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Indonesia's Swashbuckling Pirates
TIME's Alex Perry spent 48 hours with modern-day brigands -- and lived to tell
the tale
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TANTYO BANGUN FOR TIME
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Modern-day pirates demonstrate their knot-tying techniques
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It was all "After you," "Mind your step" and "Can I get you anything, a beer, a
soda?" For a bunch of cutthroats, the brigands of Babi ("Pig") Island, just
south of Singapore, were doing an extremely passable impression of Middle
England. Sure, they were sinking cans of extra strong stout from the moment they
met us in a speedboat off a stilt village on nearby Batam Island. Sure some of
them were lying to us from the word go -- and doing a bad job of it. Every time
the pirate chief tried to make out he'd given up his bad old ways, he'd giggle
and his friends would have to clamp their hands over their mouths. But we
couldn't have hoped for more polite pirates.
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Of course, we had to remember that these men might be killers. They all denied
it, most with a rather hurt look on their faces, but some of them had a way of
changing from affable and charming to unsmiling and impenetrable so fast that it
was hard not to ascribe a certain predatory ruthlessness. As generous as they
were with their offers of beer, at no time did any of us (this reporter, TIME
Jakarta reporter Zamira Loebis and photographer Tantyo Bangun) think getting
drunk with Indonesia's leading pirates -- in their lair, when no one had an idea
where we were -- was a good idea.
Meeting them proved far easier than I'd expected. In all my research, I'd found
no other Western reporter who had interviewed Indonesia's pirates outside a
jail. After all, I'd imagined weeks of island hopping in a fruitless search for
people who, after all, made a living out of successfully evading the Indonesian
authorities. But I had Tantyo. And Tantyo has the sort of contacts that makes a
seasoned reporter feel like going back to journalism school. Within 24 hours of
landing in Batam, Tantyo and Zamira had arranged for me to interview an
Indonesian customs patrolman and three pirates, two of them 25-year veterans. We
didn't even have to leave the hotel, and all it cost me was a single whiskey.
Next, they'd arranged a full day out with one of the men we'd interviewed, the
pirate chief. He'd take us by speedboat to Babi, where all the Singapore
Straits' pirates are based, show us around, introduce us to his friends, and
have his crew reconstruct a boarding raid for us. Even the ever professional
Tantyo and Zamira had to laugh at how perfectly the story was shaping up when,
as we rounded a corner on Bali's overwater walkways, our head pirate was greeted
by an overjoyed shout from a fellow buccaneer who'd heard he'd been killed.
And yet, we were glad to leave. Hanging out with pirates as they careered around
in speedboats was definitive adventure. And it would make a great story. But
these were pirates on parade, on their best swashbuckling behavior, simply
pleased to have someone to show off to. As I swept past their base the next day
on a high-speed ferry on the way back to Singapore, I knew there was no chance
they could see me behind a tinted window, but still I was glad of the extra
security of the obscuring sea spray. Who knows what would have happened if
they'd suddenly changed from nice to nasty?
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