River pirate

During the 1860s and 1870s, American merchant ships were prominent on the lower Yangtze, operating inland up to the deepwater port of Hankou 680 mi (1,090 km).

In this period, most US personnel found a tour in the Yangtze to be uneventful, as a major American shipping company had sold its interests to a Chinese firm, leaving the patrol with little to protect.

The added mission of anti-piracy patrols required U.S. naval and marine landing parties to be put ashore several times to protect American interests.

Currently, in a region known as the "Golden Triangle", river piracy, combined with illegal trafficking of heroin, poses a major international law enforcement problem.

A Chinese cargo ship hauling nine hundred thousand amphetamine pills, worth more than three million dollars, was attacked and hijacked, and thirteen crewmen were killed.

The Ushkuiniks were medieval Russian Novgorodian river pirates from the tenth to fourteenth centuries, a Slavic version of the Vikings, through fighting, killing, and robbery.

River pirates usually operated in isolated frontier settlements, which were sparsely populated areas lacking the protection of civil authority and institutions.

They resorted to a variety of tactics depending on the number of pirates and size of the boat crews involved, including deception, concealment, ambush, and assaults in open combat near natural obstacles and curiosities, such as shelter caves, islands, river narrows, rapids, swamps, and marshes.

Toward the end of the Revolutionary War, after their escape from New Madrid, Spanish Upper Louisiana Territory, John Turner and the counterfeiter Philip Alston joined Chickasaw Indian leader, James Logan Colbert and a mixed, roving band of Natchez refugees, Cumberland settlers, and Chickasaw, numbering around 600, made piratical attacks against Spanish shipping on the Mississippi River in 1781 and 1782.

During Samuel Mason's 1797–1799 occupation of Cave-In-Rock and after his departure, the name of Bully Wilson became associated with cave; a large sign was erected near the natural landmark's entrance, "Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment."

The Harpe Brothers, who were allegedly America's first serial killers, were highwaymen on the run from the law in Tennessee and Kentucky, and briefly joined Samuel Mason's gang at Cave-In-Rock.

The decline of American river piracy occurred over time, starting as early as 1804 and ending by the 1840s, as a result of direct military action taken and the combined strength of local law enforcement and regulator-vigilante groups that uprooted and swept out pockets of outlaw resistance.

Sadie the Goat modeled herself and her gang after the "pirates of the Golden Age" by flying the "Jolly Roger" flag aboard their ship and making victims walk the plank.

The USS Panay , a United States Navy river gunboat , part of the brown-water navy , which served on the Yangtze Patrol , hunting for river pirates and Chinese insurgents , on the Yangtze River , in China. The Imperial Japanese Army ultimately sunk the Panay in 1937, known as the Panay Incident .
The Yangtze River of China, a hotbed of river pirate activity from the nineteenth century until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, which was combated by patrols of American and European gunboat flotillas .
The Mekong River , where modern-day Asian river piracy exists.
A Mekong River sampan boat, typically used by modern-day Asian river pirates
The Balkan Narentines , of the ninth and tenth centuries, were known for piracy on the River Neretva . The Ushkuiniks were Russian Novgorodian Volga river pirates from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Both medieval river pirate groups were Slavic versions of Viking river raiders.
Yermak Timofeyevich was a 16th-century Cossack river pirate who started the Russian conquest of Siberia , in the reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible .
The Iron Gates , on the Danube River , are the natural boundary between Serbia and Romania, where modern-day river piracy exists.
From the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, American river pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers chose flatboats , keelboats , and rafts as profitable targets to attack because of the valuable and plentiful cargo on board.
In 1803, at Tower Rock , the U.S. Army dragoons raided and drove out the river pirates.
Cave-In-Rock was the lair, of American river pirates, along the Ohio River , from 1790 to 1834.
American river pirates patrolled the Cache River cypress swamp of Southern Illinois , near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers , from the 1790s–1820.
New York City Police Sergeant George W. Gastlin organized the "Steamboat Squad" in 1876 to end river piracy in New York Harbor by 1877.
The New York City waterfront where river pirates harassed shipping from 1866 to 1877.
New York City Police fighting river pirates along the 19th century New York City waterfront