Althouse: Is your luxury cruise ship equipped to fight off pirates?

November 5, 2005

Is your luxury cruise ship equipped to fight off pirates?

It might need to be!

7 comments:

Mark Daniels said...: Yo ho ho and a rocket launcher!

Actually, that's a bit frightening. No doubt some ideas have been planted in the minds of bad guys, whether pirate-wannabes or terrorists.; 11/5/05, 8:09 AM
Gordon Freece said...: I don't think they're "wannabes" exactly. More likely they're experienced professionals. This stuff is SOP around there, among other places. The defining attribute of pirates isn't a hook and a wooden leg, it's the fact that they attack you at sea and take your stuff.; 11/5/05, 9:34 AM
Mark Daniels said...: It is a fairly rambunctious thing for some guys on two small boats to try to take on a luxury cruise ship, though.

I'll read your links with great interest.

Mark Daniels; 11/5/05, 10:32 AM
Steve Donohue said...: Do you think that if you happened to be pirated at sea, it would take some of the sting off if the pirates really were like the Halloween caricatures we're so accustomed to? I know it would for me. It's a much better story than a just being robbed by a maritime version of a street gang. Just imagine the story you'd get to tell your friends- "And I swear, he had a parrot named Pauly, and he said 'arrggh, matie, hand me over your wallets', and we thought it was an act, but then they sailed off with all of our money."; 11/5/05, 11:10 AM
Anonymous said...: It sounds ludicrous, but it's not. "Pirates" or Muslim, or Arabs, as the less PC might say, attacked a ship in the Mediterranean, shot one Leon Klinghoffer, and pushed him and his wheelchair off the ship not too long ago in a similar attack.

Achille Lauro mastermind captured.

Arab/Muslim piracy is nothing new. The Barbary Wars was the last iteration of this phenomenon. Until the US and Europe declared them "enemies of mankind," many citizens were killed or captured and enslaved by the Barbary pirates.; 11/5/05, 5:45 PM
The Tiger said...: The Royal Navy and the East India Company fought pirates in the Indian Ocean for decades -- no, centuries.

This isn't new. Ships will just have to be equipped with the proper self-defence tools and a trained crew.; 11/5/05, 5:48 PM
goesh said...: yeah, there goes the price of a decent cruise now that you have to pay for machine guns and gunners fore and aft...the ol' skull and crossbones are still flying on the high seas, who would have thought it...; 11/5/05, 11:11 PM