616: I Am Not A Pirate

Ira Glass

When I was a kid, I was 100% about astronauts, spaceships, sci-fi, and I was 0% pirates. The fact that pirates were badasses, that they didn't obey rules, that they were rebels, that did not speak to the little nerd boy that I was.

But one of our producers, Elna Baker, she was into pirates. She liked how scary they were. And she told me this amazing story that has been her favorite since she first heard it. It's a true story about a man named Stede Bonnet.

Ira Glass

So the guy goes and hangs out with pirates. And even though he does not seem to have the smallest aptitude for pirating, he still ends up becoming a pirate.

Today on our program we hear the story of another guy-- a guy who's alive right now, a guy today-- who gets near to pirates. Did it change him? We try to figure that out. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Arrr you going to stay with us? No, we're not using that!

[LAUGHING]

Ira Glass

Act One, Pirate Change Denier.

You may remember hearing about Rachel and Paul Chandler a few years back. They're a British couple who were spending their retirement sailing around the world. But in October, 2009, in the middle of the night, a band of Somali pirates boarded their boat with guns and kidnapped them for ransom. They were held for months in the Somali bush, where they were threatened and fed a steady diet of goat liver.

Back in England, Rachel's brother, a guy named Stephen Collett was negotiating with the pirates. He spent eight months trying to work out a deal mostly with a pirate called Ali. They finally came to an agreement. $440,000 for Rachel and Paul's freedom. A contract was written up and signed and faxed to Ali's office in Somalia. Some pirates have offices and fax machines.

And then the day before Rachel and Paul were scheduled to be released, the pirates let Stephen talk directly to Paul.

Ira Glass

Mohamed Aden, the guy Stephen mentions, who's the governor of a region in Somalia where Rachel and Paul were held, he's actually American. Somali-American. He was born in Mogadishu but spent half his life in Minneapolis. Most people call him by his nickname, Tiiceey. And when Stephen says--

Ira Glass

That's actually the question of this story. Tiiceey took a public stand against piracy, worked to end piracy in his area. But right now, he's locked up in a Belgian prison. He was arrested for piracy and for criminal organization. He denies the charges. Though, of course, as you just heard, denying you're a pirate is an old tradition in pirating.

So is he innocent? Is he a pirate? Is he colluding with pirates? And if he is, how does a guy who comes all the way from America with the best of intentions, hoping to do the right things, end up in this situation? One of our producers, Dana Chivvis, looked into it.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey used to be just another boring dad in Minnesota. In 2008, he was finishing a master's degree in public administration at Minnesota State and starting a small health services company. He lived in a three-bedroom condo in the suburbs of Minneapolis with his wife, Shamso, and their five sons. He was a regular Walmart-shopping, football-loving, homework-checking father.

He was also active in the Somali community in Minneapolis, and he did the thing that do-gooder ex-pats do. He raised money from other members of his clan to send back home. He tried to improve things back in Somalia.

Clans run Somalia. There's no powerful central government there. And Tiiceey's clan is made up of hundreds of thousands of people. In 2008, the clan was trying to restore order to the part of the country they're from, a region called Himan and Heeb, a 5,000-square-mile patch of sand that hadn't had a functioning government since the early '90s. A place with no running water, rife with bandits and warlords, where camel herders wandered the desert and pirates plundered the seas. Where you couldn't drive from one town to another because the warring tribes wouldn't allow it.

So members of the clan from all over the world gathered in Dubai to come up with a plan to create a government there. Tiiceey went to that conference. He says he was actually picked to run the meeting. And he did such a good job, the clan elders drafted him to be part of a small team that would actually move to Himan and Heeb for three months, write a constitution, and get a government started. He's the guy who has trouble saying no, so he flew to Africa directly from the conference.

Dana Chivvis

At the end of those three months, he'd done such a good job that the local elders asked him to stay and run the place for a few years. He didn't want to do it, lobbied against it for a week. But his friends finally sat him down and said, you have no choice. If any of us had been asked, we'd do it. So he agreed.

Dana Chivvis

He's saying it was the scariest day in his entire life. That's Tiiceey talking to me in January. He's calling me from the prison in Belgium, so it's a little hard to hear.

Dana Chivvis

He says it was hard to bring himself to tell his wife, so he asked his friends to call her, figuring she couldn't say no to them.

Dana Chivvis

At first, he told his wife, Shamso, he'd only be gone a few months. But now he had to explain to her-- well, his friends did, actually-- that he was going to stay in Somalia for a few years, leaving her with five boys to manage back in Minneapolis while he lived in a lawless country they'd both fled years ago. When I asked him what his goals were in Somalia, he said he didn't want to die.

Dana Chivvis

I've been talking to Tiiceey since December when I visited him at the prison in Belgium. It's a massive and foreboding place with a moat, for some reason. Tiiceey doesn't look like a pirate. He looks like a professor. He's 6 feet tall and a little chubby. He's 44 years old with a goatee that's starting to grey.

And since we met, he's been calling me from a phone in the lounge area of his cell block. We've spent hours talking about his work in Somalia and his legal case. There's always a TV on in the background so it can get a little tough to hear.

Dana Chivvis

I like talking to Tiiceey. He's smart and he has a good sense of humor. At one point, we were trying to figure out how much these phone calls cost. He thought they were really expensive.

Dana Chivvis

Turns out, by the way, Tiiceey overestimated. The calls were much less than that. Only about $1 and change. Overestimating might be a character flaw of his, as you'll hear.

So here's the story he told me about how he went into Somalia full of hope and good intentions and ended up in the clink in Belgium. Tiiceey's first priority as governor of Himan and Heeb was to hire police and set up a court system. He knew he couldn't make any progress unless there was some security in the area. He hired police and paid them $50 a month. He told me he didn't pay his small administrative staff a salary at first because he wanted to save the little money he had for the police and the judges. Make sure they'd stay on his side.

Tiiceey was setting up a government from scratch, so it's not like everyone just accepted the new order. His first month there, the court heard a land dispute. Two men claimed to own the same piece of property, and the guy who lost the case was pretty unhappy about it. So he and a bunch of relatives with guns surrounded the disputed land. Tiiceey's soldiers showed up and the occupiers--

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey's men ended up killing three of the occupiers.

Dana Chivvis

After that incident, people started to respect Tiiceey's new administration. He had authority now. He was writing laws and he was able to enforce them, but it was still pretty scary.

Dana Chivvis

That's Tiiceey talking to a New York Times video journalist in 2009, a year after he started the government.

Dana Chivvis

That interview happened because a New York Times reporter named Jeffrey Gettleman caught wind of the changes happening in Adado and he decided to go see for himself. To get there, he had to hire one militia for the start of the journey, who handed him off to a second militia who drove him the rest of the way into Adado.

Dana Chivvis

But Tiiceey still had one major problem to tackle: pirates.

Dana Chivvis

The years that Tiiceey was governor, 2008 until 2013, that's when the piracy epidemic was raging in Somalia. In fact, piracy was so pervasive that it was basically its own industry-- one that cost the world economy billions each year. In 2010, more than 1,000 people were taken hostage at sea. Nobody, not the Somali federal government or rich Western nations, had been able to roust them. Tiiceey's region was home to one of the most notorious pirate towns in Somalia, a place called Harardhere.

Tiiceey set up local governments in other towns in the region, but when he went to Harardhere, the elders there told him not to bother. The pirates controlled everything. They'd even set up a pirate stock exchange there in the building where anyone could go and buy shares in a pirate venture. They had more guns and more men and more money than Tiiceey did, and they weren't going to listen to him.

In April of 2009, Tiiceey says he met with the president of Somalia and told him he needed help fighting the pirates. Luckily, the president had worked to eradicate piracy himself in the same area in 2006 and it had worked for a little while. The president knew someone who could help Tiiceey-- a guy called Mohamed Abdi Hassan. He goes by the nickname Afweyne, which means "big mouth."

He was a Somali businessman and also the godfather of modern Somali piracy. Afweyne is the guy who figured out that you could run a piracy business like any other legitimate business-- by raising capital from investors and then funding piracy ventures on the high seas.

Khat is a leaf that gives you a little buzz when you chew it. It's legal in Somalia, and pirates apparently chew the stuff all day long.

Dana Chivvis

If this doesn't seem like the greatest idea, to hire one of the most notorious pirates to help you end piracy, Tiiceey said he didn't have much of a choice. And actually, Afweyne turned out to be really helpful. This was their plan.

Step one, pirate shaming. Convince the local imams to start teaching people that piracy is forbidden in the Koran so the pirates become ostracized.

Step two, create an economic incentive. Give the pirates other job opportunities that don't require hijacking and kidnapping-- like maybe create a market for fish.

Step three, pirate rehabilitation. When they caught the lower-level pirates, the foot soldiers, Tiiceey sent them to a rehabilitation camp. Taught them new job skills, including how to read and write. And with the pirate bosses, the kingpins, Tiiceey had one especially attractive incentive to offer them to get them to quit the business. Immunity. Which, Tiiceey points out, only applies to the Somali government. It doesn't mean the US or Britain or Belgium, for instance, couldn't capture them later. But he doesn't mention that part to them.

Dana Chivvis

By 2012, pirate attacks on big ships had effectively stopped in all of Somalia. A lot of that had to do with stuff that was happening on the water. Foreign navies were patrolling the ocean. And maritime companies started putting armed security on their boats and sailing faster and further from the coast.

And in Himan and Heeb in December, 2012, Tiiceey held a press conference, where he sat onstage as a bunch of local pirates publicly retired in front of cameras and reporters in return for immunity. It was a huge moment for him.

Dana Chivvis

A few months after the press conference, Tiiceey got an email out of the blue from a guy called Yunus Collier, who was with a film company in Europe. He said they wanted to make a documentary about piracy and they wanted to talk to Tiiceey about how he dealt with the pirates in Himan and Heeb. Tiiceey agreed to meet in New York for a few days to talk about the project. The filmmakers put him up at the Trump International Hotel and Tower right on Central Park.

The first morning there, Yunus shows up. Ti noticed he was a little hyper and his clothes weren't as nice as he was expecting. So Tiiceey teases him.

Sometimes I forget he's in prison. Anyway, we got back to the story a few days later. Tiiceey says Yunus's boss was there also. They spent three days together. Took Tiiceey on a helicopter ride around Manhattan and out for nice meals. Eventually, Yunus got down to business. He wanted Tiiceey and Afweyne to be consultants on the film.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey agreed. They had one last meal at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. The filmmakers asked Tiiceey to convince Afweyne to help, too. And once Afweyne was on board, they'd all meet in Europe for a week, where they'd get to work. Seven days in Europe, $200,000 each to consult on a film about pirates. Pirates. Who could refuse?

Tiiceey and Afweyne landed in Brussels a month later. When they showed their passports, there was something wrong with Afweyne's visa. They were escorted to airport police.

Dana Chivvis

It was all a ruse. All of it was fake. Yunus Collier, the meetings in New York, the documentary film about eradicating piracy. It was the Belgian federal police the whole time. An elaborate plan to lure Afweyne to Belgium, where they could arrest him and prosecute him for the hijacking of a Belgian ship called The Pompeii.

The Pompeii was taken in April, 2009, which was actually just a few months before Afweyne joined up with Tiiceey to fight piracy. The Belgians found Afweyne's DNA on a coffee cup in the captain's cabin of The Pompeii. They'd used Tiiceey to get to Afweyne. Tiiceey's lawyer says the Belgians weren't after Tiiceey at all. But in their excitement over catching Afweyne, they got carried away and locked Tiiceey up, too.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey and Afweyne, the guys who say they put the pirates out of business in Himan and Heeb, were both charged with piracy.

There's pretty strong evidence against Tiiceey. The Belgians are saying that, when Tiiceey started working with Afweyne, Afweyne was still hijacking ships and Tiiceey got wrapped up in Afweyne's criminal organization, would insert himself into the negotiations for hostage releases, and used it to run a little side hustle. He'd demand additional money from the hostages' families-- tens of thousands of dollars-- for use of the airport at Adado. That's extortion.

The Belgians claim he extorted money from the families of hostages in four specific piracy cases. One of them is the kidnapping of Rachel and Paul Chandler. That's the recording you heard at the beginning of this story. Rachel's brother, Stephen, is on the phone with Paul, telling him to trust Tiiceey.

Dana Chivvis

But Stephen told me that wasn't how he actually felt about Tiiceey in that moment. In reality--

Ira Glass

Coming up, more of Dana Chivvis' story. We hear what actually happened between Stephen and Tiiceey-- the actual recordings of theirs conversations as they're trying to get the hostages to safety. It isn't pretty. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, I Am Not a Pirate-- stories where people make that claim. Apparently it's something people say when they aren't a pirate and also when they are a pirate. We're in the middle of Dana Chivvis' story about Tiiceey, a man who returned to Somalia to try to help out and ended up accused of criminal conspiracy with pirates.

And we pick up the story in the middle of a negotiation that Tiiceey was involved in with Stephen Collett. He was trying to arrange for safe passage for his sister and his brother-in-law, Rachel and Paul, who were being held by pirates. Again, here's Dana.

Dana Chivvis

At this point in the negotiation, Stephen had agreed to pay the Pirates $440,000 for Rachel and Paul's release. Tiiceey wasn't involved in that part of things, but he had offered to help Stephen with the logistics of getting Rachel and Paul out of Somalia.

Tiiceey wrote an email saying his administration, quote, "are not part of the pirates and don't deal or/and share money, and we are not expecting ANY--" this word is capitalized-- "ANY payment from the pirates or Paul and Rachel family. The only support we are offering was humanitarian support and to facilitate Paul and Rachel's safe passage."

Stephen needed permission to use the airport in Adado, which, as far as I can tell, is just a dusty landing strip a few miles outside town. As governor, Tiiceey was the only person who could give planes permission to land there, so Stephen called Tiiceey to get that permission.

Dana Chivvis

They talk about logistics, and then Stephen asks--

Dana Chivvis

It's kind of hard to hear. Tiiceey says, "I'm not going to charge you anything as long as you pay the expenses." Four days later, when Stephen calls Tiiceey back, there's been a slight hitch in the plan.

They were going to get the money to the pirates through a guy in Nairobi, but that fell through. So now they need to deliver the ransom money to the pirates at the Adado airport. Tiiceey doesn't like this.

Before, the plane was just coming to pick up Rachel and Paul, but now it's also bringing a huge sack of cash, and he says that creates a big security risk. He's worried people might get violent and steal the money. He'll allow it, but he needs extra security.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey's telling Stephen that he'll arrange for about 70 to 100 soldiers to secure the airport, which will cost Stephen $21,750. Stephen wasn't expecting that.

Dana Chivvis

Depending on how you hear this call, they're either in the midst of a bureaucratic stalemate or a small-time extortion.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey is saying that the number he gave Stephen, the $21,750, that's the minimum amount needed to cover the expenses for securing the airport. He's not personally getting any of that money. They do some more haggling and then Tiiceey says, let me see what I can do. A few minutes later, he calls Stephen back. He's managed to secure a discount.

Dana Chivvis

But Stephen didn't believe that Tiiceey was worried about security. He thought it was a scam.

The UN released a report that has a lengthy section on Tiiceey and Afweyne and their alleged criminal activity. It mirrors the Belgian case closely. And in it, there's a sheet from the Himan and Heeb Regional Administration. It's signed by Tiiceey, and it outlines fees for airlines using the Adado airport.

The costs are $5 per ticket, $1 per sack of outgoing goods, $50 security fee for a 50-seat flight. Of course, those prices were for normal flights in and out of Adado carrying regular passengers and bags of khat, not two British hostages and nearly half a million dollars. But still, given those prices, $21,750 seems a bit extravagant, even with the extra security.

I went around and around with Tiiceey about this fee and what it was spent on, and it never added up. Maybe he was pocketing part of the cash. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe the people he had to pay for the use of the airport and security were inflating their price. There's no way to know for sure.

Finally, Stephen gave in. They agreed on a price of $20,000. The money was transferred to a Himan and Heeb Administration account. Tiiceey assures Stephen it's not his personal account. He's not a dictator.

The ransom and rescue operation is set for June 17. The pilot will take off from Nairobi at dawn with a leather bag containing five bundles of $100 bills-- $440,000 in total. There's one last glitch, which is that the pilot refuses to actually touch down in Adado because--

Dana Chivvis

So instead, he'll fly very low to the ground and two security guys on board will chuck the ransom out the window into the pirate's hands-- a guy called Ali. He's the pirate Stephen has been negotiating with for months. The pilot will know where Ali is because-- and I'm not joking here-- he will mark the spot with an X on the roof of his car.

Now, Tiiceey had told Stephen he would supply 100 policemen to provide security at the airport. But when the pilot got into Adado's airspace, all he saw was one lonely car with an X on its roof, parked off the end of the runway. The pilot was already on the phone with Stephen, so Stephen called Tiiceey and said--

Dana Chivvis

The pilot did one low pass and then on the second, they threw the ransom out the window. Ali called Stephen a few minutes later to confirm he had the money. The pirates were supposed to spend the next few hours counting it, and then once they confirmed it was all there, they would hand Rachel and Paul over.

Dana Chivvis

He didn't hear from Ali again for two days. And then Stephen got a text demanding another $1 million in ransom. Eventually, Stephen got Ali on the phone. Ali's gone full Blackbeard and Stephen's stiff upper lip is gone. He tries threats. Ali mocks him. Here's that call.

Dana Chivvis

Ali says, don't you know that pirates are all thieves? We're all dirty people. Like, come on, Stephen. What did you expect? Ali laughs at him.

Dana Chivvis

The pirates didn't release Rachel and Paul for another five months.

Fast forward to now. The UN and the Belgians and Stephen Collett say that those phone calls, where Tiiceey is demanding money of Stephen, that's extortion. He's refusing to let Stephen use the Adado airport unless Stephen pays him an amount that far exceeds the normal cost for use of the airport. And they say this is part of a pattern with Tiiceey, that he did this in at least three other hostage cases. Up to $120,000 in one case.

Tiiceey says he's innocent of all charges of wrongdoing. But two months after we started talking, I heard all those recordings of his phone calls and I realized that some of the things he told me weren't true. For instance, we were talking about the plan for Rachel and Paul's release and he told me--

Dana Chivvis

He says. "There's no cost whatsoever." That's not what I heard on that phone call with Stephen.

Dana Chivvis

I played him that phone call you heard. At first, he sounded confused. He stuck with his denial.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey told me the $21,750 was money the airport owners were demanding, not him.

Dana Chivvis

Meaning his administration couldn't cover the expenses. And the fact that no security was on duty when the pilot dropped the ransom? Tiiceey explained that when he learned the pilot wasn't going to land the plane, he decided there was no reason to send police that day. But he says he used Stephen's money five months later, when Rachel and Paul were finally released. And in a book Rachel and Paul wrote about their ordeal, they do describe driving to the airport with Tiiceey in a convoy of 15 Toyotas and three or four trucks mounted with guns.

We had to hang up before we were done talking about this. The next time I reached him was two days later.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey tells me he asked the owners of the airport to let Rachel and Paul use it for free as a humanitarian gesture, but they said no. They said, we built an airport. We get to charge people to use it. So then Tiiceey says he went to the regional parliament and asked them to step in. I wasn't able to confirm any of this, by the way.

He says they also said no. His hands were tied. He had to ask for the $21,750. He said, actually, the airport owners weren't making much profit for themselves at that price. Regardless, $21,750 is the number he now admits he demanded from Stephen.

Dana Chivvis

Tiiceey told me he was worried that if Stephen or the pirates realized he didn't have as much control over the airport as they thought he did that the deal would fall apart and Rachel and Paul would remain in captivity. So he swallowed a bitter pill and demanded the money from Stephen.

Dana Chivvis

He was doing something positive, helping to free Rachel and Paul. And he was doing something horrible, demanding money from Rachel's desperate brother.

Dana Chivvis

Somali pirates were once just Somali fishermen. But then in the '90s, during the Civil War, when there was no longer government, they watched foreign boats sail into their waters, scoop up their fish, and leave unpunished. So they decided to do something about it. Initially, the fishermen just wanted to scare the illegal boats away, but then some of them started charging those boats a fine. Fines turned into ransoms, and Somali piracy was born.

In a semi-lawless state like Somalia, without a functioning government, everything is up for rationalization. One man's fine is another man's ransom. Or in Tiiceey's case, one man's airport fee is another man's extortion. I think it's possible that Tiiceey sincerely believes he was doing the right thing.

I ran all this past a former US diplomat who worked in Somalia and has followed it closely for years. She didn't want me to use her name, but she dealt with Tiiceey when he was in Adado. And she's worked with lots of people in Somalia like Tiiceey-- people who've spent years in the US and then returned to work in Somalia. She says people like Tiiceey, who have lived outside Somalia for years, they often have a hard time when they return. She called them in-between people.

They come of age living in the US, learn how the country runs here, and then they go back. And they can't play the US game 100%, but they also can't play the Somali game 100%, and they get in trouble. She said Tiiceey probably went to Himan and Heeb with the best of intentions, but she said, quote, "with no finances to support government functions in one of the most dangerous security situations anywhere in the world, Tiiceey and others have been drawn into that murky place, where they believe that they have no choice but to find accommodations with those who are engaged in corrupt or criminal practices. With their Western backgrounds, they can't claim that they don't understand what constitutes criminal behavior."

She told me Tiiceey meddled in too many things he should have stayed out of. And he wasn't savvy enough to protect himself, to add layers of deniability, have someone else handle those phone negotiations, put some distance between himself and the criminals. Not that she was advocating these things for him or anyone else. And she wanted me to make clear that she does not condone piracy. But that was her theory.

I put this to Tiiceey. He agreed that he should have protected himself better.

Ira Glass

Dana Chivvis. She works on our program and on the Serial podcast.

Ira Glass

Act Two, C.E.Yo-Ho-Ho.

So today, we've heard two stories about how, when you get close to pirates, people start thinking that you're one of them. That you're living by pirate rules. And so we thought we would close today's program with this story of somebody who got involved with pirates and then went on to remake the rules. Remake the rules of piracy. Here's Stephanie Foo.

Stephanie Foo

So here's a fact I learned recently that I love. The most powerful pirate of all time was a woman. Her name was Cheng I Sao

Stephanie Foo

That's Laura Sook Duncombe, who wrote about Cheng I Sao in her book, Pirate Women, the Princesses, Prostitutes and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas.

Cheng I Sao was Chinese. She was working on a floating brothel in the early 1800s when a pirate, Cheng I, proposed marriage to her. We don't know much about their love story, so this is a bit of legend. But supposedly, at first Cheng I Sao turned him down and tried to claw his eyes out. Then after some thought, she agreed that she would marry him but only if he would give her half of his fleet and his treasure. And he went along with it.

Cheng I Sao's husband was a pretty big deal already. But once they got married, the two of them got to work uniting warring pirate factions into one pirate monopoly. When her husband died, Cheng I Sao took over as leader of the pirate empire and grew it to the largest pirate fleet in history, which some members of our staff have insisted I mention is, apparently, a very Khaleesi move. I don't know. I don't watch Game of Thrones.

Anyway, Blackbeard had maybe four ships worth of pirates. But Cheng I Sao?

Stephanie Foo

In just one year-- 1808-- they destroyed half of the Chinese Navy's entire fleet, 63 out of 135 ships. Having 70,000 employees, that's as big as Exxon-Mobil. So Cheng I Sao ran it like a corporation. She had offices onshore, where she managed her accounts.

And she came up with a whole new way of making tons of money-- a protection racket, where salt ships and rich coastal cities paid regular taxes to the pirates. If you didn't pay, you got pillaged. It was like the seafaring mafia.

Stephanie Foo

I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Another innovation of Cheng I Sao-- the rules on her ships. We know about these from a book written at the time, in 1830. Most captains had rules on their ships, of course, but her punishments were particularly extreme. For instance, rule number one, don't go AWOL.

Stephanie Foo

Rule number two, don't steal company treasure. Each crew could keep 20% of the booty it plundered. The rest went into the company treasure hold. And the punishment for taking more? Again, death.

Stephanie Foo

But the most famous rule in her employee handbook is the one Laura thinks no other pirate had. They could not rape their female captives. The punishment?

Stephanie Foo

Cheng I Sao ran this operation solo for three years. She evaded Chinese authorities until finally China had lost so much money and so much control of its waters that they resorted to something they really hated doing. They asked other countries for help. England and Portugal loaned the Chinese government ships. And with these ships, they come after her and trap her in a bay.

Stephanie Foo

They fire on her for eight days, but they can't sink her. Finally, they send out fireboats-- flaming boats full of explosives-- to her fleet. But then the wind changes. The fireboats come right back towards the government ships and damage them instead. Cheng I Sao gets away.

But she decided she couldn't keep this up forever, so she went to Chinese leaders to negotiate a surrender. She docked her ship and walked directly into the governor general's headquarters onshore.

Stephanie Foo

And she got an incredible deal that amounted to basically a retirement package for her and her employees. She got to keep her plunder. She secured pardons for almost all of her pirates. But she also secured government payouts for her and her pirates to transition into civilian life and spots for some of them in the Chinese Navy. As part of this, Cheng I Sao wrote a letter of surrender to the Chinese government. Laura read part of it for me.

Stephanie Foo

Laura says wherever there was piracy, there were women pirates. They span hundreds of years, across the globe. It was an unusually progressive workplace, you know, for the time.

Ira Glass

Stephanie Foo is one of the producers of our program.

[MUSIC - "THE PIRATE SHANTY" BY WORLDWIDE ADVENTURERS]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Stephanie Foo. Our staff includes Elna Baker, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Seth Lind, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Senior producer for our show is Brian Reed.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Mark Hanna, the historian that you heard at the top of the program, is the author of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he tells me all the time producers from the radio show keep calling him, calling him, always with the same message.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.