Madame Zheng:
The Most Successful Pirate of all Times by Tatyana Dimitrova
At the height of their power, infamous Carribean pirates we have all heard of like Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, had as many as ten ships and several hundred men. But their stories pale next to the story of the most successful pirate of all time: Madame Zheng. Yes! Isn’t it curious that history has erased that tiny little detail that the most terrorising pirate to ever exist was not a man, but actually a woman? Madame Zheng, born Shih Yang, commanded 1800 vessels, made enemies with several empires and still lived to old age. She began her life as a commoner, working on one of the many floating brothers, or flower boats, in the city of Guangzhou. By 1801, she had attracted the attention of a local pirate captain named Zheng Yi. The two soon married. Interestingly, Guangzhou’s fishermen had long engaged in small-scale piracy to supplement their income in the offseason. However, a peasant uprising in neighbouring Vietnam at the end of the 18th century had raised the stakes. Due to the ongoing maritime battles, Guangzhou’s pirates were commissioned to raid the Chinese coast. Zheng Yi came under Vietnamese patronage and this turned them from gangs aboard a single vessel, to professional privateer vleets with dozens of ships of their own. In 1802, the pirates lost their patronage because their Vietnamese patrons were overthrown. Instead of scattering, the Zhengs met the crisis by uniting the rivaling Cantonese pirate groups into an alliance. At its heights, the confederation included 70 000 sailors with 800 large ships and nearly 1000 smaller vessels.
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