IX. No man shall talk of breaking up their way of living till each has a share of 1,000. Every man who shall become a cripple or lose a limb in the service shall have 800 pieces of eight from the common stock and for lesser hurts proportionately.
X. The captain and the quartermaster shall each receive two shares of a prize, the master gunner and boatswain, one and one half shares, all other officers one and one quarter, and private gentlemen of fortune one share each.
XI. The musicians shall have rest on the Sabbath Day only by right. On all other days by favour only.
Some of the principles in this mini constitution—composed sometime in the 1720s—seem appropriately archaic to the modern mind: most political documents today do not specify the terms for dueling, or forbid candlelight after eight p.m. But on the most important points, the pirate codes—as the articles of agreements were sometimes called—were significantly ahead of their time. Consider the opening line of the Roberts articles: “Every man shall have an equal vote in the affairs of moment.” The pirates encoded these democratic principles into their constitutions almost a century before the American and French Revolutions. A captain served at the pleasure of his crew, and could be removed from power if he fell out of favor with the majority. Navy and merchant ships were autocratic institutions, with a tightly controlled chain of command headed by a captain possessing absolute authority over the ship, and no mechanism for curbing any abuse of that power. The pirate ship, by contrast, was a floating democracy. According to Charles Johnson’s 1724 bestseller, A General History of the Pyrates, which included a long chapter on Every and his crimes, on a pirate ship “the supream Power lodged with the Community, who might doubtless depute and revoke as suited Interest or Humour.”
The elegance of the pirate governance model went beyond their voting rights. Most pirate ships during the period created a separation of powers on board that bears a striking resemblance to the architecture of the US Constitution. The captain’s authority was not just limited by the threat of being voted out of office; he was also reined in by the separate authority of the quartermaster. While the captain had unrestricted powers during battle, and had executive authority at all times to establish the overall mission for the ship, most day-to-day issues were adjudicated by the quartermaster, who also was charged with the distribution of prizes. In Johnson’s account:
For the Punishment of small Offences . . . there is a principal Officer among the Pyrates, called the Quarter-Master, of the Men’s own choosing, who claims all Authority this Way, (excepting in Time of Battle:) If they disobey his Command, are quarrelsome and mutinous with one another, misuse Prisoners, plunder beyond his Order, and in particular, if they be negligent of their Arms, which he musters at Discretion, he punishes at his own dare without incurring the Lash from all the Ship’s Company: In short, this Officer is Trustee for the whole, is the first on board any Prize, separating for the Company’s Use, what he pleases . . .
If the captain served as an elected leader, roughly equivalent to a president or CEO, the quartermaster played a more eclectic role, a mix of a judicial branch, determining punishments for onboard transgressions, and a chief financial officer, overseeing compensation packages. The quartermaster’s authority meant that he was often first in line to succeed a deposed captain, not unlike the transfer of power that brought First Mate Every to the helm of the Charles II during the mutiny. In those first few days after leaving A Coruña, the crew appointed a quartermaster to serve alongside Every. His name was Joseph Dawson, a veteran sailor in his late thirties, originally from Yarmouth.
The crew of the Fancy would have likely also established terms for another key innovation that pirate codes introduced, one that can been seen in Article IX of Roberts’s pirate code: “Every man who shall become a cripple or lose a limb in the service shall have 800 pieces of eight from the common stock and for lesser hurts proportionately.” Pirate communities built insurance into their constitution as a core principle of the collective. Pirates who suffered serious injuries in battle would receive a disproportionate share of whatever treasure the group managed to secure. Some insurance schemes were more precise than the one outlined in the Roberts articles. According to eighteenth-century pirate and slave trader Alexandre Exquemelin, wounded crewmen were offered specific levels of compensation depending on the injury: losing a right arm was worth slightly more than losing a left arm; losing an eye generated almost the same compensation as the loss of a finger.
All these elements combined—an onboard democracy, with separation of powers; equitable compensation plans; insurance policies in the event of catastrophic injuries—meant that a pirate ship in the late 1600s and early 1700s operated both outside the law of European nation-states and, in a real sense, ahead of those laws. The pirates were vanguards as much as they were outlaws, building codes that ensured the collective strength of the ship and guarded against excessive concentration of both power and wealth. At the very moment the modern multinational corporation was being invented, the pirates were experimenting with a different kind of economic structure, closer to a worker’s collective. Those economic and governance codes have led historians in recent years to reevaluate the place of the pirates, seeing them now not just as significant figures in the history of crime and exploration, but also as pioneers in the history of radical politics. As the maritime historian J. S. Bromley wrote, the pirates “were not merely escaping from bondage. In their enterprises at least, they practiced notions of liberty and equality, even of fraternity, which for most inhabitants of the old world and the new remained frustrated dreams, so far as they were dreamt at all.”
In his magisterial account of seafaring culture in the early 1700s, Marcus Rediker writes of the politics of the pirate class:
Pirates constructed a culture of masterless men. They were as far removed from traditional authority as any men could be in the early eighteenth century. Beyond the church, beyond the family, beyond disciplinary labor, and using the sea to distance themselves from the powers of the state, they carried out a strange experiment . . . [The pirates] expressed the collectivistic ethos of life at sea by the egalitarian and comradely distribution of life chances, the refusal to grant privilege or exemption from danger, and the just allocation of shares.
Understanding that egalitarian ethos is essential to understanding why pirates like Henry Every were so popular at home. They were not just charismatic rogues, pursuing a life of adventure at sea. They were also advancing populist values that had almost no equivalent on the mainland.
Of course, for that working-class-hero myth to take hold, the pirates needed more than mere word of mouth to get the message out. They also needed the amplifying power of media. Henry Every and the crew of the Fancy would soon enough become genuine celebrities, their exploits glorified and condemned in just about every form of media in existence at the end of the seventeenth century, in pamphlets, book-length biographies, published transcripts from criminal trials, even dramatic plays. But word of Henry Every’s turn to piracy would first captivate working-class audiences back home through a far older medium: song.
11
THE PIRATE VERSES
London
June 1694
It is not known when exactly James Houblon and the other investors behind the Spanish Expedition learned that Henry Every and his men had seized the Charles and set off to seek their fortune as pirates. As strange as it might seem to us today, the first surviving notice of the mutiny back in London is neither a newspaper item nor a legal complaint nor business correspondence. Instead, the earliest record of Every’s betrayal appearing in England is a poem.
Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1694, a London printer named Theophilus Lewis published a thirteen-stanza ballad with the title “A copy of Verses, composed by Captain Henry Every, lately gone to Sea to seek his Fortune.” As enticing as it is to imagine the newly appointed Captain Every tinkering with his rhyme schemes
as he sails past the Strait of Gibraltar, the verses published by Lewis were almost certainly written by someone other than Every himself. Multiple versions of the “Every Verses,” as they became known, would be published over the next few years, and the slight variations between them suggest that they are all derivations of an earlier rendition of the poem, likely transmitted orally as a sung ballad.
Like so many events in Henry Every’s life, the first reports of his mutiny aboard the Charles II emerged at a critical transition point between two distinct regimes: in this case, the transition between song and print. Throughout the 1600s in major European cities like London, military and political news, folklore, and true-crime narratives were transmitted via songs, in a tradition that descended from the minstrel singers of the pre-Gutenberg era. But as printing technology expanded, those sung ballads were increasingly accompanied by paper versions, with text and woodcut illustrations printed on one side of a large sheet of paper. Popularly known as a broadsides, these musical accounts of current events would be hawked by balladmongers on street corners. Modern newspapers would ultimately evolve out of these early experiments in printed news, and the balladmongers themselves were the antecedent of the classic newsboy that survived all the way into the twentieth century, hawking papers by working headlines into his standard refrains: “Titanic sinks! Read all about it!” But the balladmongers plied a more musical craft: they would actually sing the news to attract buyers for their latest broadsides, setting the “headlines” to a recognizable tune. The Every Verses, for instance, were set to the tune of a then familiar song called “The Two English Travellers.”
Imagine strolling in early June 1694 through the neighborhoods at the foot of London Bridge—Limehouse and Wapping and Rotherhithe—their alehouses crowded with sailors and merchant ship representatives pitching new ventures along the lines of the Spanish Expedition. Above the dissonant clamor of horse hooves on cobblestone, the bellowing pitches of the street vendors, the slurred arguments breaking out in front of each pub, rises the crooning of the balladeers, as they wave their broadsides at you. Their lyrics tell tales of political intrigue or unusual weather or gruesome murders: all the current events that now lead the eleven o’clock news, sung to you as you wander through the streets of the big city. In the late spring of 1694, you might have heard a ballad called “The Loyal British Fighting in Flanders,” allegedly composed by a “Protestant Sentinel of the British Forces.” Or you might have whistled along to a darker verse, one called “The Murtherers Lamentation.” (The explanatory copy on the broadside reads: “Being An Account of John Jewster and William Butler, who where arraign’d and found guilty of the Robbery and Murder of Mrs. Jane Le-grand; for which they received due Sentence of Death, and was accordingly executed. . . .”) But on one corner, a balladeer serenades you with a new set of verses. Technically, it tells the story of a crime, with the promise of more crimes to come, but its rhetorical form is a call to action, an entreaty:
Come all you brave Boys, whose Courage is bold,
Will you venture with me, I’ll glut you with Gold?
Make haste unto Corona, a Ship you will find,
That’s called the Fancy, will pleasure your mind.
Captain Every is in her, and calls her his own;
He will box her about, Boys, before he has done:
French, Spaniard and Portuguese, the Heathen likewise,
He has made a War with them until that he dies.
Her Model’s like Wax, and she sails like the Wind,
She is rigged and fitted and curiously trimm’d,
And all things convenient has for his design;
God bless his poor Fancy, she’s bound for the Mine.
The ballad contains enough key facts about the mutiny on the Charles II—facts that had not been reported elsewhere in London at the time—to suggest that it must have been written by someone with first- or secondhand knowledge of the events of early May. A later line alludes to Every’s Devonshire roots, but suggests a (likely untrue) connection to a prominent landed family in that region. (“Farewel, fair Plimouth, and Cat-down be damn’d / I once was Part-owner of most of that Land; But as I am disown’d, so I’ll abdicate / My Person from England to attend on my Fate.”) The verses also accurately describe Every’s itinerary:
Then away from this Climate and temperate Zone,
To one that’s more torrid, you’ll hear I am gone,
With an hundred and fifty brave Sparks of this Age,
Who are fully resolved their Foes to engage.
These Northern Parts are not thrifty for me,
I’ll rise the Anterhise, that some Men shall see
I am not afraid to let the World know,
That to the South-Seas and to Persia I’ll go.
Beyond the factual account of the Fancy’s mission, the verses perform a kind of “song of myself,” announcing Every’s ambition, the same design to seek his fortune that he declared to Gibson on board the Charles on May 7. You can hear in its couplets the first stirrings of a narrative device that would animate a thousand maritime tales of self-made men—the now familiar Horatio Hornblower narrative, of an ambitious sailor who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and becomes a legend:
Our Names shall be blazed and spread in the Sky,
And many brave Places I hope to descry,
Where never a French man e’er yet has been,
Nor any proud Dutch man can say he has seen.
My Commission is large, and I made it my self,
And the Capston shall stretch it full larger by half;
It was dated in Corona, believe it, my Friend,
From the Year Ninety three, unto the World’s end.
As the historian Joel Baer notes, the Every Verses are interesting in the lack of attention paid to the actual details of the mutiny itself. An in-depth account of how Every came to seize the ship would have been an easy fit with the true-crime narrative that so many of the balladmongers hawked. “A song of kindly commanders, ambitious tars and brutal ingratitude might have been fashioned that conformed to the conventions of the news ballad,” Baer observes. “The writer chose rather to shift the focus from the overt act of disloyalty and theft to the narrator’s convictions about himself, his crew, and the society he is about to abandon.” The Every Verses also broke from convention in another key respect. With the notable exception of the Robin Hood ballads, almost all verse-based crime reporting in the period told stories of crime retrospectively, from the jail cell or the gallows. (Broadsides were often sold at the scenes of public executions, like a libretto handed out at an opera.) Audiences were encouraged to thrill and shudder at the tales of murder and robbery, but the moral boundaries that framed these stories were clearly defined: the criminals deserved the punishment they inevitably received. In the Every Verses, Henry Every is never painted as a criminal, despite the obvious facts of his crime; he’s an inspirational figure, with a stirring message for all the “brave boys whose courage is bold.”
The Every Verses are significant for another reason. For the first time in Every’s life, a second front had opened up in his identity: There was Every the sailor, headed south with his crew toward the Cape of Good Hope on board the Fancy. And then there was a second Every: the one the balladmongers were celebrating on the streets of London, who would develop his own mythology over time as his story moved from sung ballads to broadsides to books and the stage, a mythology that often deviated significantly from the actual course of his life. For the generation of pirates that followed in his wake—as well as for the nation of England itself—the mythical Every would prove to be just as influential as the real thing.
12
DOES SIR JOSIAH SELL OR BUY?
London
August 1694
The “Every Verses” had originally been intended as an amusement, designed to deligh
t London consumers with the ballad of “Bold Captain Every.” But by the end of the summer of 1694, they would become evidence in a legal dispute. In June, just as the “Every Verses” were beginning to be sung on the street corners of London, the aggrieved wives of the remaining Spanish Expedition crew petitioned the Crown to intervene in their dispute with James Houblon. The Spanish Expedition investors—led by Houblon himself—had behaved “traitorously,” they claimed, leaving their husbands “in to the King of Spaines Service to Serve him, as far as [we] know all the dates of their lives.” Before long, the Privy Council had opened an investigation, inviting Houblon to submit evidence in his defense. Houblon produced three documents: a list of the Spanish Expedition investors, presumably designed to impress the council with the investors’ social stature; the employment contracts signed by the crew; and a broadside copy of “Verses, composed by Captain Henry Every, lately gone to Sea to seek his Fortune.”
While it seems unlikely that Every himself composed the ballad, Houblon took the document at its word. In his submission to the Privy Council, he observed that the Every Verses were a “Declaration of their intentions of Pyrating, Greatly to the Dishonour of this Nation and damage to the Owners’ that the mutineers had left behind them at La Coruna.”
On August 16, the Privy Council reviewed the original complaint and Houblon’s defense. They referred the case to the Committee on Trade and Plantations, who then heard additional testimony in early September. Houblon’s defensive strategy appeared to pay off: the Committee seems to have ignored the complaints of the wives and focused on the theft of the Charles II instead. The committee issued a formal proclamation: “Orders maybe be given that the Ship with all the Ship’s Company be Stopt and Seiz’d into Safe Custody in the Plantations of where soever she shall be met with.” For the first time, Henry Every and his crew were officially on the run from the law.
Enemy of All Mankind Page 9
