Do Pirates Have Emotions?

Op-Ed by John Guy

There’s the Hollywood view of piracy, as updated by Captain Phillips, and there is the reality. Hollywood is goodies and baddies and the goodies triumph as long as they are US Marines rescuing a US Captain who then lives happily ever after. In reality there are a lot of conflicting drivers behind piracy and a lot of complicated people involved, and the outcomes are never very clear.

Two things made me think about the people in piracy this week. First my daughter, who is learning Arabic in Morocco, told me that as an exercise she tried to summarise the plot of The Reluctant Pirate in Arabic for a local audience. When she had finished there was silence. Then one person said, “I never thought of pirates having emotions.”

The second thing was receiving a mail from the Submarine Channel to tell me about The Last Hijack Interactive and The Last Hijack. Last Hijack Interactive is an award-winning online transmedia experience by Submarine Channel that allows you to explore the hijacking of a ship in Somalia. Showing both the Western and the Somali perspective on piracy through the eyes of a pirate, a captain, the captain’s wife, a lawyer, a journalist and a security expert, Last Hijack Interactive allows you to uncover the complex realities behind piracy in Somalia.

Now I would normally rather poke my eyes out with a hot skewer than seek out an “online transmedia experience” but as I was waiting for a train and had good Wi-Fi I clicked on the link.

And I was pulled in. It’s a great compilation of documentary interviews and footage with some cartoons to link it up along the timeline and it really does open up how complex the Somali piracy is. The interview with the pirate is hugely informative, intercut with how the captain of the hijacked ship saw it all at the time and afterwards. There is the pirate’s family, the Kenyan lawyer, and an American warship which didn’t rescue them but did give them a good breakfast once the ransom had been paid, which is more the norm of the naval presence in the Indian Ocean than Captain Phillips’ experience.

Last Hijack Interactive can be experienced in English, German and Dutch almost anywhere and the feature film The Last Hijack is available on most US video platforms. I’m not sure why the rest of us can’t get it. Probably something to do with piracy.

Check it out. You might find you have emotions you didn’t know about too.

John Guy served on merchant ships and warships for sixteen years before becoming a ship inspector and then a journalist. He advises companies and organizations working in the global shipping industry on media and crisis management. His most recent novels are The Reluctant Pirate and The Golden Tide.