258 
PIRACY IN THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 
little trouble need be taken to suppress a gang of petty 
plunderers. 
When we consider that each pirate prahu carries away on 
an average about twenty captives into hopeless slavery, and 
that the number of these p rah us, at a very moderate calcu¬ 
lation, amounts to several hunireds in the Archipelago (as 
we have already shewn,) every humane and reflecting mind 
must be shocked, at the extent of this crying evil, and its 
most unhappy results. When we further consider that no 
single island of the entire Archipelago has been clear from 
the descents of the pirates, we may judge how formidable is 
the system. The coasts of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Bali, Lom¬ 
bok, Celebes, New Guinea, the Philippines, and other smaller 
islands have each experienced this terrible scourge, have wither¬ 
ed beneath the blighting influence of this tremendous plague. 
In the more civilized country of Java, post houses have been 
destroyed, and the unfortunate natives made slaves by the 
pirates, until for the protection of the island fast native 
prahus were employed, and, as Mr Temminck writes, “ ils 
furent dchelonnds le long des cdtes de Java" Vol. Up. 232. 
When such precautions were necessary to guard the rich 
possession of a European nation, we may judge the amount 
of suffering and misery inflicted on the inhabitants of the 
more remote and less civilized islands, and gain a faint and 
imperfect idea of the extent of an organized system of piracy, 
rarely equalled by the Ancient Greeks or the Sea Kings, and 
never exceeded by those formidable buccaneers. We must 
refer our readers once again to the works from which we 
have quoted for a confirmation of the description here given, 
and we may approach the conclusion of our task, by stating 
a few more plain facts in contradiction to the writer in the 
Examiner. 
In the pages of Raffles, Temminck and Seibold, we have 
the names of above 30 merchant vessels captured by the 
pirates, and they are but a small portion of the loss, sus¬ 
tained by the shipping of European nations within a period 
of about 30 years. It is repeated frequently in the work of 
Mr Temminck, that numerous captures of merchant vessels 
were made from year to year, which he forbears from men¬ 
tioning in detail, and the pages of the Singapore Free Press 
alone, if consulted would show, how great a number of 
merchant ships have fallen a prey to the pirate of the East. 
As the writer however has made a distinct assertion, that no 
Chinese junk or merchant vessel with a European crew has 
ever been captured, we are tempted, having previously pro- 
