In contrast to the British, the French advances in Indochina were initially not concerned with the suppression of piracy, even though piratical activity was prevalent in Vietnamese waters from the mid-nineteenth century. The Vietnamese authorities, meanwhile, lacked the naval capacity, both to keep its rivers and coastal regions free from pirates and to fend of the French incursions. Piracy in the Gulf of Tonkin increased from the 1860s, as Chinese pirates congregated to Vietnam after the efforts to suppress piracy in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca were stepped up. The main activity of the pirates was the abduction of Vietnamese, particularly women and children, who were trafficked to China, but also men who were trafficked as involuntary coolies. In the 1870s, the French Navy dispatched several antipiracy expeditions to the Gulf of Tonkin, and succeeded largely to suppress the piracy. The label piracy, however, continued to be used to denote any group of bandits or opponents of French colonial expansion in Vietnam. Doing so served to justify the colonisation of Indochina while resonating with a cultural demand for exotic adventure and horror stories in France.