Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  The pirates’ ferocity made up for their lack of numbers. With cutlasses ringing on steel scimitars, the pirates fought for the ship for two hours.

  Smoke, explosions, and the screams of dying and wounded men filled the air. The decks of the Gang-I-Sawai ran with blood as the Indian soldiers fiercely resisted the pirate onslaught. At one point in the confusion of battle, the Gang-I-Sawai’s captain, Ibrahim Khan, fled below to a cabin where he had secreted a number of Turkish girls whom he had bought in Mecca to add to his harem. Apparently intending to safeguard his property from the marauding pirates who were still battling his troops on the decks above, the Mogul captain wrapped turbans around the girls’ heads, hoping thereby to fool the infidel outlaws into believing they were boys. But the pirates, who burst into the cabin in the wake of the captain, were not fooled by the ruse. They dragged the girls up on deck where the pirates were now gaining the upper hand in the bloody battle.

  By degrees the fighting diminished as more and more of the Muslim soldiers and sailors threw up their hands in surrender. Finally, the fighting ceased altogether.

  In the wake of the noise of combat, an eerie silence now descended over the Gang-I-Sawai. The dead lay everywhere. Wreckage littered the decks. The Gang-I-Sawai creaked in the sudden quiet. Every’s men had gained the victory but at the cost of fifteen to twenty dead comrades—a fact that so infuriated them that they began a vengeful orgy of murder, rape, and torture as they ransacked their prize.

  Every’s men had little compunction about meting out brutal treatment to their captives. Muslims, in their view, were only “black heathen,” sinners who denied Christ and therefore deserved the harsh treatment they got.

  Every’s men stripped their captives, both men and women, of all their clothing and possessions. They tortured any captive they suspected of withholding valuables. In some cases the infuriated pirates simply killed their victims after taking their money. A number of the women, however, were dragged off to be gang-raped. One of those treated in this manner was the elderly wife of a high-ranking Mogul official who also happened to be a relative of the Great Mogul himself. Some of the women died under their savage treatment. Some threw themselves overboard rather than submit to ravishment. Some, feeling themselves shamed forever, later stabbed themselves to death with daggers.

  Throughout the butchery, Every himself remained aboard the Fancy. He knew better than to take part personally in these brutalities. In any case, he was not temperamentally given to such outbursts of vengeance-seeking, although he had participated in the thick of the battle for the Gang-I-Sawai.

  As the rage of the pirates spent itself, and as cooler heads began to restore order, it became clear that—as Every had anticipated—the Gang-I-Sawai was a mother lode of booty. The loot that was now piling up on her bloody decks included gold, silver, ivory, jewels, damasks, and even a saddle set with rubies, which had been intended for the Great Mogul himself.

  Now Every, taking command again in the aftermath of his crew’s explosion of violence, ordered all this wealth—and the surviving women as well—transferred to the Fancy.

  When this was accomplished, Every ordered the Gang-I-Sawai cut loose to join its consort, the previously pillaged Fateh Mohamed, for the long, lugubrious voyage home.

  Eventually both ships put in at Surat, the Great Mogul’s chief port and the East India Company’s main trading station in India. The tale of the pirate terror that the two ships’ survivors told outraged the Great Mogul. The Mogul’s fury, in turn, sent a chill of fear through the men of the East India Company who depended upon his goodwill for their continued prosperity.

  Although the Muslim Indians were sympathetic toward the civilian victims of the pirate terror, they wasted little sympathy on the soldiers and sailors who had lost the Gang-I-Sawai.

  Mogul historian Khafi Khan viewed the pirate victory as a disgrace for Mogul arms and he blamed the ship’s captain for not putting up a better fight. “The English are not bold in the use of the sword,” he wrote, “and there were so many weapons aboard that, if any determined resistance had been made, they had been defeated.”

  Meanwhile, Fancy, after rejoining the other ships of Every’s fleet, set off southward for safe waters where Every planned to share out the loot and plan his next move.

  Fancy and her consorts eventually made landfall at the island of Bourbon (later to be renamed Réunion) almost 2,500 miles away from the scene of the battle. At this time Bourbon, although claimed by France, was virtually devoid of French presence, let alone French law.

  Here Every and his men divided the plunder from the Gang-I-Sawai and the Fateh Mohamed. The East India Company later estimated Every’s loot at some £325,000—a truly imperial haul.

  Each man in Every’s company received more than £1,000, plus a number of jewels. The apprenticed seamen who sailed in the fleet, most of them boys between twelve and fifteen years of age, received £500 each. Every himself was awarded the pirate captain’s usual double share. There is no record of the fate of the women taken from the Gang-I-Sawai. More than likely they were left stranded at Bourbon.

  Now, with the loot divided, Every’s fleet broke up, with each ship going its own way. Every himself wanted to take Fancy to the Bahamas. He knew of a local governor there, he said, who would help them sell their stolen goods for cash. But members of Every’s crew wanted to go to Brazil instead. As usual Every finally won the argument, although about fifty of his men elected to remain in Bourbon rather than voyage farther. To fill their places Every took aboard a consignment of black slaves. Then, in April 1696, he set off for the Bahamas.

  As the news of the capture of the Gang-I-Sawai reached Europe, tall tales began to circulate about Henry Every, tales that would make him a legend. At this time he was given the appellation of Arch-Pirate. It was said that he had captured and married one of the Great Mogul’s beautiful daughters. Other stories had him settling down in Madagascar with one or more exotic beauties, and living in great state and luxury surrounded by adoring subjects. It was said in the drawing rooms of London that he had offered to pay off the national debt of England in order to obtain the king’s pardon for his crimes. A popular play was written about him, its title The Successful Pirate. Defoe says that many contemporaries believed that Every had founded a new monarchy in far off Madagascar. (Every was clearly the inspiration for a novel Defoe himself wrote in 1720, The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton.)

  It was even reported that Every had been one of Henry Morgan’s buccaneers in his younger days.

  Every had become in the public mind, the personification of all pirate captains: dashing, daring, cruel, and cool—the very model of a pirate villain.

  Meanwhile, the subject of all these fictions had arrived with his ship Fancy at the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, then under Danish control. Here Every and his men sold some of their booty for ready cash to an appreciative populace who quickly snapped up whatever the pirates offered.

  Every and Fancy then went on to the Bahamas where Governor Nicholas Trott received him and his men warmly after the pirates presented the governor with £7,000 worth of their booty as a mark of their high regard for him. Trott, in return, opened up his home for the entertainment of Every and his men.

  Although Every no doubt enjoyed the hospitality that his new wealth bought in the Bahamas, he realized, far better than his men did, that he would never really be free to enjoy his good fortune as long as he remained a fugitive from the law. To deal with this difficulty, Every now sought some legal absolution from his friend Governor Trott—a document of pardon that would enable him to return to England and the full enjoyment of his ill-gotten gains. But even the obliging Governor Trott was unable to provide what Every wanted. He had, he explained, no power to issue pardons. Only the king and Parliament could do that.

  Every apparently remained unconvinced. He sailed on to Jamaica where he sought out the local governor—one William Beeston—and offered him a considerable sum (Bees
ton said it was £24,000) for a pardon absolving Every and his crew of their crimes. But Beeston, like Trott, could do nothing for the Arch-Pirate.

  Back in the Bahamas once again, Every and his crew suffered a serious loss: The Fancy, caught in a storm when her crew was too drunk to handle her properly, was driven up on a reef where she broke up. She was a total loss except for her guns, which Governor Trott salvaged for his own use.

  Now some of Every’s crew, growing weary of their captain’s seemingly incessant search for an illusory pardon, began to leave him. Some found their way northward into the colonies of America. One of these even married the daughter of Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania. Others drifted away to one port or another. One, it was reported, went insane when he gambled away all his hard-won loot.

  For all the romantic tales that the Arch-Pirate and his crew of desperadoes had inspired by their exploits, the truth was that many months after their victory over the Gang-I-Sawai, most of them were in serious trouble: stranded in the Bahamas and unable to find a place of refuge to enjoy their wealth. But Henry Every, always resourceful and always looking out for his own best interests, now came up with a daring plan to return to Britain secretly. In reality, it was a plan intended to benefit him alone.

  Every suggested that he and his men buy two or three small sloops, vessels that could land unobserved in the numerous small bays of Ireland or the west coast of England. They would then, he continued, divide into several small groups, each group to man one of the sloops. Each sloop would then sail to a different destination on the Irish or English coast, after which each small crew would simply abandon its sloop and go ashore to blend in with the general population. The authorities, Every went on persuasively, would be searching for a large vessel in the Caribbean, or in the Indian Ocean. They would never expect pirates to be bold enough to return to England. Furthermore, Every suggested smoothly, the authorities would never be suspicious of an inoffensive little sloop entering an out-of-the-way harbor. The very audacity of the plan, Every assured his listeners, would guarantee its success.

  About two dozen of his original crew agreed to Every’s proposal. They now bought two sloops. Every and eleven men in one sloop, and the rest in the other, set sail for home, each sloop making for a different destination—according to plan. Every, who had furnished himself with papers and letters that identified him as “Captain Benjamin Bridgemen,” now gave out different stories to his companions about his intentions once they reached their journey’s end. His real plan he kept to himself.

  In June 1696, Every’s sloop landed at a small bay called Dunfanaghy in County Donegal, Ireland. Here Every deserted his companions and went off alone.

  The other sloop had landed in Westport, County Mayo. She had immediately aroused local suspicion when the sailors who had brought her in began to unload cargo that seemed to consist only of chests of silver and gold. The county sheriff arrested a number of these careless sailors almost as soon as they had set foot ashore. A few, however, eluded immediate capture.

  The men who had landed with Every in Donegal fared better. They got ashore all right, and they made their way to their various destinations. But they gave themselves away—as Every undoubtedly knew they would—by drunken boasting and by immodestly flashing the gold in their purses. One man, John Dann, was taken in Rochester when a maid at the inn where he was hiding out discovered that his jacket was too heavy to lift—not surprising since Dann had sewed £1,045 in gold into its lining. Other members of Every’s crew were arrested when they tried to sell their foreign coin or jewels to goldsmiths.

  In the end, all twenty-four of the men Every had talked into returning with him were arrested.

  But Every himself eluded the net.

  Questioned about their cunning captain’s whereabouts, Every’s men were unable to shed any light on the subject. One of his captured crew said Every had told him he planned to settle down in Scotland. Another said he had seen Every in Dublin. Still another said Every was making for Plymouth. Others thought Every was living in London where he had been joined by a Mrs. Adams, the wife of his former quartermaster on the Fancy.

  Henry Every, the Arch-Pirate, had disappeared behind the smokescreen of false leads that he had fed his gullible men. He was never seen or heard from again.

  If no one knows Henry Every’s final fate, the record spells out clearly the destinies of the simple sailors he had used as decoys. These captured crewmen of Every’s went on trial in October 1696. All were convicted. The court sentenced eighteen of them to be transported to Virginia as convict labor. It ordered that six of them suffer hanging for their crimes aboard the Fancy. On October 25, 1696, at Execution Dock, Wapping, the six condemned met the hangman.

  One of those hanged was John Sparkes. A contemporary broadsheet described his end:

  “This villain expressed his contrition for the horrid barbarities he had committed, though only on the bodies of heathens. The inhuman treatment and merciless tortures inflicted on the poor Indians and their women still afflicted his soul. He declared that he justly suffered death for such inhumanity even more than for his crime in running away with the Charles, which was the lesser concern.”

  Sparkes may have repented, but the other condemned men from Every’s crew went to their deaths with bravado, and with contempt for the society that had condemned them. According to the broadsheet that described the execution, one of the unrepentant men, Dennis MacCarthy, took off his shoes, after which he “kicked them off the scaffold, saying he would prove those to be liars who had said he would die with his boots on.”

  As for the Arch-Pirate, his mysterious disappearance only added to his legend, giving rise to even more lurid tales about his career and speculations about his fate. One story that gained considerable credence held that Every had bought himself a royal pardon with his plunder—and, with a new identity, lived out his days in ease and comfort in a great house overlooking the sea. Other stories suggested that Every, repenting of his villainous past, spent the rest of his life doing penance. Some said it was Every himself who betrayed his returning crew members to the authorities in England—an act of perfidy that the Arch-Pirate was certainly capable of—and that he later went mad with remorse.

  Even Defoe gives his tale of the Arch-Pirate a colorful ending. Defoe says that Every eventually ended up in the town of Bideford, in Devon, where he was cheated of his swag by local merchants who threatened to expose him to the authorities if he complained. Defoe says that in the end Every died “not being worth as much as would buy him a Coffin,” and crying to all who would hear him that merchants were “as good Pyrates at land as he was at Sea.”

  Whatever Every’s true fate may have been, it remains unrecorded. His exploits in eastern waters, however, were not only recorded, they were discussed avidly in the fo’c’sles of a thousand ships where sailors dreamed of Arab gold, the bodies of dusky women, and the liberty to do as they pleased.

  If Thomas Tew and Amity had exposed the wealth of the East, Henry Every and Fancy had confirmed its amplitude—and had shown that resolute fighting men could take it for themselves.

  As the 1690s ran out, the pirate war burned in full conflagration. In the wake of Every, English and colonial pirates infested the Indian Ocean. The Red Sea became a pirate lake. Ships with names like Resolution, John and Rebecca, (which belonged to the New York City merchant prince Frederick Philipse), Portsmouth Adventure, The Charming Mary, Pelican, and a dozen others, all manned by tough ex-privateers and mutineers from both the merchant fleets and the Royal Navy, cruised the Indian Ocean like the armed fleet of a country at war.

  As with any combat fleet, the pirate men-of-war needed places to resupply, to rest and repair—in brief, a secure base of their own.

  Luckily for them, such a base already existed, a ready-made fortress that would soon become the unruly “homeland” of a ragtag “nation” of rebels and raiders: Madagascar.

  5

  The Outlaw Nation

  The wor
ld’s fourth largest island—after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo—Madagascar lies approximately eight hundred miles below the equator, off the southeast coast of Africa. It is separated from the African coast by a five-hundred-mile stretch of water called the Mozambique Channel.

  From north to south Madagascar is 980 miles long. It is 260 miles across at its widest point. In area Madagascar is about five times larger than England, and twice the size of Italy.

  When approached from the Indian Ocean, the great island, green and jagged against the horizon, seems to emerge abruptly out of the ocean itself—as if a mountain range had suddenly heaved itself up from the sea. On this eastern side of Madagascar the land climbs sharply to a green plateau—geographically a long and narrow shelf of land thick with forests. Above this wooded shelf loom the mountains whose massive formation, like a huge rugged wall, runs the length of the island. Some of the peaks of this mountain chain rise more than 7,000 feet above sea level. One, Amboro, soars to 9,500 feet. Numerous short and violent rivers leap from the mountains, foam across the narrow, forested tableland, and hurl themselves in spectacular waterfalls over cliff faces into the sea below. Some of the mountain rivers, rather than ending in falls, have cut gorges for themselves down to the ocean.

  In many places the wall of mountains is broken by deep, thickly forested, silent valleys, which afford passage from the precipitous Indian Ocean side of Madagascar to the gentler, western slope of the island.

  The western plateau of Madagascar consists primarily of open grasslands, marked by occasional wooded areas. This side of the island slopes in a long, easy descent down to the Mozambique Channel. Here many rivers wind down to the sea through the open plains. These rivers are longer, deeper, and slower than are the streams on the eastern side of the island.

  During the rainy season—which usually lasts in these latitudes from November to April—the forested eastern side of Madagascar receives more than one hundred inches of rain, while the grassy western slope receives less than half that amount. The extreme southwestern end of the island, however, receives almost no rain, and is virtually a desert.