Everything that made the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden such an advantageous route for traders also made it a hunting ground.
15
THE AMITY RETURNS
The Gulf of Aden
Spring 1695
The charms of Madagascar were not generally apparent to the first generations of Europeans to visit the island. One observer described the place as “Swarms of Locusts on the Land, and Crocodiles or Alligators in their Rivers.” In 1641 an Englishman named Walter Hamond became so enamored with the island and its native Malagasy people (he wrote a pamphlet calling them “happiest people alive”) that he led a group of English Puritans to build a community at Saint-Augustin Bay—the Indian Ocean version of the Mayflower Puritans who had helped settle Massachusetts two decades earlier. Hamond inaugurated what would prove to be an enduring literary tradition of Europeans spinning elaborate fantasies of an island utopia off the eastern shore of Africa, a tradition that Every would play a central role in as well. In one of his missives, Hamond called Madagascar the “richest and most fruitful island in the world.” It is unclear how many of his fellow settlers shared his opinion. The colony had disintegrated by 1646.
Other Europeans tried to get a foothold in the years that followed. The French established Fort Dauphin to the east of Hamond’s settlement. The Portuguese extracted slave labor from the native populations where they could. But the island retained its autonomy, along with a certain reputation for lawlessness. By the time Henry Every arrived there in the early months of 1695, Madagascar was a pirate’s den.
At Saint-Augustin Bay, and in other secluded harbors to the north, the crew of the Fancy enjoyed a productive idyll as they prepared for their Red Sea assault. It is unclear whether Every was aware of the exact timing of the hajj that year, or whether he simply knew that the western monsoon winds of late summer were likely to generate a significant amount of shipping traffic in the Gulf of Aden in August. Either way, he seems to have recognized that the most propitious time for an attack would not arrive until summer. Biding their time, the crew careened the Fancy again. They savored the Danish brandy they had pilfered back on Cape Verde. They traded a few guns and some gunpowder to the Malagasy for a hundred head of cattle, and spent most of March feasting on roast beef. By late spring, they had sailed for the Comoro Islands, where they enticed another forty men from a French ship to join their number. (After plundering the French ship for rice, they sunk it in the harbor, which may have made their case slightly more persuasive.) The pirates also bartered for hogs and vegetables, before escaping to sea after three East India Company ships appeared on the horizon.
With more than 150 men under his command, and the summer months rapidly approaching, Every decided it was at last time to execute the plan he had been mulling over since those long days and nights in the A Coruña harbor. The Fancy sailed along the coast of modern-day Somalia, headed toward the Gulf of Aden. Stopping over in a town the pirates called Meat—in actuality, Maydh—their efforts at trading were rebuffed by the local Muslim community. “The people would not trade with us,” the ship’s coxswain John Dann would later say of the town, “and we burnt it.” According to some accounts, the pirates went so far as to plant gunpowder beneath the local mosque, demolishing it as an act of revenge.
That demolition raises an interesting question: To what extent were Every and his men animated by the fact that they had set their sights on a target that was specifically Muslim—those “Moor” ships making their annual pilgrimage? Was their mercenary desire for treasure enhanced (or legitimized) by the idea they were also going to be waging war on the infidels? Certainly they would have described themselves as “anti-Muslim,” if you had asked them. But was that a core faith, or just a convenient one?
It is difficult to say from such a distance. On the one hand, the crimes Every’s men would later commit on board one of those Moorish ships were horrendous ones, ones they might well have refrained from had they captured a ship populated by Christians. But the fact that they were targeting Muslim vessels in the first place had an obvious financial justification. To paraphrase the classic Willie Sutton line about bank robbery, the Muslim ships were where the money was.
But the mosque at Maydh was different. There was nothing to be gained by destroying it. Yes, as pirates, you might resort to violence (or the threat of it) to coerce a town that refused to trade with you to hand over whatever you had hoped to barter for. But going out of your way to plant explosives beneath a mosque suggests a deeper level of contempt. It seems likely that at least a few of the key men on board the Fancy—if not Every himself—harbored actively anti-Islamic views.
Entering the Gulf of Aden, it quickly became apparent that Every was not alone in his scheme to prey on the Red Sea pilgrims. First, they encountered two American privateering ships, the Dolphin and the Portsmouth Adventure, with a combined crew of 120 men. Together, they sailed to Perim, a crab-shaped volcanic island in the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. “We lay there one night,” Philip Middleton would later recall, “and then three more came. One commanded by Thomas Wake fitted out from Boston in New England; another, the Pearl Brigantine, William Mues Commander, fitted out of Rhode Island; the third was the Amity sloop, fitted out at New York. They had about six guns each. Two of them had 50 men on board and the Brigantine between 30 and 40.” The Amity was no stranger to these parts. At her helm was the legendary Thomas Tew, the pirate whose successful Red Sea heist two years before had inspired Every’s original scheme.
The convergence of all these pirates—traveling thousands of miles independently to arrive on the same tiny island in the mouth of the Red Sea—tells us something about just how irresistible the siren song of the Grand Mughal’s wealth was in 1695. All told, the six ships held 440 men. In the summer of 1695, they probably represented a significant fraction of all working pirates on the planet. During the golden age of piracy in the early 1700s—when a generation of buccaneers inspired by Henry Every wreaked havoc in the Caribbean—official estimates at the time put the total global pirate population at roughly two thousand. Assuming that number is higher than the global pirate population in 1695, before Every’s mythological story drove the next generation to sea, the pirates clustered together in the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb that June might well have represented fully half of all the pirates on the seven seas at that moment in history.
No doubt Every experienced mixed feelings watching these other vessels sail into his hunting grounds. On the one hand, they would all be vying for the same treasure, and after an entire year as captain of the Fancy—with largely unchallenged control over his own destiny—his future actions might well be mediated by the leadership on board the other ships. But on the positive side, Every had been struggling from the beginning to build up enough manpower to take on the well-fortified ships of the Indian fleet. If the six ships anchored in the Perim harbor could agree to work together, they might well have enough force to challenge Aurangzeb’s mightiest vessels.
According to Middleton’s testimony, the six captains convened after consulting with their crews and set out the terms for their alliance. Articles of agreement were almost certainly drawn up. The fact that they would consolidate forces at this critical moment was not, in itself, surprising. If they managed to overtake one of the Indian treasure ships, there would be plenty of loot to go around. What was surprising about the alliance between the six ships was their choice of a leader. Thomas Tew was, on paper, the obvious candidate. Every had done most of his trade on the western coast of Africa, and was by all accounts a newcomer to piracy as a full-time profession. Tew had just pulled off a heist of historical proportions in the very waters they were currently sailing. But something in the chemistry of those two men, and the crews they commanded, led to a different outcome. “They all joined in partnership,” Philip Middleton reported, “agreeing Captain Every should be the Commander.”
For twelve months, Henry Every had kept his
men alive and eluded capture with little more than a fast boat and a cunning plan at his disposal.
Now he had an armada.
16
SHE FEARS NOT WHO FOLLOWS HER
Bombay
May 1695
John Gayer had barely assumed the position of governor of the East India Company, overseeing all of the company’s operations in the subcontinent, when news of a pirate named Henry Every first came across his desk. The son of a merchant, and nephew of London mayor Sir John Gayer, he had grown up not far from Every’s hometown in Devonshire. Like Every, he took to the sea as a young man, and soon became a ship’s captain for the East India Company. In the early 1690s, he had been dispatched to the subcontinent with 120 English soldiers with instructions to stabilize the “depleted” Bombay port and factory; just two years later, he was overseeing the entirety of the company’s Indian business.
In May of the following year, as Every’s men were lighting those explosives under the mosque at Maydh, a report arrived courtesy of the three East Indiamen that had chased Every off the Comoro Islands. It was a factual account of their interactions with Every, but it was also a prediction: Every would be a problem for the East India Company. Much of the document echoed a refrain that appears throughout Every’s run as captain of the Fancy: This pirate is commanding an astonishingly fast boat.
Your Honor’s ships going into that island gave him chase, but he was too nimble for them by much, having taken down a great deale of his upper works and made her exceeding snugg, which advantage being added to her well sailing before, causes her to sail so hard now, that she fears not who follows her. This ship will undoubtedly [go] into the Red Sea, which will procure infinite clamours at Surat.
The news must have seemed ominous to Gayer, given the East India Company’s troubles back in London and its tortured relations with Aurangzeb. Now he had to worry about a band of pirates bound for the Red Sea in a ship that sails “so hard now, that she fears not who follows her”?
But however “snugg” Every’s ship might have been, the evidence suggests he was not entirely without fear. Along with their report, the merchantmen delivered a letter they had recovered at Johanna Island, a letter penned by Henry Every himself, and left behind as an open declaration to “all English Commanders.” The exact text of that letter—down to the idiosyncratic, semiliterate spelling and punctuation—survives to this day:
To all English Commanders lett this Satisfye that I was Riding here att this Instant in ye Ship fancy man of Warr formerly the Charles of ye Spanish Expedition who departed from Croniae ye 7th of May. 94: Being and am now in A Ship of 46 guns 150 Men & bound to Seek our fortunes I have Never as Yett Wronged any English or Dutch nor never Intend while I am Commander. Wherefore as I Commonly Speake wth all Ships I Desire who ever Comes to ye perusal of this to take this Signall that if you or aney whome you may informe are desirous to know wt wee are att a Distance then make your Antient Vp in a Ball or Bundle and hoyst him att ye Mizon Peek ye Mizon Being furled I shall answere wth ye same & Never Molest you: for my Men are hungry Stout and Resolute: & should they Exceed my Desire I cannott help my selfe.
as Yett
An Englishman’s friend,
At Johanna February 28th, 1694/5
Henry Every
Here is 160 od french Armed men now att Mohilla who waits for Opportunity of getting aney ship, take Care of your Selves.
What is the meaning of this declaration? On the most literal level, it conveys a code, a kind of nautical secret handshake: Bundle your flag (“Antient” here refers to the ship’s ensign) into some kind of ball, and raise it to the top of your mizzen mast, and I will leave you alone. But the declaration was also a lie. He had ransacked British ships, albeit with more courtesy than he had shown the residents of Maydh. The historian Joel Baer interprets the letter as a “shrewd tactic to avoid conflict with the only force in the Indian Ocean capable of effectively opposing the Fancy, the heavily armed ships of the East India Company.”
What light does this lone document shed on Every the man? From the mutiny itself to the collective decision to appoint Every—and not Thomas Tew—as admiral of the pirate armada, it seems clear that Every possessed extraordinary charisma, a “born leader of men” as one historical account has it. But what order of villain was he? As captain of the Fancy, he had overseen acts of genuine barbarity, from the slaves captured in Guinea to the demolished mosque at Maydh. But he had also tried to adhere to some improvised code of honor in his dealings with British citizens. The Johanna letter captures that tension exquisitely: a man who has embraced the pirate’s existence outside the boundaries of nation-states and their laws, who is at the same time trying to preserve some legitimacy (and protection) as an English citizen. The letter suggests a man trying to invent on the fly a new set of codes of conduct, not a man who has renounced codes altogether. He had led a mutiny aboard an English vessel and absconded with the property of English citizens; that was undeniable. But the Charles II had belonged to a private venture; it wasn’t as though he had stolen a Royal Navy ship. And James Houblon had reneged on the terms of their contract, leaving the men languishing in A Coruña, unpaid, for months. Every could well have convinced himself that the mutiny was within his rights, once the Spanish Expedition backers had failed to deliver what they had promised. But perhaps that attitude was purely opportunistic. Did he truly think in his own mind he was engaged in legitimate actions as a British subject, and thus should be unmolested by the East Indiamen or any other representative of the Crown? Or was that all just an act to keep the authorities at bay long enough for him to carry out his plan? Certainly he was shrewd. Certainly he was a thief. Whether there was honor in the thief—that is harder to detect at such a distance. The signal is too faint.
A meaningful slice of that signal, however, persists in the Johanna letter, particularly in its enigmatic last line: my Men are hungry Stout and Resolute: & should they Exceed my Desire I cannott help my selfe. The words are unmistakably intended as a threat. My men are hungrier than yours, they implied; don’t challenge us. But it is not hard to read another layer into Every’s words: his men may be capable of acts that he himself will not be able to prevent, even if they go against his wishes as commander. He was captain of a floating democracy, after all. Whatever power he possessed originated in the men who had given it to him. Perhaps he had already detected a capacity for violence among his crew that had disturbed him. Perhaps he recognized that their “hunger” posed its own distinct threat to his plan, that all his careful positioning could be undone by the frenzy of an out-of-control crew.
Whatever Every’s intended meaning, the lines were prophetic. The hunger of his men would lead them to the most brutal and sadistic extremes of human violence. That much we know for certain. Whether they “exceeded the desire” of Henry Every in committing those acts is a harder question to answer.
17
THE PRINCESS
Mecca
June 1695
The treasure aboard the Gunsway was not the only thing that made the Mughal ship unusual for its time. A quick survey of the passenger manifest would have revealed another startling fact: there were dozens of women on board, many of them members of Aurangzeb’s court.
The maritime world circa 1695 was overwhelmingly a world of men. Merchant ships, warships, privateers—most of them would have been entirely devoid of women. Migrant ships—like the Mayflower—would occasionally carry women and girls to their new homes across the sea, but a ship containing a large number of aristocratic women was almost unheard of. Not all the females aboard the ship were of noble birth; the captain had purchased a collection of Turkish concubines during the voyage and was importing them back to India, an operation that we would now consider sex trafficking. But most of the women on board the Gunsway were there as religious pilgrims, fulfilling their duties as good Muslims observing the hajj.
One of those pilgrims, m
aking what would have likely been her first voyage to Mecca, was rumored to be the granddaughter of Aurangzeb himself.
The identity of this Mughal princess is shrouded in mystery. According to the official records, Aurangzeb had ten children by multiple wives, but none of those children had daughters who appear to fit the profile of the Mughal princess aboard the Ganj-i-Sawai. Most likely she was a member of Aurangzeb’s extended family, not a direct descendant. But the mystery behind her identity itself reveals a larger point about the way histories of this period are conventionally told. The presence of so many women making their pilgrimage to Mecca is a fulcrum in the story of the Ganj-i-Sawai; their fate transformed what might have been a minor contretemps into a global crisis. And yet, while countless pages have analyzed the daring and savagery of Every and his men, the entrepreneurial ambition of the East India Company agents, and the wrath of Aurangzeb, the women on board the ship have only the briefest moment in the spotlight. The only identity they are granted is to be victims of a heinous crime. They have no names, no histories.
Despite that blank spot in the historical record, we can reconstruct something of what the experience of a woman in the Mughal court would have been like, and perhaps even imagine what might have been going through the mind of that young princess as she made her way back from Mecca. At the highest echelons of court society, women could play a role in political and cultural affairs, possess their own property, and even dabble in commerce. During the more progressive regimes of Akbar and Jahangir, wealthy noblewomen engaged in trade, and in some cases owned their own vessels. (In 1613 Portuguese traders seized a Mughal vessel called the Rahimi, at the time the largest ship in the Indian fleet. The Rahimi belonged to the mother of the emperor Jahangir, creating an international dispute that anticipated the crisis that would erupt around the Gunsway seven decades later.) Princesses could be patrons of the arts and architecture; a number of public gardens in modern-day India were originally championed by women in the Mughal court.
Enemy of All Mankind Page 12
