Freebooter
Page 31
Lockwood was watching him closely and must have sensed something of Hector’s inner turmoil. ‘Lynch, if the captain and crew of Adventure Galley do turn pirate, you’ll have the chance to wipe the slate clean. The person who turns King’s evidence earns a pardon.’
Hector kept his face carefully blank. The role of spy for Lockwood was distasteful but it would not last for ever, and this time he was on the right side of the law.
There was one thing that he had failed to ask. ‘This thief-taker at sea, what’s his name?’
‘Kidd, William Kidd.’
HISTORICAL NOTE
Henry Avery was ‘King of Pirates’ according to Daniel Defoe, who wrote The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe also penned and published two fake letters allegedly written by Avery, giving a lengthy and wildly colourful account of his ‘rambles and piracies’. There was no need for Defoe to invent. What we know about Avery’s true story reveals a remarkable personality: intelligent, audacious and sly. He was persuasive and effective as a leader: notably in May 1694 when he was a prime mover in the mutiny that led to the theft of the royal warship renamed Fancy. Fifteen months later, he showed himself to be equally gifted as a fighting captain when he directed the successful assaults on Fateh Muhammed and Ganj-i-Sawa’i, one of the largest vessels afloat. His captain’s share of the plunder brought him great riches, and he then showed a talent for clever management of his own success. In March 1696, posing as ‘Captain Bridgeman’, he brought Fancy to the Bahamas and disposed of the ship and what remained of the plunder to the corrupt governor. When the authorities offered a £500 bounty for his arrest, he vanished into a fog of misinformation. There is good reason to believe that he returned via Ireland to England. There, according to one rumour, he died a pauper unable to pay for his own coffin after being swindled by Bristol merchants. Alternatively, it is claimed that he lived as a very rich man under an assumed name. The one certainty is that he was never arrested or put on trial.
The looting of Ganj-i-Sawa’i caused a massive shock to the trade between England and India. This act of sacrilege against peaceful pilgrims outraged the devout Mogul Emperor, Aurangzeb Alamgir. English traders in Surat, the English East India Company’s main trade port along with Bombay, were imprisoned for nine months as hostages. Reparations were angrily demanded. The East India Company put the value of the damages at £300,000 when dealing with the Moguls, but (in what amounted to a reversal of the under-valuation that Hector provides for the Company factor in Surat) looked for a £600,000 insurance claim in London. In the end, the furore died down when the foreign nations agreed to provide escort ships for the Indian hajj fleets.
Something is known of other characters who appear in Freebooter: Thomas Tew with the eight-gun sloop Amity had made an earlier piratical raid into the Indian Ocean before returning there and joining the ambush of the hajj fleet. He was killed, probably during the attack on Fateh Muhammed, when a cannon ball ‘carried away the rim of Tew’s belly’. William Mayes and the crew of Pearl made up for the disappointment of being denied loot from the hajj fleet. They took several Indian ships off the coast of India, and Mayes came back to New York with £7,000 in plunder. He returned to the Indian Ocean in 1699, again successfully. Thomas Wake died of disease at St Mary’s. Portsmouth Adventure under Joseph Faro was wrecked in the Comoro Islands. Faro got himself to Réunion (Bourbon), where he was picked up by Henry Avery and accompanied him to the West Indies and then across the Atlantic to Ireland. Adam Baldridge, the dealer in stolen goods on St Mary’s, double-crossed some of his Madagascan allies, and was forced to flee the island. He too finished up in New York, where he was interviewed by the authorities but not prosecuted. In the end, from Henry Avery’s crew, only five were hung at Execution Dock, and not for acts of piracy, but for stealing Fancy when she was a navy ship with the intention of turning pirate. The chief witness for the Crown was John Dann. He received a pardon and went on to become a private banker-goldsmith in London. In a freakish twist of fate as strange as anything that Daniel Defoe invented, John Dann’s bank failed when he fell victim to a swindler.
TIM SEVERIN, explorer, filmmaker, and lecturer, has retraced the storied journeys of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Sindbad the Sailor, Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses, Genghis Khan and Robinson Crusoe. His books about these expeditions are classics of exploration and travel.
He made his historical fiction debut with the hugely successful Viking series, followed by the Pirate and Saxon series.
Also by Tim Severin
NON-FICTION
The Brendan Voyage
The Sindbad Voyage
The Jason Voyage
The Ulysses Voyage
Crusader
In Search of Genghis Khan
The China Voyage
The Spice Island Voyage
In Search of Moby Dick
Seeking Robinson Crusoe
FICTION
Viking: Odinn’s Child
Viking: Sworn Brother
Viking: King’s Man
Pirate: Corsair
Pirate: Buccaneer
Pirate: Sea Robber
Pirate: Privateer
Saxon: The Book of Dreams
Saxon: The Emperor’s Elephant
Saxon: The Pope’s Assassin
First published 2017 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2017 by Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-4472-6235-0
Copyright © Tim Severin 2017
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Map artwork by Neil Gower
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