Richard Sievers

Richard Sievers (* probably around 1660 in the Hamburg area ; † 1700 in Bombay ) was a pirate captain who was active in the Indian Ocean for several years from 1695 . Although he was probably the only German pirate of international standing, he has remained virtually unknown.

Prehistory: The fascination of "Mohrengold"

At the end of the 17th century, the Indian Ocean was the center of deep sea piracy for about a decade. Lured by the fabulous wealth of the Indian pilgrimage fleet, which sailed from the Mughal Empire to the Red Sea every year , pirates from all over the world flocked to the east to make their fortune here.

It all began in the first half of 1694 when Thomas Tew entered the port of Newport (Rhode Island) on the ship Amity . The news of the wealth that the newcomers had stolen from the “ Moors ” spread extremely quickly, and soon numerous adventurers and soldiers of fortune set off to the east to do the same.

Sievers' raids in the Indian Ocean

The first voyage (December 1694 - November 1695)

Richard Sievers was one of the men who followed the call of gold back then. As with most pirates , little is known about the life he led before he became a pirate . He must have gone to sea as a boy, mainly on English ships. Sometime in the fall of 1694 he had turned up in Newport looking for a lucrative wage . The ship on which Sievers eventually hired was the Portsmouth Adventure , one equipped with six guns Bark , which by a former crew member of Amity for plunder was equipped in the Indian Ocean. Sievers must have had considerable seafaring experience at this point, as he was hired as a navigator , making him the second man on board after the captain.

At the end of December 1694, the Portsmouth Adventure set sail with her crew of almost 60 men. In April 1695 the ship reached Madagascar and continued to sail towards the Red Sea in June. On the way there, the Portsmouth Adventure joined two other pirate ships, including the Fancy commanded by Henry Every . The three ships lurked together on the Arab side of the Bab el-Mandeb , in a sheltered bay on the island of Perim , for the pilgrims' fleet. Led by Thomas Tews Amity , three more pirate ships were later added.

The crews of the six ships waited around five weeks in the summer heat of Arabia without seeing anything of the pilgrim fleet. It was a nasty surprise for the pirates when they finally found out that they had been passed twice unnoticed by the pilgrim fleet and that they were already on their way home to India . Now a week-long chase began, during which the pirate fleet continued to fall apart. In the end, only the Portsmouth Adventure could follow the two leading ships Every commanded. However, it too was too slow to take an active part in the coup that made Every and his men rich and famous in September: the capture of the two pilgrim ships loaded with treasure, Fath-i Mahmamadi and Ganj-i Sawai . Accordingly, Sievers and his cronies received nothing in the distribution of the huge booty. After the pirate ships separated, the Portsmouth Adventure set course for the Comoros island of Mayotte , where it arrived in early November 1695.

The Second Voyage (June 1696 - June 1697)

On the Comoros Island, the no longer seaworthy Portsmouth Adventure was abandoned. It was not until May 1696 that the Boston- based Schebeck Resolution armed with 18 cannons appeared that the pirates were given the long-awaited opportunity to leave Mayotte. In June, the resolution and its over a hundred crew members, including Sievers, set course for Bab el-Mandeb to await the arrival of the pilgrims' fleet. However, the resolution was not successful . The resulting tensions finally culminated in early September when the captain and co-owner of the ship, Robert Glover, was dismissed by the dissatisfied crew. The mutineers finally got rid of Glovers and his 24 partisans by forcing them to switch to a prize made at Rajapur . Then the 90 or so pirates who remained on the Resolution chose Sievers as their new captain.

In the weeks that followed, the pirates made two prizes during their voyage along the Malabar coast , but neither had any valuable cargo on board. On the morning of December 3, 1696, the Resolution reached Calicut , where the pirates instantly captured four ships lying in the harbor. However, none of them had loaded particularly valuable goods. Sievers tried to extort a ransom of 10,000 pounds sterling for the prizes from the townspeople . However, his attempt failed because the city residents a few days later flotilla of Marathas came to the rescue, making the resolution was forced to leave Calicut fled. After this recent failure, the pirates cruised in the waters off the southern tip of India until February 1697, but only captured a Danish ship, the cargo of which was completely worthless. Since they had already been at sea for around ten months, the pirates set a course for the island of Sainte Marie off the northeast coast of Madagascar , which served as a hideaway for the pirates in the Indian Ocean.

The third voyage (October 1697 - July 1698)

Sainte Marie from stabbing Sievers and his crew in October 1697 with the now in Soldado renamed Resolution to sea again. They had chosen the Strait of Malacca as their new destination , in which they wanted to ambush the richly laden ships that were sailing between India, China and the Spice Islands . After waiting for weeks, the crew of the Soldado was able to land a Chinese junk here , but the value of its cargo was very low. In order to prevent the increasing unrest on board, Sievers decided to relocate the operational area back to the waters on the southern tip of India. Shortly afterwards, in April 1698, the pirates hijacked the English two-master Sedgewick that had loaded pepper. But since there was no way to safely and profitably deposit the pepper load anywhere, and the prevailing wind conditions made it advisable to break off the pirate voyage, the pirates set course for Madagascar again.

The fourth voyage (July 1698 - December 1698 or January 1699)

The starting point of the last voyage of the Soldado , which began in July 1698, was the bay of Saint Augustin in southwest Madagascar. The target of the pirates was again the pilgrim fleet, which this time they wanted to ambush not in the Red Sea, but in the waters off their home port of Surat . In September, in the waters off Surat , the Soldado was given company by the frigate Resolution , commanded by Robert Culliford . Sievers and Culliford decided to work together and share whatever booty they would make. Shortly after a convoy of more than 20 pilgrim ships was sighted on September 17, but not attacked because of its heavy cover, a new pirate ship appeared: the Pelican, coming from Rhode Island and commanded by Joseph Wheeler .

The big chance for the pirates came when a three-master sailing alone appeared on the horizon on October 3, 1698. It was the Mohammed , a straggler of the pilgrim fleet, who came within range of the Soldado's guns after a short chase and was severely hit several times. When Sievers let the Soldado go alongside, the Indians also fired a broadside, which did some damage. Sievers' crew had boarded the Mohammed before the other two pirate ships could even intervene. The Indian resistance was quickly broken and the pirates began to plunder Mohammed , which was occupied by several hundred pilgrims . Now it turned out that the team of Soldado had almost captured magical treasures with a loss of only two men: Around 65,000 gold and silver coins, about a thousand ounces of gold dust, three chests magnificent coral , two bags of beads and large amounts of precious merchandise found get on board. The value of the booty was around £ 120,000, not even counting the merchandise in that sum. According to their agreement, Sievers and Culliford shared the booty, the no-deal Pelican crew only received a "gift of grace" of around £ 1,000. Then the pirates made their way south with the Mohammed . Their passengers had simply been left in the dinghies at sea - without provisions or oars . Only around 80 pilgrims, including many women, were kept on board, probably to serve the pirates as work slaves or to satisfy their desires.

Most of the remaining passengers were put ashore in an estuary near Rajapur and the spoils were distributed among the crew of the Soldado . Each of the little more than a hundred men received a share of around £ 600 - an enormous sum at a time when a simple seaman earned no more than two to three pounds a year. As captain, Sievers was even entitled to two shares. With the Mohammed renamed Soldado - they had sunk their old Soldado because it was no longer seaworthy - the pirates then set sail again. After they had captured a Portuguese ship and extorted provisions in Onore , Sievers and Culliford sailed with their men back to Sainte Marie, where they arrived at the turn of 1698/99.

Sievers' end

On Sainte Marie the pirates parted ways for good. Disguised as passengers, many of them went with their riches on board various merchant ships that had sailed here to do profitable business with the pirates. Sievers and 18 other pirates left Madagascar in early May 1699 with Brigantine Margaret to go to the Bahamas . At the end of December, a storm forced the captain of Margaret , who had taken another load of slaves on board on the west coast of Madagascar, to call at the Dutch base at the Cape of Good Hope . This is where the journey for Sievers and his cronies ended. The Loyal Merchant , a three-master of the East India Company, was on the Cape . In order to combat piracy, their captain, Matthew Lowth, was authorized to search all ships suspected of piracy. Sievers and his cronies were arrested and taken aboard the Loyal Merchant as prisoners . The amnesty that the English king had promised repentant pirates in a proclamation of December 1698 and which they now invoked was of no use to them. They remained prisoners and were with the Loyal Merchant to Bombay, the main base of the East India Company brought. On June 15, Sievers and the rest of the pirates were incarcerated in Dongri Fort . The appalling conditions of detention and the almost unbearable climate in Bombay during the monsoon season soon claimed the first pirate deaths. Richard Sievers also died in the second half of 1700 and was probably buried in an unnamed grave in the English cemetery of Bombay.

literature

• Arne Bialuschewski: Pirate Life . The adventurous journeys of the pirate Richard Sievers. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 1997. ISBN 3-593-35819-0 ( Based on the interrogation protocols of captured pirates and the information about ambushed seafarers, which are stored in the British Public Record Office (PRO) , among others , Siever's life as a pirate traced with astonishing wealth of detail. Everyday life on a pirate ship is meticulously reconstructed, thus drawing a picture of pirate life that leaves no room for romantic transfiguration.)