Queens of the High Seas | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Did you ever play a video game that sucked you in and took over your life? I mean, if you have, you can relate, but if you haven't, it's similar to that feeling of reading an amazing book and staying up late to read just one more chapter. And then before you know it, it's three in the morning.

Playing Sid Meier's Pirates was like that for me. The game takes place in the Caribbean during the 1500s and 1600s. You start out as an entry-level pirate, and you work your way up the food chain by plundering Spanish treasure ships and fighting some of history's most famous pirates like Calico Jack Rackham, Henry Morgan, and Blackbeard. You take their ships, you steal their treasure, and you build a fearsome reputation. I was obsessed. It was adventure on the high seas in the form of many, many hours spent in front of the computer.

There's just something about them; the whole—it’s like the opposite of what real life is, especially for kids. This is Lee Lewis. She wrote a kid's book for Nat Geo about pirates. More on that in a minute. You know, there are no parents, there are no rules. It's a life at sea instead of life on land. There's no school. They get to do what they want. Kids figure out pretty quick that a pirate is supposed to look like Blackbeard or Long John Silver or Captain Jack Sparrow. You know, a greasy dude with a long beard, maybe a peg leg. That's how Lee pictured pirates too until a few years ago when she came across an article about one she'd never heard of before: Ching Shih.

Ching Shih led a group of up to 70,000 Chinese pirates. The article made the case that Ching Shih was the most successful pirate of all time, and what really blew Lee's mind is that Ching Shih was a woman. "I just was dumbfounded by the idea that there could be the most successful pirate who ever lived—Ching Shih—and that I had never heard of her."

Not long after, Lee was at the swimming pool with her daughters. They were playing this game called "Walk the Plank." Lee grew up playing it too. She says one kid steps on the diving board and the rest yell commands in pirate speak. "The way that we played it with my brother and sister could be, uh, you know, do a flip and a half, which none of us had any idea how to do. But if you were commanded to walk the plank and do a flip and a half, you were doing a flip and a half."

"Or at least landing on your back," she laughs. That's exactly right—that's all the better. But as she watched her kids flipping and yelling as pirates, Lee couldn't stop thinking about the real Chinese pirate Ching Shih. Afterwards, she called them over and said, "Hey, can you tell me what pirates you know?" They could name Blackbeard, and I think one of them knew Captain Kidd, and that was it. I just thought, "Well, that's really something—that it's multiple generations here that just don't have any idea."

So Lee decided she had to know more about this female pirate, and as she dug, she realized Ching Shih wasn't alone. "I was absolutely surprised and delighted at every turn by how many female pirates we actually know of and to think about how many we don't know of. Why don't we know them? What is it that would make us have this gap in the history books?"

When I talked to Lee over Zoom, I noticed something on the wall behind her. There were a couple of posters from her new book. It's called "Pirate Queens: Dauntless Women Who Dared to Rule the High Seas." One poster has an illustration of six women. They're lined up, and some of them are holding weapons and shields. They kind of look like a rock band—think like L7 or The Donnas. But I have to ask, "Are those posters behind you? Are those yours?"

"They are. National Geographic sent them to me. They just showed up in my mail one day." Those six women are all real-life pirates profiled in Lee's book. You probably haven't heard of them yet. They aren't household names like Blackbeard, but there were female pirates all over the world going back thousands of years. There's Artemisia of Caria, who led a naval attack against the ancient Greeks twenty-five hundred years ago. Ahara, a Muslim woman born in the Kingdom of Granada in the 1400s, she was forced to flee the country during the Reconquista and took revenge on the Spanish by attacking their ships in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean at about the same time as Blackbeard and Bonnie plundered ships, sometimes disguised as a man.

"And it's just kind of a spread of them with a little poem that I wrote that kind of sums it up."

"Oh, that is so cool!"

"Yeah, it's great: Of marauding men at sea, many books have told the tale. But of all the pirates in all the world, the most fearsome were female. I've asked me hearties—it's time to walk the plank with the biggest, baddest pirate of all time, who just happens to be a girl. I'm Amy Briggs, executive editor of National Geographic History magazine, and this is Overheard at National Geographic—a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, movies and myths might make you think piracy was only a man's game, but we're here to right the ship.

We'll learn about the real-life Ching Shih—maybe the most successful pirate of all time. She led tens of thousands of pirates, managed to keep them happy, and then pulled the biggest power move of all: going out on top. More after the break.

Ching Shih's story begins in southern China, a little more than 200 years ago. In English, there are different versions of her name depending on how you Romanize Chinese. She's also called Jiang Yi Sao, which is what historians prefer to call her. "Do you remember the first time you started to learn about her? What was your first impression?"

"I was really surprised. I didn't go into this with any feminist ideas or anything."

This is Diane Murray. She's a professor emeritus of history at Notre Dame. Diane first started researching Chinese pirates back in the 1970s. The U.S. opened up diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in 1979, and Diane was in the first wave of scholars allowed access to China's imperial archives. When she started researching, Diane knew nothing about this female pirate.

"The more I read, the more I just became utterly fascinated with this woman who, you know, who seemed to excel and to stand out. So, I was very surprised. I had not expected it."

To understand how Jiang Yi Sao ended up on top of the pirate world, you have to know a little bit about Chinese piracy. When she came on the scene around the year 1800, piracy was going through a big change. Before that, piracy in China was basically a side hustle for fishermen. Diane calls them part-time pirates. The fishing season was part-time; it was good in the winter and pretty lousy in the summer. When the monsoons would come and the fishing would not be so good, the piracy would commence. That's how piracy operated— you know, a nuisance, but not a threat.

A typical pirate crew might have a couple dozen men on one ship, but by the end of the 1700s, China's pirates got a lot more powerful. They allied with a rebel group who overthrew the government of Vietnam, and in return, the pirates got financing and experience in battle. By 1800, there were thousands of pirates divided into squadrons and fleets. They fought each other and were, you know, killing each other off, and there were pirate battles and on and on. Finally, one of them got smart and said, "You know, this is really stupid. Why don't we cooperate? Why don't we collaborate?"

Diane's work suggested that the pirates had formed some kind of confederation, but for years she couldn't find any hard evidence. By the 1980s, she finally made it to Beijing. She was digging through boxes of old imperial records when she found what she was looking for. "This was in the archives in the Forbidden City where the emperor used to sign the documents that I was reading. As I sat there, there was this one particular governor general whose works I had already read; his memos had been published, and I wasn't interested in him. But I called up all the documents, and I reached into the box, and there was this crumpled up piece of tissue paper-like stuff. I opened it, and that was the actual contract—the pirate contract."

"Wow, that was a moment where I just couldn't believe it." In this contract, written in 1805, the pirates agreed to work together, and they outlined some ground rules that are frankly pretty boring, like the policy for registering boats or how to call a meeting with the boss. Piracy wasn't part-time anymore; it was a professional enterprise.

And this is when Zhang Yisao comes into the picture. "But first of all, we know very little about Jiang Yisao's childhood and her background."

This is Ronald Poe. He grew up in Hong Kong—prime pirate territory back in the day. He's a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science who specializes in Chinese maritime history. Jiang Yi Sao was born in around 1775 in the coastal city of Guangzhou, which Europeans also call Canton. At the time, the city was so crowded that it spilled over into the water, where people lived in floating villages. Pretty much anything you could do on land, you could do there, including visiting a brothel.

The only record we have is that her original name was Xi Yang, and she was to be found on one of Canton's many floating brothels, employed as a sex worker, and who had already developed a reputation as a savvy businesswoman. One of her clients was the leader of the pirate confederation. His name was Zheng Yi. Eventually, he married this woman from Canton. In fact, Jiang Yi Sao just means Zheng Yi's wife. Ronald says it's not clear how they ended up together. A popular version of the story is that he asked her to be his wife, but then there’s another version of the story, which is also equally fascinating.

"It goes like this: Jiang Yi Sao was the one who sought Zheng Yi out specifically and persuaded him to marry her." In this version of the story, Jiang is portrayed as a highly tutored planner and a political operator who recognized it and exploited it for her own benefits. So Jiang Yi Sao went from working in a floating brothel to co-running a pirate fleet.

Just a few years after she arrived, things changed pretty dramatically. "Zheng really came to her summit of power after her husband died—in quite a private way, by the way." So after his husband died in 1807, Jiang Yi Sao became the leader of the confederation.

"So you mentioned that Zheng Yi died in a piratey way. So how did he die?"

"Well, he was either killed by a storm or by a cannonball; we’re not sure. But he certainly had the wind blown out of his sails with no more Zheng Yi. There was a power vacuum, and Jiang Yi Sao saw an opportunity. She knew she couldn't take power alone, so she tried something that might sound a little unorthodox."

Jiang Yi had kidnapped a fisherman's son, and he and his wife adopted him as their own son. By the time Zheng Yi died, their son was a powerful pirate leader in his own right. So Jiang Yi Sao began a relationship with him, and later they even got married. As a career strategy, it worked. "There were these various alliances that tied these various people together, and she was able to, you know, come out on top."

"So she must have had very good negotiating skills. She must have had a lot of ability to command respect. I mean, she sounds much more like a CEO than, you know, the romantic idea of a pirate."

"Like the thing I'm just thinking is—like, you think of pirates as being a very physical thing with, you know, violence and fighting and having to use physical threats, and that doesn't sound like her at all."

"I think her skills, I think, to some extent—they certainly were administrative, organizational. I'm not saying she was all love and kumbaya, but I think she certainly had a lot of skills that were not all murder and cutthroat activity."

Jiang Yi Sao was now in control of a monster fleet— a couple thousand ships and as many as 70,000 pirates. When you think about it, it's hard to put in perspective just how big that is. Think of it this way: at his peak, the great Blackbeard is said to have commanded a few ships and several hundred pirates. Jiang Yi Sao's fleet was more than a hundred times bigger.

Coming up: how to keep seventy thousand pirates on your side. We'll explain how Jiang Yi Sao ran the fleet and how the pirates turned some of their enemies into shark food. More after the break.

When Jiang Yi Sao took control, the pirate confederation was powerful but precarious. The system was mostly based on personal relationships. If other pirates turned on her, it could all fall apart. So she put her administrative skills to work.

"Jiang Yi Sao realized that it was important—imperative—to actually make it more formal and organized. So, in doing so, she established a set of law codes that were extremely severe. For example, if you disobeyed the command of your supervisor, that would lead you to immediate beheading. Yeah, it was quite scary, wasn’t it?"

There were even rules about how to treat prisoners. When the pirates captured women, the code said anyone who raped a captive would be put to death. But it wasn't all about fear. Jiang Yi Sao also created incentives to keep the pirates happy. Whenever they unloaded their stolen treasure, there was a system for dividing it up fairly. Twenty percent of the captured goods were allotted to those involved in seizing those like booty, while the remainders went into the communal treasuries.

"So, it's very much like an organized welfare system in Scandinavia. Everything was like under control in those days." The pirates had a lot of booty to pay out. They created a steady revenue stream by forcing other ships to pay an expensive fee not to be attacked. They even issued official passports to the ships that paid up.

Fishermen wanted a piece of that. In groups of hundreds at a time, they gave up fishing and joined the pirate fleet. "I'm curious about—were there other women on these ships? Were there other women who not necessarily were running the show, but who were working on those pirate boats as well? It feels weird that there would only be one."

"Yeah, there were lots of women. I mean, in the pirate clans; I mean, that by Jiang Yi Sao and your rights. May not all of them were fighting, like on the forefront, but some of them were actually backing up the entire confederation. For example, they cooked; they did the laundry. I mean, they did this; they acted as a supporting role. Many of the male pirates even brought their wives and kids along on the ships, and they lived in extremely close quarters. Sometimes an entire family would squeeze into an area of four feet by four feet. But those women weren't always stuck in supporting roles."

"I have to also emphasize that there are also some women soldiers that Jiang Yi Sao led. She herself had a group of female warriors who were very faithful to Jiang Yi Sao and would always stand by Jiang Yi, fight in the battles together with Jiang Yi Sao. So, there are also various types of women that we can identify on board."

By this point, the pirates had grown so powerful that the Chinese navy didn't have the money or the manpower to stop the pirate attacks. One of Jiang Yi Sao's favorite tactics was to sneak up on an unsuspecting ship. "Like, if I'm just an innocent sailor, I'm on my boat, and I see a pirate fleet on the horizon coming right for me—like, what happens next?"

"Well, like, if you were spotted by pirate ships, you better run as soon as possible, right? And if you couldn't outrun the pirates, you'd better surrender! Otherwise, they'd show no mercy." Diane says they might start a battle by throwing grappling hooks onto the innocent ship and climbing aboard, and the fighting was primarily hand-to-hand.

They had some cannon and they had some guns, but they weren't particularly good at using them. The pirates also made improvised stink bombs out of gunpowder. Once they caught the ship's crew, they'd tie them up and beat them. But by far the worst torture was saved for the Chinese navy. If they had government officials or military officials, they loved to behead them, and sometimes they would take the hearts out and eat them because they thought that would give them a lot of military prowess. That was always a thing. The pirates would also turn navy sailors into shark food by nailing their feet to the deck, hacking them to pieces, and throwing them in the water.

About three years after Jiang Yi Sao took over, the Chinese government was getting desperate to shut down the pirate confederation. Nothing was working. So the Qing government decided to use some other strategies instead of fighting them in the sea. They decided to approach a couple of squadrons individually and offer them a comfortable retirement.

So it's likely to divide and conquer. The government basically offered to pay the pirates to not be pirates. The pirates had also started fighting each other again, and the confederation was in danger of falling apart, so retirement seemed like a good deal. Jiang Yi Sao and her second husband-slash-adopted son decided to leave on a high note.

When the chips were down, they ultimately decided to surrender and serve the government. But even in retirement, Jiang Yi Sao had the upper hand. "She drove a ruthless bargain and only agreed to a deal once the government met her demands. Both sides reached a deal in which Jiang Yi Sao was allowed to retain a fleet under her command of between 20 and 30 ships, and Zhang Bao and Zhang Yi Sun were also allowed to keep much of the booty they collected. So they walked away with the ships and the money."

After that, the records don't have much to say about Jiang Yi Sao, but we do know that her life as a pirate was only the beginning. We know her second husband, Zheng Bao, rose through the military ranks. We know they had a son together, and we know that Jiang Yi Sao died peacefully at the age of 69. Apparently, she was a businesswoman until the end, and she moved back to Canton and continued to live out her life on the proceeds of her gambling dens and bordellos.

"So wait—she's a pirate, she becomes the respectable wife of a government official, and then she runs a gambling den?"

"Yeah, that seems to be it."

"That is a colorful life. These days, Jiang Yi Sao isn't as famous in the West as Blackbeard, although she did inspire a character in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But in southern China, the legends of her pirate fleet are alive and well."

"So, I guess, I mean, everyone in Hong Kong knows or has at least heard about the Zheng Bao Cai cave."

There's an island off Hong Kong. There's a small cave on a rocky bluff overlooking the water. As the story goes, Jiang Yi Sao's second husband had his own pile of money, and he didn't want to give it up to the pirate central fund, so he hid his treasure inside the cave.

Well, there's no actual evidence that that really happened, but it's a popular spot to explore anyway. Ronald went there when he was a kid, and it was a school trip that we were guided by teachers. "But actually, we were like—like, the Zheng Bao Cai cave was not on the plan. The teacher said it was dangerous; the path to the cave was too slippery. But come on! You can't take kids to a pirate cave and then tell them not to go in. So we had a group of, uh, some of my friends—there were about 10 of us or something. We decided to go there by ourselves."

"Yeah, so it's not officially on the agenda of the school trip, but we made it happen." Ronald says the main thing he remembers about the cave is that it's small. Even when he was a kid, it was tough to maneuver inside.

"You need to squeeze your body a little bit and twist your body a little bit in order to get through those chambers."

"Did it seem like a good place to hide booty? Like when you went into it?"

"Well, to be honest, no, not really. I'm afraid it’s not a very pleasant tourist spot, I would say."

But Ronald says people still care about the stories about Zheng Bao Cai. He shows up as a main character in TV shows and plays as a Robin Hood figure fighting corrupt leaders. And even though the stories usually focus on her husband, Jiang Yi Sao is there too. Author Lee Lewis says it's not uncommon for women to get written out of history by telling the stories of Jiang Yi Sao and other women pirates. She wants to fill in the holes in what we've been taught.

"Even in piracy, something that we've mostly—all, almost all of us have seen as an all-male domain—that women existed and excelled. And then, specifically, I guess I hope that at least some kids out there, when they picture a pirate, instead of Blackbeard, they picture a Chinese woman in the South China Seas: Ching Shih."

It's just like the poem in Lee's book: Of marauding men at sea, many books have told the tale. But of all the pirates in all the world, the most fearsome were female.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/explore to subscribe.

We have a lot for you to explore about pirates. Check out Lee Lewis's new kids' book; it's called Pirate Queens: Dauntless Women Who Dared to Rule the High Seas. Subscribers can also read a cool story about another pirate queen in the 1500s: Grace O'Malley, who battled the English off her home on Ireland's coast. Now, she's seen as a national hero, and the Irish government is memorializing her with a tourist trail.

We also have stories that cut through some myths you might think you know about pirates. Read about the real-life discovery of Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, how pirate fleets ran on democracy, and what science has to say about a pirate's diet. Hopefully, you like hard tack, dried beef, and a whole lot of beer.

That's all in the show notes right there in your podcast app. This week's Overheard episode is produced by senior producer Jacob Pinter. Our producers are Kyrie Douglas, Alana Strauss, and Marcie Thompson. Our senior producers include Brian Gutierrez. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Our manager of audio is Carla Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Davar Arteelon. Our fact checkers are Julie Beer and Robin Palmer. Ted Woods sound designed this episode, and Hansdale Sue composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The Walt Disney Company, which produced Pirates of the Caribbean, is the majority owner of National Geographic Partners. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. David Brindley is National Geographic's interim editor-in-chief, and I'm your host, Amy Briggs.

"Yar! See you next time!"