I'm reading The Opium War: Being Recollections of Service in China, written by a British captain serving in China during the Opium War, and in it he mentions Malay pirates using kriis, and Chinese cock fighters equipping their cocks with kriis for fights. What is this weapon? I haven't been able to find anything on it. To quote the book:
"The cocks, which at the present day precent specimens of the finest class, were then trained much in the same way as in Europe, but were armed, in the place of a spur, with a broad flat blade, resembling their own favourite weapon-the kriis;..." [Pg 37]
"These savages [Malay pirates] armed with terrible kriis are in the constant habit of attacking plundering the coasting merchantman which they the more readily make a prey of from the circumstance both the Siam and Cochin-Chinese government forbidding her merchantmen from being armed." [Pg 36]
What exactly does this weapon look like? How common were they?
The word 'kriis' is probably an alternate spelling for the word 'kris,' a type of asymmetrical dagger.
This image outlines the nomenclature of a typical kris in the Moro (Malay) tongue.
I've run across mention of kris in a lot of pirate-related histories, and they appear regularly as a Malay-pirate trope, so I'd imagine that they were fairly common, though I cannot speak to the actual usage statistics.
