Staff Blog
The Pirates of the Delaware
posted by Joel Tannenbaum
During the 17th and 18th centuries, fishing boats and passenger ships along the Delaware River suffered the attacks of pirates like the notorious Richard Worley. Philadelphians boarding even the smallest and most inconsequential vessels lived in fear of being raided and stripped of their valuables, or worse, by the motley array of thugs, deserters and brigands who might trim their sails in the tidewaters near Trenton and voyage down the Delaware in search of plunder. Worley was captured in Virginia and hanged in 1819.
Then, for a long time, nothing happened. The Delaware became so placid and dull that by the late 20th century, even the universally loathed “Ride the Duck” amphibious vehicles could prowl the river without fear of reprisal. (The same could not always be said on land, as with the case with the Great South Street Duck Hunt of 2013.)
Seemingly out of nowhere, piracy returned to the Delaware in the mid-21st century. Early one fog-shrouded Sunday morning, a junk ship disembarked from its pier in Port Richmond, headed for the Atlantic. The ship, Chilean in manufacture, was bound for Shanghai. It’s cargo: several tons of copper wire, aluminum and brass, mostly stripped from residential properties in Philadelphia. The ship’s voyage was not unusual. It was simply the penultimate stage in what had become the lifeline of Philadelphia’s economy: the global recycled metals industry.
The ship’s captain, who, typical of his generation, had begun ferrying scrap after graduating from Haverford College in 2042 with a BA in Comparative Literature, had just finished guiding the vessel away from the dock and along the river. He glanced in his binoculars and squinted in disbelief at the battleship-grey sloop headed directly towards them. It was the ship’s ragged black flag that particularly caught his eye. He rolled his eyes. “Whatever dude.” he quipped to the ship’s first mate, “Could this be like, anymore derivative of Conrad?”
“Maybe it’s more of an homage,” replied the first mate, whose still unfinished doctoral dissertation concerned the possible influence of Mendellian genetic theory on the later fiction of Herman Melville. “There’s kind of like a Billy Budd thing going on too,” he began, the thought stifled by his own laughter. “I mean, if you take the flag to represent…”
THUD! THWACK!
Before he could complete his observation, the two lay unconscious on the cabin floor, laid low by a gym sock filled with nickels, wielded by none other than the soon-to-be infamous Fishtown Peg, pirate of the Delaware.
Hours later, the junk ship’s former crew awoke afloat on a hastily tied web of pool noodles, bumping gently against the pier belonging to Club Egypt, the last remaining non-scrap business on Delaware Avenue. As the club’s waitstaff revived them with jello shots, the two pondered the effect the hijacking would have on their student loan payment schedules, and wept.
By that time, Fishtown Peg and her small but highly efficient crew had navigated the stolen junk ship into the Atlantic, several miles off of the Jersey Shore, just over the line into international waters. Her firearm visible from her waistband, Peg negotiated politely but firmly with the crew of a Turkish trawler over the price of her ill-gotten haul of copper wire and brass fixtures.
“Çok pahali!” muttered the trawler’s captain as he counted out 10,000 Chinese renminbi and handed it to Peg. As he re-boarded his ship, Peg and her crew assumed their respective positions around their new vehicle and charted a course back towards Philadelphia. If they were lucky, they could be back on land before the black market currency exchange on Kensington Avenue closed for the day, and back out in the water by nightfall to pick off a mid-sized freighter or two. For Peg, and her rapidly growing flock of imitators, formerly law-abiding citizens of an increasingly impoverished city, it was all in a day’s work.
Fishtown Peg, née Peggy Dombrowski of the 800 block of East Girard Avenue, hadn’t exactly found piracy. It had found her. After stints as a short-order cook, cab dispatcher and nursing student, Peggy had woken one morning in 2038 to find herself unable to meet steadily increasing mortgage and car payments, despite logging 60-70 hour work weeks. Venting her frustrations in a distinctly robust evening of drinking with childhood friends on the disused Michael Nutter Memorial Riverfront Bike Path, Peggy awoke from blackout to find herself peddling an antiquated paddleboat down the Delaware. In the backseat were the paddleboat’s driver and a family of kind-looking but terrified Canadian tourists, all bound at the wrists and ankles with scraps of what appeared to be a vintage “Fishtown University” t-shirt, sized XXL. The events of the evening slowly beginning to creep back into her memory, Peggy quickly docked the vehicle and began to untie her captives, apologizing profusely. Uncomprehending, they scrambled towards the muddy embankment, emptying the contents of their wallets and discarding wedding bands and expensive earrings behind them. Baffled, Peggy counted up her haul. She had $2539 in Canadian traveller’s checks (roughly $9000 American at 2038 exchange rates) and significantly more than that in jewellery. The rest, as they say, is Fishtown history.
In many ways, the proliferation of pirates along the Delaware was a fitting climax to the now decades-old scrap metal economy. Beginning in the first decade of the 21st century, when the collapse of the housing market and the rapid economic growth taking place in China and India had inflated commodity prices to previously unimagined levels, scrap became a wildly valuable source of income for residents of North Philly. A seemingly endless supply of abandoned houses and cars, combined with seemingly endless demand from Asia for building materials, meant that an enterprising Philadelphian with a blowtorch, bolt cutters and a working knowledge of the urban geography of Kensington could load up a shopping cart with old pipe-fittings and haul it down to one of the dozens of (by 2015, increasingly Chinese-owned) junkyards dotting the river, and walk away with the equivalent of a week’s wages. At first viewed as a nuisance, the city government came to embrace the practice. Soon it was all but de rigueur for local politicians to dot their speeches at supermarket openings and community college graduations with glowing references to the “brass knuckles” of today’s young entrepreneurs.
But the problem with recycled metals, as local economists occasionally pointed out, was that they were finite. There had been little new building in Philadelphia since the first decade of the 21st century. As such, when Philadelphia scrappers found they had cleaned out every single abandoned house in the city, they moved on to the hulking, abandoned condominium buildings on the waterfront and in the “Loft District” (subsequently renamed “Cholera Alley” for reasons that will be discussed elsewhere in this tome.) When these were exhausted, they moved on to occupied residences. Soon it was not uncommon for a family of four to awake in the morning and find that all of the fittings and much of the electrical work had been stripped while they slept.
Pirates like Peg also found themselves in an increasingly crowded field. As freight-hauling became more dangerous, piracy quickly supplanted it (along with rat-hunting) as the most popular occupational choice for liberal-arts graduates. It was not uncommon for three or even four pirates of the Delaware to attack a single junk ship, and often as not end up fighting with each other. And Philadelphia pirates soon found themselves competing with professional pirates from as far afield as the coastal waters of Somalia and the South China Sea, drawn by rumors of the lucrative scrap hauls to be found on the Delaware.
With law enforcement budgets at an all-time low, the practice was tolerated. It was not until the 2042 “Sinking of the Duck” that the city finally attempted to crack down. “The wacky quacker noisemakers,” said one traumatized witness. “The last thing you heard as they went under was those wacky quackers.”
But law enforcement was too late. With the city’s building effectively cannibalized, and the Delaware crowded with would-be pirates, foreign-owned scrapyards began to pull up stakes in search of more lucrative ventures in Brazil and India. As the last ship left its moorings, Fishtown Peg was undeterred. “All hands on deck!” she was heard to tell her crew. “We’re headed for Brooklyn!”
