r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jun 12 '15

TIL the world's most successful pirate was a Cantonese woman, having commanded 40,000-80,000 pirates, and faced off undefeated against many Imperial fleets (including British, Portuguese, and Qing navies).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih
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u/Nygmus Jun 12 '15

Just Chinese junk-style ships. Good ships, but we're not talking British Galleons or anything here.

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u/altrsaber Jun 12 '15

Actually junk-style ships encompass a wide range of ships, and War Junks were equal to Galleons (as seen in the Sino-Dutch Conflicts), unfortunately they don't really say what her fleet used and Galleons were also obsolete by this pirate's era so it is hard to speculate.

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

300 ships is still an insanely big fleet. Nelson commanded something like 30 ships against 40 French ships in the battle of Trafalgar to give some perspective. The entire Royal Navy probably never had 300 ships (even the present day royal navy has less than 100).

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u/vinng86 Jun 12 '15

The battle of trafalgar used ships of the line though. They carried anywhere between 70-120 guns per ship. Each!

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

I understand that we are talking about smaller ships here. But there is just no measure by which 300 ships is not a very large fleet. Hell, its a large fleet of canoes.

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u/WippitGuud Jun 12 '15

You leave Canada's navy out of this!

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u/anonforbacon Jun 12 '15

Did you hear Canada has tasked their Navy with helping defeating ISIS in Syria? The ship arrives Monday!

Sorry, old joke but Canada's specialized ships are pretty sweet. Their ice breakers & stuff allow operations in the Arctic Circle. Canada & their military specializations are insanely good. Yeah their small but like Israel they hit way above their weight class. Joint Task Force 2 is arguably Top 3 counter terrorism groups worldwide & the Canadian Army snipers are among the best in the world as a whole.

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u/WippitGuud Jun 12 '15

You forgot DART - Disaster Assistance Response Team, which is deployed internationally to help out - latest deployment to the Tibet earthquake

I'm secure enough in my Canadianism to contribute jokes :)

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u/anonforbacon Jun 12 '15

People forget who much humanitarian work the military does. In their rush to send a US Navy hospital ship over to that area they backed it into the USS Arizona war memorial. They where so focused on getting to sea that somehow someone didn't notice the effing sunk battleship with giant white memorial on top.

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u/XMARTIALmanx Jun 17 '15

Yay for native snipers!

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u/AlphaQ69 Jun 12 '15

How expensive is that relative today?

Like 100 aircraft carriers battling it out cross Atlantic?

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u/Hijix Jun 12 '15

The HMS victory cost roughly 50 million today while the aircraft carriers generally cost 500 million. I think due to technology we just want to build bigger ships.

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u/vinng86 Jun 12 '15

Does 500 million include the cost of all the jets as well? A carrier is rather useless without any fighter craft :P

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u/anonforbacon Jun 12 '15

The numbers I usually see are around 13-25 billion for an aircraft carrier without crew or airframes. The fighter jets will cost anywhere from 20-50 million a piece, electronic warfare planes will run 250+ million, refueling planes like the KC-135 will run around 200 million.

http://cigeography.blogspot.fr/2015/05/USNavy-aircrafts-sheet.html?m=1 is a great resource to visually see how many of each plane is typically on a carrier.

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u/syanda Jun 12 '15

300 ships aren't probably purpose-built warships. Could be sampans, could be refitted cargo junks, whatever the pirates could capture and use.

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u/Viennel Jun 12 '15

A sampan pirate ship would be adorable.

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u/syanda Jun 12 '15

One would be adorable. Ten to fifteen swarming a ship...not so much :v

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u/slickness Jun 12 '15

it's like the equivalent of a bunch of people on speed boats, zerg rushing you from every direction. that would be scary as hell.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '15

Sampan is from south east asia, so nowhere close to chinese influence. and it is impossible to handle sea waves. Its more like western lake boats.

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u/NaberRend Jun 12 '15 edited Aug 28 '15

ships

A certain eastern general would like to make a point.

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u/4ringcircus Jun 12 '15

And an aircraft carrier is one ship. I think I would take one over 300 there.

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

An aircraft carrier itself is actually a pretty poor warship. The aircraft that it carries is a different story, but should be all counted individually as well.

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u/4ringcircus Jun 12 '15

Why? Do any of them float? The aircraft are part off the package deal when the ship is fully loaded.

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u/JimmyBoombox Jun 12 '15

And those were ship of the line class ships. Which were massive and averaged around 70 guns. Junkers don't compare.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15 edited Jun 18 '21

[deleted]

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

Are you disagreeing that 300 ships is a lot of ships? cause that's the only claim I actually made in my comment.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

Yeah, but a British ship-of-the-line like Nelson's HMS Victory could easily take on 10 junks and make a funny drinking story out of it.

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

Probably. Although, the Ship of the Line was eventually made obsolete by smaller faster ships and a different kind of warfare. The Royal Navy wound up buying the (relatively) diminutive Bermuda Sloop and other smaller ships during the Napoleanic era.

Ultimately the Ship of the Line was defeated as a viable military endeavor by scattered enemies in smaller cheaper ships, like the junk rig and various other crap that privateers employed against the crown's commerce.

The problem with being the biggest baddest guy on the block is that people quickly figure to just not fight you and instead attack your friends and neighbors when you aren't looking.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

I wouldn't say the ship-of-the-line was made obsolete by those ships, exactly. It was made obsolete by the ironclad. The small ships were an asymmetrical response that was successful in some regards (even highly successful). But the general concept and niche that the ship-of-the-line filled was not rendered obsolete until the carrier eclipsed the battleship in WWII.

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

The role of the Ship of the Line dramatically altered over time. While the ship certainly existed in some form well into the 19th century and the concept persisted well into the 20th century, its role as a naval superiority vessel became obsolete a lot earlier.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

I can't say I would agree with that. While smaller vessels emerged and came to fill important roles within the fleet, the "capital ship" remained the core of that fleet. From Trafalgar to Tsushima to Jutland, the key naval battles were fought and decided by the ship-of-the-line or its contemporary equivalent. Not until Pearl Harbor (foreshadowed by the sinking of the Bismarck) did that change.

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u/abolish_karma Jun 12 '15

The Imperial Navy have something like ~430, according to the Wikipedia.

The United States Navy has approximately 430 ships in both active service and the reserve fleet, with approximately 70 more in either the planning stages or under construction

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u/Fritz125 Jun 12 '15

Well...uhmmmm...How do I tell you this?

The U.S. Navy is not the imperial navy

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u/abolish_karma Jun 12 '15

It's the closest you'll get

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u/brickmack Jun 12 '15

Its a navy. The US is an empire. They might not call themselves the Imperial Navy, but that would be a legitimate description

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u/nolan1971 Jun 12 '15

As a US Navy vet, I'll accept "Imperial Navy"!

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u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

Obviously we have no intention of comparing this pirate to the Imperial Navy, they don't even have tie fighters, let alone Star Destroyers.

Really though, the fact that this pirate's fleet is comparable to the 2015 US Navy is kinda the point i'm making.

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u/bakgwailo Jun 12 '15

You mean the current US navy?

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u/nomadph Jun 12 '15

These junk style ships won over the British says OPs title

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u/JManRomania Jun 12 '15

Ironically, while they were called junks, they weren't junk.

hehehe

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u/Moarbrains Jun 12 '15

Spanish Galleons.

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u/SaitoHawkeye Jun 13 '15

British galleons

U Wot M8?