The legacy of the Sea Peoples also included another key element that would come to define the pirate culture of Every’s time: the tactical deployment of spectacular violence and terror. Under siege by the Sea Peoples, King Ammurapi of Ugarit—part of modern-day Syria—sent a desperate missive to another ruler in Cyprus: “My cities were burned, and [the Sea Peoples] did evil things in my country. . . . The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.” The inscription at the temple of Ramses III sounds a comparable note in its description of the coastal raids of the Sea Peoples: “All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray . . . A camp was set up in one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being.”
The carnage unleashed by the Sea Peoples was so extreme during their heyday in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE that it provoked a massive crisis among the previously flourishing Mediterranean civilizations of the Bronze Age. Today, this period is known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, one of those stretches of history where the march of technological progress reverses course. The great palace societies of Greece and the Levant disintegrated into loosely organized village cultures, after the Sea Peoples laid waste to their coastal capitals. They brought a near apocalyptic destructiveness to their interactions with all land-based communities, a violence that seemed almost arbitrary in its intensity. The Sea Peoples did not invade lands to claim them as their own, or extract treasure or slaves to bring back to their homeland. They torched the great capitals of the Bronze Age just to watch them burn. While they lacked the armies and fortresses of their mainland foes, their strategic use of terror allowed them to wage what we now call “asymmetric” warfare: a much smaller force successfully challenging a much larger one.
From its beginnings, piracy has shared many key traits with the modern concept of terrorism, both in terms of its hold on the popular imagination and in its legal definition. One of the first known uses of the word “terrorism” in the English language appears in a letter written to Thomas Jefferson in 1795 by James Monroe, then the American ambassador to France. Writing from Paris a year after the execution of Robespierre, Monroe referred to the Jacobin attempt to restore “terrorism and not royalty.” The terminology appears to have spread quickly among the American political elite. In a letter written just a few weeks after Monroe’s, John Quincy Adams alluded to the “partisans of Robespierre’s dominion” as “terrorists.”
The sense of terrorism as a tool to advance radical political values through the use of targeted public violence belongs to both its original use and its modern deployments. But in one crucial sense, the contemporary definition no longer matches its original meaning. Until the twentieth century, the idea of terrorism took its cues from the actions of the the Comité de Salut Public (Committee of Public Safety) and other arms of the French revolutionary government. Terror, in other words, was a political tactic that belonged to the state apparatus. It wasn’t until the rise of the anarchists a century later that the idea of terrorism would come to be associated with non-state actors, small groups disrupting civilian life with carnage and explosions as a way of fighting a proxy war with massive governments and military powers. Robespierre’s terror took the state’s legal monopoly on violence to devastating extremes. It was a way of making a ruling power even more formidable. Modern terrorism does the reverse: it grants a disproportionate power to small bands of insurgents and shadow networks. The whole notion of asymmetric warfare that characterizes so many contemporary military conflicts—in which a superpower finds itself engaged in battle with an enemy thousands of times smaller in terms of manpower and military might—has its roots in this reversal of terrorism’s meaning. Modern terror is a force multiplier. You don’t need a vast standing army or a fleet of aircraft carriers to create a gnawing sense of fear among millions of people. You just need a few well-placed explosives—or even box cutters—and a network of media outlets willing to amplify news of your attack.
While the actual etymology of the word “terrorism” dates back to Robespierre’s reign, some of the first real practitioners of terrorism’s contemporary form—extreme violence carried out by non-state actors, creating disproportionate effects through media dissemination—were pirates. And the first convincing proof that such a strategy could work—that a handful of men could effectively hold entire nations hostage with a few acts of grotesque barbarity—would play out in the clash between the Fancy and the Mughal treasure ship in 1695.
There was precedent for that strategic terror, of course—starting with the legendary brutality of the Sea Peoples. Another pioneer in that bloody tradition was a French noblewoman named Jeanne-Louise de Belleville, born in the first year of the fourteenth century. In the middle of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, Belleville’s second husband, Olivier de Clisson, was executed by the French king Philip VI for treason, his head mounted on a spike and publicly displayed in Nantes, Brittany, near Clisson’s estate. Outraged by the king’s actions, Jeanne sought vengeance by selling her lands and property and assembling a small fleet of three ships. For dramatic effect, she painted the ships black and hoisted sails that had been dyed blood red. Legend has it that she prowled the English Channel for thirteen years, assisted by two of her sons, attacking French ships and decapitating the supporters of Philip, always leaving a handful of survivors to bring back word to the mainland of the “Lioness of Brittany.”
“Dead men tell no tales” is the pirate mantra often invoked as a justification for killing off one’s enemies, but for pirates like Clisson and her descendants, the slogan has an alternate meaning: dead men by definition can’t amplify the pirate’s reputation for bloodlust and savagery if they’re tossed overboard. By the so-called golden age of piracy, the generation of pirates that followed Henry Every, it had become standard practice to grant mercy to a few lucky survivors so they could return home with tales of terror on the seas. Living, as she was, in a pre-Gutenberg era, the Lioness of Brittany could only send messages that circulated through palace rumor and personal correspondence. But Every and his descendants had a vibrant media apparatus through which they could broadcast their atrocities: the pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and books that shaped so much of popular opinion in European and Colonial American cities during that period. Many of the conventions that we associate with “tabloid” media—hastily written, often fabricated stories of sensational violence—were first developed to profit off the distant actions of men like Henry Every and the pirates who followed him in the early 1700s. If Every was, in his prime, the descendant of mythic seafaring men like Odysseus, he was also an augur of another kind of larger-than-life figure: the killer that captivates a nation with his outlandish crimes, like John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, Charles Manson.
We tend to think of the pamphleteers and early journalists of the Enlightenment as a refined intellectual class, filing witty copy for the Tatler from their coffeehouse off the Strand. But even in those formative early years of print media, there was no shortage of sensationalism. Enterprising publishers would hawk special-edition broadsides at public executions, promising morbid details about the original crime. Almost two centuries before Jack the Ripper became the first celebrity serial killer, the pamphleteers were already making quick money celebrating violent criminals. And no class of criminal captured the popular imagination more than the pirates.
The most extreme serial killer narratives of the modern age have nothing on the gruesome inventories of pirate torture published during this period. A French pirate by the name of François l’Ollonais was reported to have “ripped open one of the prisoners with his cutlass, tore the living heart out of his body, gnawed at it, and then hurled it in the face of one of the others.” The American Weekly Mercury, an early colonial newspaper, relayed a particularly appalling account of the British pirate Edward Low: after a merchant captain allegedly tossed a satchel of gold overboard, Low “cutt off the said
Masters lipps and broyl’d them before his face, and afterwards murder’d the whole crew being thirty two persons.” In one later version of the story, worthy of a modern-day Hannibal Lecter novel, the maniacal pirate forces the captain to eat his own lips after broiling them.
No doubt many of these stories were exaggerated to sell copy. But accounts of pirate atrocities drew from the transcripts of legal trials. These publications—often printed within days of a delivered verdict—began a long tradition of media amplifying the reach of scandalous court cases. One of the most appalling in the genre was an account of a “Captain Jeane of Bristol,” accused of torturing and murdering a teenaged cabin boy who had dared to steal a dram of rum from his quarters. The book was published under the title Unparallel’d Cruelty, a title that almost seemed understated given its account of the boy’s agonizing and prolonged murder: strung up on the mainmast for nine days, whipped, forced to drink the captain’s urine, among other atrocities.
The sadistic violence of Captain Jeane did not end well for the pirate. He was condemned to death and hung in an usually brutal fashion, dangling by the neck for eighteen minutes before dying. But in many cases, the mythologies of pirate brutality were not just a symbol of their deranged mental state. If the pamphleteers of London or Boston had a financial incentive in tales of buccaneer brutality, so did the pirates themselves. By cultivating a reputation for bloodlust and mayhem, the pirates made their own jobs easier. A merchant captain who had just read an account of one of his peers being force-fed part of his own anatomy would naturally be more inclined to surrender his ship at the first sight of a black flag. There was, in other words, a method in the madness. In the economic historian Peter Leeson’s study of the surprisingly rich economic systems that the pirates maintained—memorably titled The Invisible Hook—he describes the extremes of pirate violence as a kind of semiotic act:
To prevent captives from withholding booty . . . pirates required a reputation for cruelty and barbarity. And adding madness to the piratical reputation didn’t hurt either. Pirates institutionalized their reputation for ferocity and insanity into a piratical brand name through the same means Mercedes-Benz uses for this purpose: word of mouth and advertisement. Pirates didn’t take out glossy ads in magazines. But they did make a point of publicizing their barbarity and madness so their reputation could strengthen and spread. What’s more, pirates received advertisement for their reputation in popular eighteenth-century newspapers, which unwittingly contributed to pirates’ ruthless brand name, indirectly facilitating pirates’ profit.
While they were usually separated by thousands of miles of open ocean, the enterprising publishers of London, Amsterdam, and Boston were locked in a symbiotic embrace with the pirates themselves: the publishers needed stories of living hearts being torn out of chests to sell copy; the pirates needed those stories to circulate as widely as possible to instill fear in their prospective victims. The fact that the golden age of piracy coincides almost exactly with the emergence of print culture is no coincidence. Jeanne de Clisson may have made a name for herself in the fourteenth century by haunting the English Channel for a decade, but in general it was challenging to establish yourself as a pirate without the power of media amplification. If you wanted to make a living as a pirate, an appetite for cruelty and physical abuse was helpful. But it was even better to be famous.
3
THE RISE OF THE MUGHALS
The Bolan Pass
663 CE
With mountain peaks that rarely exceed ten thousand feet, the Central Brahui Range that runs through the center of modern-day Pakistan does not possess the same glamour as its neighboring range to the north, the Himalayas. But for many centuries, a fifty-five-mile stretch of valleys and gorges naturally carved through the limestone ridges of the Brahui served as the primary conduit linking the Arab world to the agricultural settlements of the Indus Valley and the wide sweep of the Indian subcontinent beyond them. Today, you can travel the Bolan Pass—named after the mountain stream that opened up the gateway through thousands of years of erosion—via car or rail. The pass was not always so accessible. A British military officer described the pass in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society in 1841: “Should there be rain in the higher part of the mountains, the stream at times comes down in an almost perpendicular volume, without warning, and sweeping all before it, as a friend of mine experienced, when he saw a party of men, horses, and camels, and all his property, borne down by it. . . . About thirty-seven men were washed away upon that occasion.”
In 663 CE, only thirty-one years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, a Muslim military force successfully traversed the Bolan Pass and made their way down the foothills of the Brahui into the valleys of the subcontinent. (Among their ranks may have been a few religious disciples who had studied with Muhammad himself.) The raid marked the first time Islamic soldiers made contact with the Hindu cultures of India. At the time, the expedition through the pass seemed like the logical continuation of the furious three decades of conquest that had followed Muhammad’s death. The birth of Islam is conventionally dated at 622 CE, with Muhammad’s exodus from Mecca; by 650 CE, Muslim forces had toppled the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, seizing contemporary Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, parts of North Africa, and most of Afghanistan. That Islam would continue its march into India seemed all but inevitable. Muslim traders had already started doing business in the port cities of western India, their merchant ships following the same path across the Arabian Sea that Henry Every’s ship would take a thousand years later.
But the warriors who made it across the Bolan Pass in 663 would not prove to be conquerors. They were quickly rebuffed by a brahman by the name of Chach who ruled over the Sindh region during that period. But a half century later, Muhammad bin Qasim successfully returned to conquer Sindh and the Indus Valley. For the next few centuries, the lands shuffled back and forth between Islamic occupation and native rule, but the invaders never managed to control much of India beyond those northern regions. The Muslim interlopers came to be known as mlecchas: a dismissive term that suggested inferiority, and not a looming threat. In part, their conquest was limited by the natural barrier of the Thar Desert, which today defines the border between Pakistan and India. Trade, however, did manage to establish a constant web of interdependence between the two cultures. Islam created the first truly global integrated trading network in world history, reaching from western Africa all the way to Indonesia, but in that vast network, few trade routes were as lucrative as the one that brought Arabian horses to India in return for spices and cotton.
Global trade ultimately made India too wealthy for Islam’s imperial ambitions to resist. From 1 CE to 1500 CE, no region in the world—including China—had a larger share of global GDP. Its copious supply of pearls, diamonds, ivory, ebony, and spices ensured that India ran what amounted to a thousand-year trade surplus. But no product ignited the imagination of the world—and emptied its pocketbooks—like the dyed cotton fabrics that would play such a critical role in the history of India. The link between cotton and the subcontinent is an ancient one. Archaeological excavations along the Indus River in modern-day Pakistan uncovered a few threads of dyed and woven cotton that had been affixed to a silver vase. The fabric is believed to have been created sometime around 2300 BCE, making it one of the earliest known examples of processed cotton fibers anywhere in the world. Herodotus took note of wild trees in India “which produce a kind of wool better than sheep’s wool in beauty and quality, which the Indians use for making their clothes.” From the beginning, cotton inspired technological innovation. The frescos in the legendary Ajanta Caves, dating back to roughly the same period, feature Indians working single-roller machines designed to extract the seeds from the cotton fibers, an early antecedent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
But the innovation that would most transform the subcontinent—and its economic relationship to the rest of the world—did not involve separating the see
ds from their fibers; every society that domesticated cotton for textile use ultimately developed some kind of mechanical gin. What made Indian cotton unique was not the threads themselves, but rather their color. Making cotton fiber receptive to vibrant dyes like madder, henna, or turmeric was less a matter of inventing mechanical contraptions as it was dreaming up chemistry experiments. The waxy cellulose of the cotton fiber naturally repels vegetable dyes. (Only the deep blue of indigo—which itself takes its name from the Indus Valley where it was first employed as a dye—affixes itself to cotton without additional catalysts.) The process of transforming cotton into a fabric that can be dyed with shades other than indigo is known as “animalizing” the fiber, presumably because so much of it involves excretions from ordinary farm animals. First, dyers would bleach the fiber with sour milk; then they attacked it with a range of protein-heavy substances: goat urine, camel dung, blood. Metallic salts were then combined with the dyes to create a mordant that permeated the core of the fiber. The result was a fabric that could both display brilliant patterns of color and retain that color after multiple washings.
Enemy of All Mankind Page 3
