By March 1696, the protectionist defenders of the wool industry—one of the first genuine labor movements in history—had convinced at least some members of Parliament that drastic measures were required. Already the more radical body, the House of Commons passed a bill banning the importation of “all wrought silks, Bengalls, dyed printed or stained calicoes of India.” By that point, the share price of East India Company stock had lost half its value in just fifteen months. If the House of Lords ratified its own version of the bill, the weavers of the North Country would level almost as devastating a blow to the company as the one Aurangzeb was threatening to deliver. Take silks and dyed cottons off the balance sheet, and the East India Company would be out of business.
That was where the world’s first joint-stock multinational corporation—now arguably the most powerful economic force on the planet, rivaled only by the economic power of national governments—found itself a few years shy of its hundredth birthday, facing existential threats at home and abroad. If England had outsourced its relations with India to the East India Company, it was not clear, in those first months of 1696, how that strategy was going to play out. Perhaps powerful imperial states would come to realize—as Aurangzeb seemed on the verge of doing—that the capitalist traders were undermining their authority and exploiting their economies both through parasitic trading practices and outright piracy. Perhaps the weavers would figure out a way to get the Tory House of Lords on their side, and the East India Company would collapse via an act of Parliament. Both were viable scenarios.
We should not push the alternate histories too far. The joint-stock multinational corporation was probably going to become a dominant organizational form, one way or another, however troublesome the anti-calico crowd or the pirates happened to be. But if there were a moment when its long-term survival was most at peril, it was probably during that last decade of the seventeenth century, thanks to the bribery scandal, the siege of Bombay and the Every affair in India, and the “calico madam” backlash at home. It was an inflection point, a stretch of history’s river where small perturbations can determine which way it ultimately runs.
Confronting this crisis from within the fortifications at Bombay Castle, John Gayer wrote increasingly desperate reports back to London. The first made it to the company’s headquarters on Leadenhall Street in East London in December 1695; three others followed in the coming months. If Every and his men were not apprehended and brought to justice, Gayer warned, the wrath of Aurangzeb would result in complete expulsion from the subcontinent, if not mass slaughter of the company’s employees. Slowly it dawned on the company’s board that with Annesley and his men imprisoned in Surat—and Bombay vulnerable to imminent attack—the crisis in India was just as dangerous to the company’s future as the calico backlash at home. Orders were sent to company settlements throughout India to detain and interrogate the crews aboard any ships in the region, seeking information on the whereabouts of Every. Anyone detained who had deserted a pirate ship was to be dispatched back to London as a potential informant.
Unfortunately for the company, it was an unusually challenging time to mobilize a response to an overseas crisis. Previously such issues would have been presented to the Lords of Trade, but that administrative body happened to be in the middle of a transformation into a new institution that would be known as the Board of Trade, with a permanent professional class of civil servants. The East India Company had a compelling case that a strong response from the British government was in the interest of both the company and the nation. The problem was that the institutional body responsible for hearing that case was still in the process of self-assembling.
Eventually, though, the East India Company recognized that its own resources were insufficient to conduct a dragnet of such vast scale. On June 19, twenty of the company’s directors gathered at East India House on Leadenhall Street for what was then called a “court of committees”—the equivalent of a corporate board meeting. The attendees included some of London’s most powerful merchants and political figures, among them George Bohun, governor of the East India Company and member of Parliament, and Sir John Fleet, former Lord Mayor of London. A third of the men in the room had been knighted; most of them had accumulated significant fortunes from the rise of company stock over the preceding decade and stood to suffer meaningful losses if the Every crisis resulted in the expulsion of the company from India.
Also at the table in the committee room was a company director just shy of his fifty-eighth birthday named Isaac Houblon, the brother of James Houblon, whose catastrophic Spanish Expedition Shipping had initially provoked Every’s mutinous turn to piracy. Houblon joined the meeting with a double motive: to protect the East India Company’s interests in India, and to seek some sort of restitution for his brother’s financial losses—starting with the theft of his prize vessel, the Charles II.
The committee discussed a few routine matters—a minor dispute over customs, the payment of a large bill to a trader—before turning to the main topic of conversation. The court minutes make note of the “English pyrate” Henry Every and his “great depredations on some of the ships of the great Mughall in the Red Sea which may greatly prejudice the company’s affairs in those parts.” The directors agreed to form a special committee with the mandate “to advise what means are most proper to be used for apprehending said pyrate, whether by letter of marque and commission under the Great Seal of England, or by his Majesty’s Proclamation, or what other method may be prescribed in the case for vindicating the company’s honor and innocence in this matter—and for declaring their abhorrence of such detestable practices.” The committee was also instructed to write a letter expressing that innocence and abhorrence to Aurangzeb himself. Four directors were named to the committee; one of them was Isaac Houblon.
Within weeks, the company’s secretary, Robert Blackborne, had submitted a handwritten petition to “Their Excellencies The Lords Justices of England.” The document reviewed Every’s crimes, quoted at length from the pirate’s 1695 letter, and described the imprisonment of Annesley and the other company factors in Surat. It warned of “many great inconveniences which may be made upon them at Surat or other factories from reprisals which may be made upon them at Surat . . . But also from the interruption which may be there given to their trade from port to port in India as well as their trade to and from thence to England.” It ended with a simple plea: “We do must humbly beseech your Excellencies to use such effectual means for the preventing [of] the great loss and damage which threaten them hereby as your Excellencies’ great wisdom shall be thought fit.”
The petition generated a quick response from the Lords Justices, who immediately issued a formal proclamation, the opening lines of which established a clear demarcation between the laws of England and the depraved actions of the pirates:
Whereas we have received information from the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading to the East Indies that one Henry Every, Commander of the Ship called Fancy of forty-five guns and one Hundred and thirty men has under English Colours acted as a Common Pirate and Robber upon the High Seas and hath performed under such Colours to commit several Acts of piracy upon the seas of India and Persia and may occasion great Damage to the Merchants of England . . . We do here by charge command all his Majesty’s Admirals, Captains and other officers at sea, and all his Majesty’s Governors and Commanders of any forts, castles or other places in his Majesty’s planation, or otherwise, to seize and take Henry Every and such as are with him on the ship to be punished as pirates upon the High Seas.
A subsequent proclamation, composed by the newly formed Board of Trade, based on the original draft from the Lords Justices and signed by King William himself, extended the vast collection of authorities—and indeed, ordinary citizens—encouraged to participate in the hunt for Every and his men:
We do therefore, with Advice of the Lords of Our Privy Council, Require, and Command, the Sheriffs of the
several Shires, Stewarts of Stewartries, Baillies of Regalities, and their Respective Deputs, Magistrats of Burghs, Officers of Our Army, Commanders of Our Forces and Garisons, and all others Employed, or Trusted by Us in any Station whatsoever, Civil or Military within this Kingdom, and Our Good Subjects whatsoever within the same, to do their outmost lndeavour and Diligence to Seize upon, and Apprehend the Persons of the said Henry Every, and several of his Accomplices . . .
After further back-channel negotiations with the special committee on piracy, the government added a reward worth more than $50,000 in today’s currency, quietly funded by the East India Company itself.
The proclamation also offered a smaller reward for the capture of any of the crew of the Fancy. The combination of the reward money and the direct address to “any other of Our Good Subjects” sent a not-so-subtle signal to the wider community at sea. Pirates themselves were as welcome to the bounty on Henry Every’s head as the sheriffs and commanders were. And if they had to physically harm Every or his men in attempting to capture them, they were welcome to do that as well; the document went on to “indemnify hereby all and every one of Our Subjects from any Hazard of Slaughter, Mutilation, or other Acts of Violence which they may Commit against the said Henry Every.” If it were necessary to kill the villain in cold blood in order to apprehend him, the bounty hunters had the permission of the British crown to pull the trigger.
For the first time in history, a global network of military forces, local law enforcement officers, governors in remote colonial outposts, and merchant shipmen—along with amateur bounty hunters, many of them pirates—would be on the lookout for a single wanted man. But if this global manhunt was a preview of coming attractions—the forerunner of the hunt for modern “enemies of all mankind” like Osama bin Laden—it was nonetheless handicapped by the sluggish communication channels of its day. The relay time of news traveling by ship from Bombay to London and back, and the bureaucratic delays introduced by the formation of the Board of Trade severely limited the government’s responsiveness to the crisis. Despite all the renunciations of Every’s “horrid villainy” and the enticements of the reward money, from Henry Every’s perspective, the most important line in the original proclamation came at the very end: the date of its signing, July 17, 1696.
By the time the authorities finally managed to put a price tag on his head and launched the global manhunt in earnest, Henry Every had enjoyed a ten-month head start.
Part Four
THE CHASE
23
THE GETAWAY
The Indian and Atlantic Oceans
Fall-Winter 1695
After we had done as much as we thought convenient,” John Dann would later chillingly say of the plundering of the Gunsway, “we sent her to Surat with the people in her.” Watching the Gunsway limping toward the mainland, Henry Every would have had one thought dominating his mind: after fifteen months patiently waiting for the perfect opportunity, he now faced a countdown clock. The Fath had likely already made its way back to Surat; the Gunsway would arrive in a matter of days. All of the Grand Mughal’s operatives—not to mention the East Indiamen—would be on the lookout for him by the time the last of the passengers made their way off the treasure ship. Every and his crew had to escape the scene of the crime as fast as the Fancy would carry them.
But first, they would have to divide up the loot. The three remaining ships—the Fancy, the Pearl, and the Susanna—had possessed a strength in numbers fighting the Muslim treasure fleet, but now three ships clustered together was a liability, particularly for Every, who knew he could leave the others behind the horizon line within a half day of good sailing, if the winds were favorable. But he couldn’t leave them behind before distributing the fortune they had extracted from the Fath and the Gunsway.
If the pirate articles were clear about anything, it was that the act of dividing up the booty was as close to a sacrament as anything else in the code. It had to be done fairly, or the whole enterprise of piracy would lose its financial allure. Immense risk, unbearable living conditions, and a very real chance that you would end your life disemboweled in the middle of an ocean, five thousand miles from home—you could tolerate all those horrors knowing two things: first, that you were part of an enterprise that could potentially produce immense profits in a matter of months; and second, that the organization would distribute that fortune equitably among all the participants. The pirates were men living in a world dominated by people like Lord Houblon or Aurangzeb, heirs to dynastic wealth that went back many generations: the number of commoners who had escaped their roots and made their own fortune, as Every had declared to Captain Gibson fifteen months before, was vanishingly small. That was the great promise of the pirate’s life: You could break free from the cycle of servitude and poverty. But you could only do it if the spoils were equitably shared.
Dividing the spoils was no easy task. There were likely a dozen different currencies collected from the hulls of the two ships; distributing them fairly among the crew would be close to guesswork, without any expertise in or access to current exchange rates. And the rest of the loot would have been even harder to value: jewels, ivory tusks, silk, spices. Quartermaster Dawson would need a few days to get the ratios right, and the act of distributing the booty would itself take time, with the three ships at their most vulnerable: anchored together, their men distracted by the gleam of gold and silver.
Every directed the three ships to sail south, still following the Indian coast. Near Rajapur, a trade center south of Bombay where there was a small outpost of the East India Company, they took on water and provisions, while Dawson doled out the goods. The ultimate distribution, across the three ships, had multiple tiers: “Some [got] a thousand pound, some six hundred, some five hundred, and some less, according as the Company thought they deserved,” Philip Middleton later reported. As one of the youngest members of the crew, Middleton was awarded “above a hundred pound,” though he claimed his shipmate John Sparkes later “robb’d him of it.”
For an ordinary sailor, £500 would have been close to a lifetime’s worth of wages. Recall that most members of the Spanish Expedition, an unusually well-funded enterprise, had been promised something in the order of £3 per month. At that rate, £500 would be the equivalent of ten years of uninterrupted work for a top-shelf enterprise. You could work thirty years in the Royal Navy for the same wages. While the folklore version of Henry Every’s story would later claim that the pirate acquired enough gold in the Gunsway attack to live as a “pirate King” for the rest of his life, his official share from the heist was £2,000. It was enough money to secure a life of leisure for the remainder of his days, but still short of dynastic wealth.
Of course, to enjoy that life of leisure, Every would have to slip free of the dragnet that was surely coming for him. Every and his men obviously couldn’t sail the Fancy back to the Thames dockyards and stroll off the ship as heroes, the way Drake had done. To escape the law—and the bounty hunters who might also be on the lookout for them—they would need to get rid of the ship and somehow launder the money they had pilfered from the treasure fleet. The three ships first sailed southwest across the Indian Ocean to the island of Réunion, then known as Île Bourbon.
While nearby Madagascar had been settled by humans more than a millennium before, somehow the mountainous terrain of Réunion had repelled would-be settlers. When the Europeans first discovered it in the 1500s, the entire island was uninhabited, making it one of the very last islands to be settled by human beings anywhere in the world. The French had established a permanent base there in the mid-1600s, and would eventually develop a long-standing and profitable industry on the island growing vanilla, which was, for a time, one of the most valuable commodities on the planet. To help develop the rough terrain and build their plantations, the French captured or bought slaves from Madagascar. By the time Every and his crew arrived on the island in the fall of 1695, the island had deve
loped a reputation comparable to Madagascar’s as a pirate’s nest, and as a hub for the growing slave trade.
Anchored in Réunion, Every presented himself to the French as a slave trade interloper, the line of work that he had pursued in the years before he signed up for Spanish Expedition Shipping. (Interlopers were themselves borderline criminals, but it was better to be seen as a run-of-the-mill interloper than the world’s most wanted pirate.) Reverting to his Benjamin Bridgeman alias, Every used some of the Gunsway treasure to purchase ninety slaves. Most of the men Every shackled in the hold would have been born on Madagascar and only recently brought to Réunion by the French settlers. It is sobering to imagine the dislocation and horror of such an itinerary: Born in an island village where your ancestors have lived for centuries, captured by the French and transported to a rugged and remote island that had rejected all human settlement for its entire existence, compelled to work transforming its volcanic soils into some kind of functioning agriculture. And then one day you wake up to find yourself sold to a British pirate, locked up belowdecks on a ship bound for an unknown destination.
Enemy of All Mankind Page 16
