Enemy of All Mankind

by Steven Johnson

  Henry Every would have had no way of knowing it, in those first years of his naval career, but his actions would ultimately compel those two models of piracy to collide with each other, forcing the British to confront the possibility that one of their celebrated buccaneers might just be a monster after all.

  5

  TWO KINDS OF TREASURE

  Surat, India

  August 24, 1608

  The merchant galleon Hector that dropped anchor at the mouth of the Tapti River on the western coast of India in late August of 1608 had been at sea for more than a year, sailing from London around the Horn of Africa, with extended stops in Sierra Leone and Madagascar to reprovision. The sight of a European trading vessel on the Tapti would have been nothing new to the Indians living along the river; just fourteen miles upstream lay the harbor town of Surat, the epicenter of Red Sea trade. But a discerning observer would have noticed something unusual about the Hector. In an age where the Portuguese held a monopoly over European commerce with India—a tradition that had begun with Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage of 1499—the arrival of the Hector marked a critical turning point in the relationship between India and Europe. It was the first ship flying British colors to reach the shores of the Indian subcontinent.

  On board the Hector was a representative of the East India Company named William Hawkins, who had been dispatched by the company to investigate the possibility of opening new avenues of trade with India. The general lessening of tensions after the Treaty of London in 1604, which ended the Anglo-Spanish War, had led the company to believe the Portuguese might tolerate other traders in the Indian ports they controlled, and the company’s recent troubles in the Spice Islands made its directors particularly eager to secure new markets. Hawkins carried with him a letter from King James to the Grand Mughal Jahangir, requesting that the sultan grant “such liberties of traffique and privileges as shall be resonable both for their securitie and proffit.”

  In Surat, Hawkins was initially informed that the local governor was “not well” and would not be able to meet with him. (In his diary, Hawkins notes that he suspected the cause was an opium stupor, not ill health.) Instead he was welcomed by the shahbander, or port master, of Surat. “I told him that my comming was to establish and settle a factory in Surat,” Hawkins recorded in his diary, “and that I had a letter for his king from His Majesty of England tending to the same purpose, who is desirous to have league and amitie with his king, in that kind that his subjects might freely goe and come, sell and buy, as the custome of all nations is; and that my ship was laden with the commodities of our land which, by intelligence of former travellers, were vendible for these parts.”

  At first, Hawkins’s overtures seemed to induce a favorable response. The morning after his meeting with the port master, he learned that the governor was now well enough to receive him. Dressed in an elaborate scarlet taffeta outfit embroidered with silver lace, designed back in London specifically to create an aura of ambassadorial distinction, Hawkins presented the governor with gifts and repeated his desire to establish a commercial relationship with Jahangir’s regime. “With great gravity and outward shew of kindness he entertained me,” Hawkins wrote, “bidding me most heartily welcome, and that the countrey was at my command.” The welcome, however, would prove to be short-lived. A customs officer named Muqarrab Khan seized some of the “vendible commodities” that Hawkins had hoped to sell to the merchant community in Surat; the rest fell into the hands of the Portuguese, who also captured most of Hawkins’s crew, declaring that “Indian seas belonged exclusively to Portugal.” Dodging several murder plots against him, Hawkins escaped with two men and began the long overland trek to the capital city of Agra, in the hopes that the Grand Mughal himself might be more open to his proposition of “amitie” with King James and the traders of the East India Company.

  Hawkins’s persistence paid off in the end. In Agra, he found a city of staggering architectural grandeur and opulence, with forts and palaces constructed out of the region’s distinctive red sandstone. (The ivory white marble domes of Agra’s most famous structure, the Taj Mahal, would not be built for another three decades.) Lush tropical gardens, replete with octagonal pools, pavilions, and mausoleums, lined the Yamuna River. At the end of a journey that entailed “much labour, toyle, and many dangers,” Agra must have seemed like something out of a dream.

  Hawkins’s reception at the court of Jahangir proved to be far more successful than his initial encounters in Surat. Having lost almost all of his “vendibles” to Surat’s port master and the Portuguese, Hawkins had only “a slight present” of cloth to offer as tribute to the Grand Mughal. But the missive from King James resonated with Jahangir: “He spake unto me in the kindest manner,” Hawkins later wrote, “granting and promising me by God that all what the King had there written he would grant and allow with all his heart, and more if His Majestie would require it.” The two men then discovered that they shared a common language, Turkish, and in a long conversation about the different nations of Europe, they began a complicated friendship that would last for almost four years.

  Hawkins’s travels from Surat had stripped him of almost all his belongings, and nearly cost him his life multiple times, but overnight, under the graces of the Grand Mughal, he was immediately elevated to a far more lavish lifestyle. Jahangir declared that Hawkins should become a “resident Ambassador” at Agra. “He was made captain of four hundred horse, with a handsome allowance, was married to an Armenian maiden, and took his place among the grandees of the court,” according to historian William Foster. Discarding his ragged taffeta uniform, Hawkins began to dress in the “garb of a Muhammadan noble.”

  During his stay at Agra, Hawkins made an important contribution to a venerable genre of “Orientalist” literature: the European marveling at the astonishing opulence of the Indian elite. The entire second half of Hawkins’s diary of his years in India is devoted to an exacting inventory of the Grand Mughal’s extravagant lifestyle. “His treasure is as followeth,” Hawkins announces, and then proceeds to list his “coins of gold,” his “jewells of all sorts,” his “jewels wrought in gold,” “all sorts of beasts,” all the way down to the jewel-encrusted furnishings of the royal court:

  Of chaires of estate there bee five, to say, three of silver and two of gold; and of other sorts of chaires there bee an hundred of silver and gold; in all an hundred and five. Of rich glasses there bee two hundred. Of vases for wine very faire and rich, set with jewels, there are an hundred. Of drinking cuppes five hundred, but fiftie very rich, that is to say, made of one piece of ballace ruby, and also of emerods [emeralds], of eshim, of Turkish stone [turquoises], and of other sorts of stones. Of chaines of pearl, and chaines of all sorts of precious stones, and ringes with jewels of rich diamants, ballace rubies, rubies, and old emerods, there is an infinite number, which only the keeper thereof knoweth.

  Hawkins’s amazement at the sheer scale of the Grand Mughal’s treasure is a reminder of an important conceptual frame that shaped encounters between Europe and India during this period: many Europeans assumed that India, of the two cultures, was the wealthier one. Measured purely by the standard of the production of luxury goods, it was no contest. Economists now believe that the per capita GDP in India was likely close to that of Europe circa 1600, but the concentration of wealth among the ruling elite was far greater in the subcontinent. At the high end of society—in the palaces, the royal gardens, all the outward appearances of wealth and civilization—India appeared to most European visitors to be the more advanced culture.

  In his description of Jahangir’s own personal dress, Hawkins hints at the origin of the Grand Mughal’s vast treasure:

  He is exceeding rich in diamants and all other precious stones, and usually weareth every day a faire diamant of great price. . . . He also weareth a chaine of pearle, very faire and great, and another chaine of emeralds and ballace rubies. Hee hath another Jewell that commeth round about
his turbant, full of faire diamants and rubies. It is not much to bee wondered that he is so rich in jewels and in gold and silver, when he hath heaped together the treasure and jewels of so many kings as his forefathers have conquered, who likewise were a longtime in gathering them together, and all came to his hands. Againe, all the money and jewels which his nobles heape together, when they die come all unto him, who giveth what he listeth to the noblemens wives and children; and this is done to all them that receive pay or living from the King, India is rich in silver, for all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same; and this coyne is buried in India and goeth not out.

  This coyne is buried in India and goeth not out. The line could serve as a slogan for India’s economic program. From the Roman days on, India displayed little interest in the products that Europeans offered to trade in return for the spices and fabrics and other goods that were so highly valued by European consumers. If the citizens of Europe wanted pepper on their table or calico on their skin, they had to pay for it in bullion. But instead of turning that wealth into working capital, most of it went into the grand displays that had so dazzled Hawkins and his contemporaries. “India had long been ‘an abyss for gold and silver,’” the historian John Keay writes, “drawing to itself the world’s bullion and then nullifying its economic potential by melting and spinning the precious metals into bracelets, brocades and other ostentatious heirlooms.” The gold arrived in India as a form of currency, but it was ultimately turned into an ornament, the equivalent of winning the lottery and decorating your house with wallpaper made of hundred dollar bills. Yet in the early days of the seventeenth century, the economic model that the Mughals had pursued seemed undeniably to be working. If your goal was to assemble a vast fortune, the path pursued by the Grand Mughals—and, it should be said, by King James and the other European monarchs—appeared to be the most viable option.

  But William Hawkins was more than just a representative of King James. He was also a kind of emissary from the future. He was there as a representative of both a nation-state and a private corporation, the East India Company.

  This is what ultimately makes that meeting between Hawkins and Jahangir so important, from the long view: it was the first point of contact between two different strategies for accumulating treasure. The first was an old trick, almost as old as agriculture: declare yourself emperor/king/mughal and extract rents from everyone beneath you in the form of taxes and tariffs. This approach had a long track record of success. Jahangir’s “infinite number” of jewels and precious stones marked the outer boundaries of that strategy’s returns, but they were not unusual at that moment in history. If you wanted to join the super-rich in 1600, the entirely fictitious notion of “royal blood” was the main point of entry. But that was about to change. Within a few centuries, the monarchies would become high-class pensioners, living off a lavish but ever-declining dole. The real money would be made elsewhere.

  Mostly it would be made by joint-stock corporations and their shareholders. Royal families barely make an appearance on the Forbes 100 these days; today the upper echelons of the super-wealthy are composed almost entirely of people who have participated in public or semipublic offerings of stock in corporations, either as founders (think Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos) or as investors (think Warren Buffett). As a representative of the East India Company and an emissary for King James, Hawkins was in the service of two masters. He swore loyalty to a British king who, in terms of the feudal economic model that sustained him, bore a meaningful resemblance to Jahangir. But Hawkins was also a representative of the East India Company, by most accounts the first joint-stock corporation in the history of human commerce.

  Queen Elizabeth I had granted a charter to form “one body corporate” with the formal name “The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies” on December 31, 1600. Publicly traded shares, giving investors a stake in a company’s overseas ventures, were offered to a wide swath of wealthy British society: “earls and dukes, privy councilors, judges and knights, countesses and ladies of rank, widows and maiden ladies, clergyman, merchants, tradesmen and merchant strangers.” Before the East India Company, if you wanted to capture some of the value of these emerging global trade networks, you had to set sail with Francis Drake or one of his contemporaries. (Or be a member of the royal family.) Joint-stock offerings gave you a piece of the action without forcing you to leave your London coffeehouse. All you had to do was buy a few shares.

  Initially, the company issued what was called “terminable stock,” based on single voyages or sometimes clusters of three or four voyages. The company would raise funds for a voyage, say, to the Spice Islands, and if the voyage proved to be successful, the profits were distributed among the shareholders based on the size of their original investments. But by the middle of the 1600s, the company had shifted to the model that most corporations employ today: issuing permanent stock that reflected an investment in all the company’s current and future ventures. This innovation had two crucial benefits, and one interesting side effect. Raising funds from a large pool of investors meant that, for the first time, business ventures with massive fixed capital costs—for instance, building and transporting ships across the world to purchase goods to sell back to British consumers—could raise enough money from private citizens that they could operate without the direct oversight and backing of the state. (At the height of its power in India during the 1700s, the East India Company would effectively function as its own state apparatus, with standing armies and corporate officers controlling vast stretches of the subcontinent.) Secondly, by distributing the investment across many individuals, the company minimized the risk of any individual venture. If a ship sank on its way back from India, the loss would be felt widely among the investor classes back in London. But because the voyage had been funded by many small contributions—instead of by, say, one royal patron—the impact of the sinking was less catastrophic.

  The side effect was that issuing publicly traded stock created a secondary market for the shares themselves. Those shares would rise and fall in value as the fates of the East India Company rose and fell over the 1600s. But mostly they rose. Between 1660 and 1680, shares in the company quadrupled in value, driven in large part by the craze for calico and chintz that swept through the London elite during that period. (By the 1680s, the East India Company was importing almost two million pieces of cloth annually, dwarfing the trade in spices that had originally inspired Elizabeth to grant the corporate charter.) The increase in share value constituted a genuinely new kind of wealth. The corporation itself made money in the time-honored tradition of merchants, dating back to the Islamic traders and beyond: they bought low and sold high, and their profits reflected the delta between those two prices. Some of those profits flowed back to the investors in the form of dividends. But the trading of shares created a second form of wealth, one that, in the long run, proved to be more lucrative. You made money investing in the East India Company not just because the company turned a profit, but because other investors thought your shares were worth more than you had paid for them.

  And so that meeting between the two men in Agra, in the spring of 1609, marks an early milestone in the transition from one regime of wealth accumulation to another, a transition that would spread from London and ultimately sweep across the entire planet, as the joint-stock corporation became, by the twentieth century, the dominant form of organizing economic activity, in the private sector, at least. Hawkins wouldn’t have looked all that impressive in his tattered taffeta next to Jahangir’s “chaines of emeralds and rubies.” But he had the future on his side.

  Despite Jahangir’s apparent fondness for Hawkins, the Portuguese managed to intervene to keep the English out of the Indian trade for several years. Hawkins left Agra in 1611, and died at sea shortly thereafter. It was not until 1612 that the Grand Mughal granted the East India Company a permit to open a factory at Surat. Hawkins’s successor,
Thomas Roe, secured a missive from Jahangir to King James that made the terms explicit:

  I have given my general command to all the kingdoms and ports of my dominions to receive all the merchants of the English nation as the subjects of my friend; that in what place soever they choose to live, they may have free liberty without any restraint; and at what port soever they shall arrive, that neither Portugal nor any other shall dare to molest their quiet; and in what city soever they shall have residence, I have commanded all my governors and captains to give them freedom answerable to their own desires; to sell, buy, and to transport into their country at their pleasure.

  The factory at Surat marked the first foothold on Indian soil for this fledgling new corporation. From that small port city, where the victims of Henry Every’s predations would seek their revenge almost a century later, the British would steadily extend their domain, most famously in their settlements at Bombay and Madras. Before long, the entire subcontinent would be under the rule of the East India Company.

  6

  SPANISH EXPEDITION SHIPPING

  East London

  August 1693

  If Henry Every spent his childhood living in fear of being abducted into slavery by Barbary pirates, the experience seems to have not had much of an influence on his subsequent ethical feelings about the institution of slavery itself. The first clear reference to Every in the historical record—after his Royal Navy engagement as a young man—comes from an agent of the Royal Africa Company (RAC), Thomas Phillips, who reported in 1693 that Every had taken up a career as a slave trader, working for the governor of Bermuda. At the time, the RAC claimed a monopoly on all English slave trade in the region. British history often conveniently neglects the sheer scale of the company’s involvement in the slave trade during this period, focusing instead on the fact that slavery was largely abolished in England itself—if not in her colonies—by the late 1700s. But as the historian David Olusoga observes, “the Royal African Company transported more Africans into slavery than any other British company in the whole history of the Atlantic slave trade . . . around a hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children passed through the company’s coastal fortresses on their way to lives of miserable slavery.” According to the RAC agent Phillips, Henry Every had built a career for himself in the early 1690s as an interloper, working outside the official monopoly of the RAC, sometimes capturing the English traders themselves along with their African captives. Typically for Every, even Phillips’s unmistakable reference contained two aliases for the man. “I have nowhere met the negroes so shy as here,” the agent wrote, “which makes me fancy they have had tricks played on them by such blades as Long Ben, alias Every, who have seized them and carried them away.”