun for poor Lilac Chen. But that is all for tonight; isn't it?

Header:Ladies of Vancouver via China.org

History: In the Cards

The British Museum has a curiously ordinary looking pack of playing cards on display in person and on their website (the picture above is from the latter). They were acquired in the Philippines by a Royal Navy officer named Edward Belcher some time in the 1840s. According to Belcher, he confiscated them from a pirate ship he had engaged and successfully defeated.


Belcher, a fascinating individual who really should be the subject of his own post, joined the Royal Navy in 1812 when he was a lad of twelve. He was quite successful and saw the world aboard ship, exploring such diverse places as the Canadian Arctic and the Great South Sea. He was particularly active off the coasts of China, Japan and the Philippines where he zealously – some historians claim over-zealously – tried to stamp out the rampant piracy that had become an institution by the time he arrived in those waters.

Cards, like dice, were a favorite game for many seamen. They were easy to carry and to learn how to play; gambling with them was easy too. Most pirate articles in the West forbade gambling at sea but that doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t go on. Many famous names in piracy, from Bartholomew Roberts to Blackbeard to Cheng I Sao, were reportedly inveterate gamblers.

Belcher did not say why he confiscated the cards and what he actually did with them – perhaps he was a gambling man himself? Regardless, they now reside in the British Museum for the enjoyment of visitors from all over the world. They’re quite lovely, too, and just one of those many seemingly mundane objects that tie us to our collective piratical past.

Lady Pirates: Dragon Lady

What a woman she was! Rather slender and short, her hair jet black, with jade pins gleaming in the knot at the neck, her ear-rings and bracelets of the same precious apple-green stone. She was exquisitely dressed in a white satin robe fastened with green jade buttons, and green silk slippers. She wore a few plain gold rings on her left hand; her right hand was unadorned. Her face and dark eyes were intelligent… and rather hard. She was probably not yet forty.

This is how journalist Aleko E. Lilius described his subject, the “Queen of the Macao Pirates,” Lai Choi San (sometimes also known as Hon-Cho Lai or Mrs. Hon-Cho Lo). Lilius was in China in 1921 researching local pirates when he managed to find a berth (possibly by paying the pirate queen) aboard Lai’s ship. He would document his adventures in the book I Sailed with Chinese Pirates. Originally published in 1931, Lilius’ book is still in print today.

Lai Choi San, like so many infamous pirates, comes from a hazy background and fades into obscurity, seemingly without a trace. The only documentation of her exploits is Lilius’ book, which is both fortuitous and unfortunate. Mr. Lilius, who himself is somewhat of a mystery, is punch drunk with excitement at his good fortune to be aboard a pirate ship. He also gets over his interest in the unusual pirate queen fairly quickly and moves on to talk about piratical pillaging, vices and “the body-warm smell of blood”. We know who Lai was, which is wonderful, but it is sad to have such an extraordinary person lost to talk of opium and gambling.

How Lai became a pirate, running a number of armed junks up and down the China Sea, is debatable. Lilius is not forthcoming on the issue other than a brief mention in his first chapter of an interview with a local American. This man tells him that Lai is “… said to have inherited the business and the ships from her father…” but he goes on to say that “… so many stories center about her that it is almost impossible to tell where truth ends and legend begins.” Other sources claim she took charge of her pirate flotilla when her husband died. Even the number of ships in her charge is up for debate with seven or twelve mentioned by Lilius and as many as forty or even sixty-four by later writers.

Lai appears to have been in the pay of the Chinese government. Her armed junks were, in theory, protecting local fishermen and merchants. In fact, like that other Chinese pirate queen Cheng I Sao, she probably collected money from those she was sent to protect thereby allowing them to avoid raids not only by other pirate gangs but by hers as well. Those who failed to pay up would be boarded and taken hostage with ransoms demanded for anyone who looked solvent. A second failure led to dismembered body parts like ears and fingers being sent to the families of the captives. No ransom at all was a death sentence for the unfortunate hostage.

The Macao pirates also staged land raids, swooping down on villages along the Beihai coast to take supplies. Lai hand picked young women to take prisoner and then sold them for a tidy profit to “flower boat” owners in the harbors of larger cities. The boats, of course, were floating brothels and the good looks of each girl determined her value. Because of her involvement in the sex slave trade one wonders if Lai didn’t come from a flower boat herself. This was certainly the case with Cheng I Sao who started out as a prostitute, married into piracy and ended her days running a brothel and gambling house of her own. That’s pure speculation on my part but it is worth noting that the Madams who ran the flower boats didn’t deal with just any pirate; they had to know and trust their supplier.

Lai’s raiding and pillaging seems to have terminated suddenly early in 1923. Theories abound on what became of her. Some authors have her retiring much like Cheng I Sao. Others say she was taken prisoner by the Japanese after her junks confronted one of their torpedo squadrons. Still others say she was betrayed by her own men and turned over to the Chinese government in exchange for their heads. Clearly, no one has the first clue and it goes without saying that Lilius, whose book became a bestseller, didn’t bother to follow up.Sometimes fate steps in, however, and that was certainly the case when another writer took up where Lilius left off. Milton Caniff made Lai the model for the villainous Dragon Lady in his 1930s comic Terry and the Pirates. He even went so far as to use Lai’s name, leading to a legal battle between Lilius and the publishers of the strip.

Like so many pirates before her, Lai Choi San was a mystery at all levels to just about everyone. Well, except for those who had the sincere misfortune to meet her in battle.

Header: Vintage Chinese illustration c 1925 and “Enter the Dragon Lady” from Terry and the Pirates

Women At Sea: The Nile And Beyond

In very ancient times, the profession we now call prostitution was a sacred one. Representing the goddess of love, the priestesses offered themselves to worshipers as part of festivals and other rights of fertility. This kind of religious practiced morphed quickly when someone figured out there was money to be made in the skin trade. Of course, nothing different occurred in the temples, brothels and on the barges of Ancient Egypt. And yes, I did say barges.

Most people are at least familiar with the so called “flower boats” historically active in China. It was aboard one of these that the famed pirate Cheng I met his future wife in the late 18th century. The brothel girl, who would become known as Cheng I Sao, went on to rule her husband’s pirate kingdom and eventually retire to run her own flower boat complete with gambling, music, liquor and food and, of course, the usual entertainments.

Long before Mrs. Cheng claimed her small space on a six decked floating bordello, the Ancient Egyptians were making the Nile welcome for sailors and others who could pay.

The barges were originally something like holiday party boats. Decked out with fabrics and lotuses they sailed up or down the Nile heading for one religious festival after another. The ladies on board were at first priestesses doing their sacred duty but, as Egypt became more powerful and slaves began to be readily available from captive nations, these now less fortunate women became money making flesh for their masters. It is documented that by the 19th Dynasty women, particularly Israelites and Greeks, were a highly valued commodity for their potential economic return in brothels and on pleasure barges. This continued for several Dynasties. Zenon, the chamberlain of Ptolemy II’s palace and keeper of the Pharaoh’s business records, writing in the 3rd century BCE notes that women were on a par with oil, wine and grain as leading imports to Egypt from Israel.

By the reign of Alexander the Great’s descendants, the barges were strictly business and varied widely depending on clientele. There were the common papyrus boats that would pull up in rural areas after the harvest to service local men. Next on the scale were the more elaborate wooden barges that looked very much like monoremes and stayed on the water for the most part. These kept to the tourist trade and were also available for naval ships returning from or heading out to battle. Finally, there were the grand pleasure barges of royalty and the wealthy which were working the Nile delta well before Cleopatra put her famous floating diversion together.

Strabo, the Greek historian, is probably taking into account all three types of floating bordellos when he writes in the 4th century BCE:

… on the canal which runs from Alexandria to Canopus the traffic of ships journeying to and fro never ceases by day and night. Men and women dance, totally unembarrassed, with the utmost licentiousness which seems to make for riotous proceeding.

The relative freedom – even among slaves – of Egyptian women was part of the Greek outrage at such displays. Egyptian courtesans, if not their sisters of less aggrandized employ, bought and sold all manner of property, brought lawsuits and were sued in turn, and owned some of the finest homes in cities like Alexandria. Another Greek historian, Polybius, has his nose just as out of joint as Strabo did when he writes that the most elegant private homes in Egypt belonged to whores.

Allow me to end with the amusing tale of a working girl from a few hundred years before Strabo. Her name is listed in court records as Archidice and the story goes that she turned a man away because he did not have her fee, which the court implies may have been a bit steep. Understandably, the gentleman’s ego is bruised and he begins to gab to his friends that he dreamed of sleeping with the beautiful Archidice. Our girl will not stand for gossip, so she turned to the courts and files a lawsuit demanding her fee for this client’s imagined time with her. The judge, in a clever twist that doubtless did not set well with Archidice, informed the lady that she should settle up in dreams. The judge says, essentially, since the gentleman had you in a dream, you should go home and dream that you have been paid.

Proving once again that despite the millennia between us, our ancestors were very much like us.

Header: Cleopatra’s Barge by Frederick Bridgman

Lady Pirates: Bonny And Beyond

Well, it's official Brethren: Triple P has been up and running for exactly one year. That's right; it was July 28, 2009 when your humble hostess began this little experiment in all things afloat. To mark the occasion and to thank each and every one of you for your continued support, a special treat is in order. Allow me to offer a guest post from one of my favorite writers on the web or anywhere else. Check out the sometimes funny, sometimes thought provoking and always masterful CRwM at his wonderful blog And Now The Screaming Starts at your leisure. But today and tomorrow, I proudly encourage you to check him out right here:

The Naked Breast of Anne Bonny

The most famous image of Anne Bonny is an etching created sometime in the 18th Century. It’s possible that the image was created during her lifetime, but it was most certainly created after Bonny’s career as a pirate was over. The date is important to understanding the picture. Even if Bonny was still alive when this picture was created, the artist was capturing a vibrant, violent Anne who had passed into the pages of history decades ago. The picture isn’t a representation of Anne Bonny. It’s a representation of what the artist imagined when he thought about Anne Bonny.

In the etching, she stands in awkward mid-stride. The artist has trouble with rendering depth (no doubt this was a fairly down and dirty quick rendering for some disposable bit of scandalous proto-pulp writing) and, without paying close attention, it appears as if she’s not in a contraposto stance. Though her left leg is forward, it looks at first like her left arm is forward as well. In fact, after some close study, one comes to the conclusion that her left arm is slightly behind her and her raised right arm is shooting at someone positioned at her one or two o’clock. Viewed from the top, the dynamic lines of her motion would form an X, with her top and bottom halves going in opposite directions.

Bonny is depicted in the middle of some piratical action. She’s well armed: a drawn sword; two pistols, one drawn and firing; and a hatchet. She’s advancing towards the viewer, but not directly. Her attention is on a theoretical figure to the viewer’s left. Given the angle of Bonny’s arm, we have to position this target somewhere in the extreme foreground. Or, more curiously, we can imagine that, like the viewer, this target is supposed by the author to be outside of the frame of the picture, looking in just as the viewer is. It’s a pop trash version of the the depth of space play one finds in Velasquez’s Las Meninias.

Her curious X-stance isn’t the only awkward thing about Anne Bonny in this picture. Her head and chest are curiously too small for the body. This is especially notable because Bonny’s chest is exposed to the viewer. We’re meant to believe that Anne Bonny - specifically this in-the-middle-of-combat Anne Bonny - runs into violent activity with her boobs hanging out. If Russ Meyer had directed Pirates of the Caribbean, you might have ended up with a female lead like the Anne Bonny depicted here. The simple fact that Bonny’s breasts are visible often distracts from the oddness of their size and placement.

Here’s the point where I apologize to Pauline for being the first writer to stain her site with the term “underboob.”

To get a sense of the weirdness of Anne Bonny’s breasts in the picture requires audience participation. Don’t worry: you don’t have to send in pictures. In the famed image, Bonny’s arm is extended straight out from her torso. So take your right arm and extend it perpendicular to your body. Now draw a line from the bottom of your chest. Go ahead and trace your finger across to get a sense of how high up on your chest the line extends. Now look back at Anne Bonny. Her underboob (so sorry Pauline) lines up with the bottom of her sleeve, which means that parallel line you traced across your own chest falls just above that. Even on the gents in the audience, you’ve got to admit that falls a bit high on the body. Though, curiously, her head is in proportion to her chest. It’s everything else that’s out of whack. It’s as if the artist decided that all the things that made her female were one statement and all the things that made her a pirate were another, legitimate but incommensurable, statement.

What makes this particular discontinuity even stranger is that it is based on the odd decision to have Bonny’s breasts hanging out. Why did the artist decide that Bonny would wade into the heat of battle with her chest on display?

When I first saw this image, I came up with a technical theory that explained this odd choice. Given Bonny’s mannish clothing, an absurd display of femme flesh was an easy (and arousing) way to solve the problem of showing that the artist’s subject was a woman. After all, the unbound long hair is no hint: representations of Blackbeard show the infamous pirate with longer, wilder hair than Bonny is depicted with. And that, dear reader, was where I was going to end this post. But on further research, I decided, as we Southern boys say, that dog don’t hunt.

Let’s talk lady pirates.

She Pirates

Women occupy a curious place in pirate history: Female pirates are rare creatures, but the single most successful pirate in the history of piracy is a woman. It’s an odd situation which has, as far as my limited intelligence can encompass, no equivalent. To imagine a parallel, create in your mind an inter-gender boxing league where a random handful of women appear in the sports history books here and there - mostly because they do “pretty good for a girl” - but the unquestioned Ali of the sport is woman. That’s how odd it would be.

The most successful pirate in the world was Cheng I Sao, a former floating brothel whore who took control of her pirate husband’s fleet after his death and turned it into the greatest pirate enterprise the Earth would ever know. Cheng I Sao - her name means “widow of Cheng,” a reference to her dead pirate husband - stepped into the role of captain in 1809. Her first move was to hand day-to-day control of her fleet over to Chang Pao, her husband’s second in command. It was a canny move. In a single swoop, she nipped in the bud any potential mutiny from Chang Pao and left herself free to concentrate on organizing a pan-fleet pirate collective. In less than three years, Cheng I Sao had unified nearly every pirate in the South China Sea into a single organization: the Red Flag Fleet. At its height, the Red Flag Fleet was the dominant power in the waters off Southeast Asia. Cheng I Sao not only organized the fleet, but she brokered deals with local governments, farmers, and merchants to establish an insanely elaborate web of logistical support that was, in essence, a shadow nation of vassals, regulation officials, and paper pushers all serving a single pirate queen.

Cheng I Sao was an effective, but unforgiving leader. She established a universal code of conduct for all ships in the Red Flag Fleet and it could be quite ruthless. Disobedience meant you were beheaded. Go AWOL and the pirates of the Red Flag Fleet would cut your ears off. Notably, the former brothel girl created a detailed set of instructions for dealing with female prisoners: Ugly women were released, without harassment, as soon as possible. Pretty women were kept to be sold. Pirates in the Red Flag Fleet got a special members rate on the pretty women, but if they bought the lovely prisoner, the Red Flag Fleet considered the pirate married. The price for cheating on your newly purchased wife was your head.

Somebody might perhaps argue that these achievements don’t, in themselves, qualify Cheng I Sao for the title of “Greatest Pirate Ever.” Their argument is insane. But, even if I grant it validity, there’s another career achievement that I think pushes her into the top slot. She managed something no other pirate managed. In the struggle between pirates and the legitimate powers of the ocean, Cheng I Sao won. In 1810, an outsmarted, outgunned, outnumbered Chinese royal government made peace with Cheng I Sao. The coldly effective queen fed more than 100 pirates to the government for execution: a sacrifice to public outrage and a peace offering to a government that needed blood to assuage its wounded pride. Another 400 men received some sort of legal sanction. The rest became the royal Chinese navy. Cheng I Sao was put at the head of the navy. Cheng I Sao retired from the pirate game. She married Chang Pao, the dangerous second-in-command she placated the second she took control, and opened a casino. She died peacefully in 1844. She was 69. She was a grandmother.

That’s why Cheng I Sao wins at piracy.

Still, Cheng I Sao is the exception to the rule. Most seem to be like Anne Bonny - oddities in the general pattern. Though this is unsurprising, if you think about it.

So, Like, Why Aren’t There More Women Pirates?

The primary reason there weren’t more women pirates, especially in the era of sea travel that Anne Bonny knew, was that pirates came almost exclusively from the ranks of disgruntled legitimate sailors, and that was an almost entirely masculine realm. Basically, the standard pirate bio goes something like this: A going nowhere laboring class (or, in the pre-capitalist days, sub-laboring class, that is to say slaves or indentured individuals) man joins the navy of some legit naval power. In a short time, they realize that life on a sailing vessel is a true hell on Earth. The food’s horrible, the living conditions are barbaric, and the power the officers wield over you is cruel and absolute. Furthermore, it wasn’t much of a meritocracy. You might move up the ranks a bit, but in all likelihood even the most dedicated member of a national naval force was going to leave the service dead, severely injured, or not much better or worse off than when he first set foot on a ship. From a self-improvement standpoint, it was like choosing to do nothing but increase the chance of violent death for as many years as your luck held out.

Hence the attraction of piracy. While it was generally no better on the economic and health fronts (few pirates retired wealthy and few retired at all), at least you didn’t have to eat the crap served up by the officer class. During the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, the highwaymen of the sea developed a strikingly democratic system of self-rule. Under combat conditions, the rule of the captain was absolute, but in most other cases, the captain could be overruled through majority rule. On many ships, the captain could be replaced through a vote of no confidence. (Blackbeard was replaced and re-elected captain several times.) They pioneered several other workplace innovations that speak directly to the class-based roots of many a pirate, including evolutionary predecessors to modern profit-sharing and workman’s comp plans.

It’s tempting to suggest that pirates were some sort of floating worker’s rebellion, aimed at redistribution of wealth the establishing of a working man’s utopia. In fact, when the academic study of piracy started to gain traction in the late 1990s, the dominant scholarly narrative was one of liberation. For example, scholars used the pirate tradition of willing belongings to male shipmates as evidence that pirates practiced and supported some primitive form of recognized gay marriage. The fact is that we have some informal wills that involve men with no connections outside of their crew leaving their worldly possessions to members of said crew. Could this be the act of gay lovers? Sure. But it just as easily could be what a straight dude who doesn’t have a friend or family outside the crew of his ship does when drawing up a will. The tendency to see pirates through the lens of modern liberal politics evoked a backlash of its own, with the most notable example being the book The Invisible Hook, by economist Peter T. Leeson. Leeson attempts to rewrite the entire liberal take on piracy, replacing it with an image of logical, rational, economically minded criminals whose seemingly liberal deeds were actually hardheaded displays of financial reasoning.

Personally, I think both narratives are true. What liberal romantics tend to ignore is that pirates were brutal crooks who most likely never did anything out of some high-minded ideology about the common good. On the reverse, the idea that the working class rabble that made up the ranks of the pirates should be in control of their own economic destinies was, at the time, a profoundly revolutionary idea. Pirates are a lousy fit with our contemporary political spectrum, but in their time, they were doing something that turned the conventional wisdom about the rights of men upside down. Their revolutionary impulse and its limitations should be recognized.

We’ll get back to this narrow revolutionary impulse shortly, but first we need to settle the primary reason pirates were men: The almost all-male world of the professional navy was the factory of pirates. Most men became pirates when they either overthrew their captains in a mutiny or chose to join with a pirate crew upon their capture. Since no nation employed women in their navy during the 18th Century, the single largest source of pirates was utterly devoid of ladies.

The second reason actually connects back to code of the Red Flag Fleet and shines a clarifying light on the restricted liberality of pirate ideology. The most common situation in which a woman would cross paths with pirates was if she was taken hostage when pirates captured a ship. There were two was this scenario could go. If the captured ship had fought back against the pirates, then things would get nasty fast. We won’t dwell on the details, but suffice it to say that the woman in question was most likely doomed and that her end was almost certainly unpleasant. If, however, the captured craft had surrendered, then it was probable that the woman would be released unmolested. There’s an economic logic to this. Every conflict between pirates and their prey could, conceivably, lead to disaster for the pirates. They could lose key personnel, have their ship damaged in some crucial way, or get screwed in any of a million other nasty ways. Every ship they could take without firing a shot is a boon. And the best way to discourage people from firing at you is to establish a rep for slaughtering everybody who resists, but respecting the rights of anybody who comes peacefully. (In modern terms, think of it like this: The rule in airplane highjackings used to be that you played along with the highjackers to ensure that nobody got hurt, but now, after 9/11, that social contract is broken and any would-be highjacker must now account for the fact that everybody on the plane is going to assume that cooperation means death.)

This brings us back to the captured women. They are simply more valuable to pirates if they do not join the pirate crew. In code of the Red Flag Fleet, the pretty women are a saleable commodity. For Western Golden Age pirates, the strategic release or destruction of captured women helps establish the rep you need to keep potential victims in line. The alternative, make the women pirates, would have rarely made sense. Most women would have had no training in seafaring skills or combat. Adding them into the crew diminishes each pirate’s share in the take, but does not add any particularly important skills to your group’s collective efficiency.

Stunning, isn't it? But our gentleman writer is not done by half. Come back tomorrow for Mary Read, Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People and yeah, more about pirates and boobs. What's not to like?

Lady Pirates: Arguably the Most Successful Pirate Ever

Cheng I Sao's name seems like it would make today's tenacious heroine fall by the wayside of history's long road. It means simply "Wife of Cheng". Her own given name is lost to us entirely. Fortunately, though, her amazing exploits are not.

Cheng I Sao was born in China, probably around 1775. There seems to be no real documentation of her family's standing or station but they probably weren't living high on the hog. At some point in the late 18th century, Cheng went to work in a brothel.

These kind of establishments attract some colorful characters and it was here that Cheng met her future husband, Cheng I. By the time he hooked up with Cheng, Cheng I was a powerful pirate king, in charge of a loose confederation of hundreds of junks and thousands of men that raided local and foreign shipping out of a base in Macao.

Upon their marriage, Cheng I brought his new wife into the business and she seems to have gone at it with gusto. She was not from a piratical family as far as can be told but, by the time her husband died somewhere off the coast of Vietnam in 1807, she had the pirating thing down. Cheng stepped up to take her husband's place and work the Pirate Queen angle for all it was worth.

No fool Cheng, she knew that many of the 50,000 or so pirates that now reported to her would never agree to a woman as their leader. Using the same shrewdness that would see her through to a ripe old age, Cheng called up her husband's adopted son to become the ostensible leader of her Red and Black Flag Fleets.

The young man, who was around twenty years old at the time, was named Chang Pao. He was a fisherman's son who had been captured by Cheng I and looked on fondly by the pirate king. So fondly, in fact, that gossips said there was a sexual relationship between the teenage Chang and Cheng I. Whether or not that was true, it is known that Mrs. Cheng and Chang became lovers not long after Cheng I's death and eventually the two were married.

With her power over the pirate confederation now secure thanks to her relationship with Chang, Cheng set about strengthening her operation through written laws. The standards of pirate codes were there: distribution of booty, respect for superiors, etc. but Cheng added some interesting points that are worth a mention. Several capital offenses were noted, with beheading being the standard form of execution. These included failure to report for duty, refusing to act on a direct order and raping female captives. Interestingly, if it was determined that the female captive had consented to sex, the pirate would be beheaded anyway. And the female captive would be tossed overboard with a weight around her legs. Also written in the code was the pirates' right to leave homely female prisoners on shore and keep only the pretty ones. I'm getting a mixed message here, Mrs. Cheng.

Under the impressive leadership skill of Cheng, the confederation thrived. Protection money became the order of the day and certain industries routinely paid Cheng and her boys not to raid their ships. By 1809, the salt trade was virtually in the Pirate Queen's hands as her ships escorted salt junks where ever they went. Even the Chinese military tried to avoid Cheng and her pirates with stories of Army Generals sabotaging the ships they were supposed to sail on to stay out of Cheng's way.

Eventually the Government of China got fed up and, in 1810, Cheng agreed to sit down with officials and make a deal. It was agreed that no moneys would be repaid by the pirates and that none of them would be prosecuted in court. Many of Cheng's Captains were welcomed into Navy service. Her own husband was given a cushy government job that set the couple up for life. Add negotiation to her long list of accomplishments.

Mrs. Cheng took her fortune and invested in a brothel and gambling house which she ran until her death around 1840. She may very well have been the most successful pirate that ever lived, especially considering the complete lack of reprisal by China's officials. Even the Pirates of the Caribbean movies gave her a nod in the formidable character of Mistress Cheng. I wonder what Cheng I Sao would think about that.