But Every would not truly enter the main stage of history until the following year. An affluent investor and MP named James Houblon had gathered a group of relatives and tradesmen in London to fund a new speculative venture. One of twelve children, Houblon was a member of a prestigious London family with extensive ties to the East India Company; his brother John would be the first governor of the Bank of England. (His portrait appeared on a £50 note issued during the 1990s.) The enterprise—which went under the name Spanish Expedition Shipping—planned to assemble a squadron of ships loaded with guns and cannon, which would then set sail for the West Indies, trading some of the arms to the Spaniards there. Houblon had made a small fortune importing Spanish wines and other foodstuffs, and he had used his connections with Madrid to secure a trading and salvage license from Carlos II. The Spanish Expedition would make its real money, Houblon and his investors believed, by salvaging treasure from sunken Spanish galleons in the Caribbean. Led by an Irish admiral named Don Arturo O’Byrne, the fleet consisted of four vessels: the James, the Dove, the Seventh Son, and the flagship, a sleek newly constructed forty-six-gun “ship of force” named the Charles II.
Houblon had commissioned the Charles II specifically for the Spanish Expedition, the ship constructed in the East London dockyards near where the East India Company built its own vessels. In addition to the extensive armaments onboard the ship, the Charles II was uncommonly fast and agile. Documents that survive from the period suggest that Houblon was particularly enamored of the ship. He called her a “great merchant-man . . . a stout frigate of forty guns and an extraordinary sailer.” Houblon and the other investors had gone to the expense of building such an intimidating flagship so that the squadron could defend itself against any would-be attackers off the coast of Spain or in the West Indies. Just a year earlier, John Houblon had written an impassioned note to the Board of Trade, begging for a convoy of men-of-war to accompany his merchant ships returning from Lisbon. More than a dozen Barbary pirate ships were prowling the coast, he warned, and “French privateers off of the coast of Portugal intercept[ed] and [took] several English and Irish ships.” Several months later, James Houblon sounded a similar note in a petition to the Privy Council, asking for naval support for ships he had dispatched to trade with Spain. “The ships will be very richly loaden with Spanish wooll and [considerable monies], and other rich comodityes,” he wrote. “Wherefore they humbly pray you Lords be pleased to order a speedy convoy to fetch home the said ships, suitable to the richness of the fleete and the Danger they will run.” By investing up front in their “stout frigate of forty guns,” Houblon and the other Spanish Expedition investors would no longer need to plead for help from the Privy Council. The Charles II could outrun whatever danger it might encounter on its journey.
Houblon and his fellow investors recruited their crew by promising regular wages, with a month’s advance paid up front on signing up for the expedition—a far more generous deal than anything the Royal Navy would have offered. Because the Spanish Expedition would quickly prove to be an utter failure—at least in terms of its initial objectives—the venture ultimately triggered a number of lawsuits that give us a documentary record of the financial package granted to some of the crew. One high-ranking sailor on the Dove was offered four pounds, ten shillings per month, with a total package of £82—roughly the equivalent of $20,000 in today’s currency—for the entire voyage. With such well-heeled backers, the food and grog aboard the ship promised to far exceed what you would have found in the mess of a Royal Navy ship (at least for the ordinary seamen on board). Prospective crew would no doubt have expected to supplement their wages with some of the eventual plunder, making the whole proposition even more enticing.
In August 1693, Houblon paid a personal visit to the squadron as it took on provisions while anchored on the Thames. Houblon promised that the families of the crew would be compensated during their long journey, and wished them bon voyage. Shortly thereafter, the four ships raised anchor and began sailing toward the mouth of the Thames and out onto the open sea.
Roughly two hundred men were aboard the four vessels. The fleet was notable for the experience of its officer class. John Knight, captain of the Dove, was reputed to be a “sober, diligent, and knowing man” who had already commanded a number of ships in voyages to the West Indies. The pilot aboard the Charles II was a veteran Spanish navigator named Andres Garsia Cassada. The original captain of the Charles II was John Strong, who had led a successful salvage operation off the coast of modern-day Haiti several years before. But Strong would die early in the voyage, replaced by an alcoholic mariner by the name of Charles Gibson.
Below the officer class, the biographical details get blurrier. There was Thomas Druit, first mate of the James; Joseph Gravet and David Creagh, second mates on the Charles, along with Henry Adams, who would ultimately be promoted to quartermaster on the ship. The steward on board the James was a fifty-year-old sailor named William May, a “very sickly man,” by his own account, who had served his “King and Country for thirty years.” Also aboard was forty-nine-year-old coxswain John Dann, originally from Rochester, along with a forty-five-year-old sailor from Newcastle upon Tyne named Edward Forsyth. At the other end of the generational spectrum were an ambitious but unseasoned young sailor in his early teens named Philip Middleton, a seventeen-year-old Londoner named John Sparkes, and William Bishop, an eighteen-year-old sailor on his first voyage at sea, who later claimed to have been forced into service on the James against his will.
One of the most intriguing characters to sign up for the Spanish Expedition was the second mate of the Dove, a veteran seaman and scientist named William Dampier. In his early forties, Dampier had already circumnavigated the globe once, in a rambling series of voyages that lasted almost the entire decade of the 1680s. (He would go on to become the first man in history to circumnavigate the earth three times.) A few years after the Spanish Expedition’s spectacular demise, Dampier published a memoir of his travels called A New Voyage Round the World. While the book was surprisingly silent about Dampier’s connection with the Charles II—at the time, the subject of much speculation in the popular press—the book went on to be a bestseller, and helped inaugurate a tradition of travel writing that would become one of the eighteenth century’s most popular nonfiction genres. Novelists, as well, were deeply influenced by Dampier’s tales: both Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels drew heavily from A New Voyage Round the World.
The travelogues so impressed the admiralty that Dampier was ultimately granted command of a warship, HMS Roebuck, on which he made a historic voyage to Australia, where he documented the continent’s unique flora and fauna. His botanical studies—as well as pioneering work that he produced on the connection between trade winds, tides, and ocean currents—made him a role model for Charles Darwin, who read extensively from Dampier’s travel narratives and naturalist studies during the voyage of the Beagle. Today, a portrait of William Dampier hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The fact that Dampier was so circumspect about his time aboard the Charles II—in books that otherwise documented his travels in exhaustive detail—was likely a strategic move. Throughout his career, Dampier operated at the blurred boundaries between pirate and privateer, maintaining a level of legitimacy that would keep him in good graces with the Royal Society and the British Admiralty. An association with the Charles II threatened to undermine that delicate positioning, thanks to another crew member who had joined the Spanish Expedition, one whose fame would for a time far eclipse that of William Dampier: the first mate of the Charles II, Henry Every.
Every was likely in his late thirties, tall and in impressive physical condition. He had striking gray eyes and wore a “light coloured Wigg,” according to one of his shipmates. He was embarking on what must have seemed at the time to be a promising but not particularly exceptional voyage. He would have had at least a dozen compara
ble expeditions under his belt at that point in his life. Did First Mate Every have an inkling, standing on the deck as the Charles II made its way down the Thames, that this mission might mark the turning point in his life? On that question, as on so many questions about young Henry Every’s life, the historical record is silent. But one fact is clear: Every would end the journey with an elevated rank, from first mate to captain, from an anonymous sailor to the world’s most notorious criminal.
For five other members of Spanish Expedition Shipping, the voyage would end with a different kind of elevation: hanging from a noose at Execution Dock.
7
THE UNIVERSE CONQUEROR
Delhi
September 1657
Once a year, the graves of the royal couple entombed in the Taj Mahal—the Grand Mughal Shah Jahan and his queen, Mumtaz Mahal—are opened to the public for three days to commemorate the death of Shah Jahan, who built the epic mausoleum as a tribute to his late wife. For those few days, known as the urs, the usual entry fees charged to visit the Taj Mahal are waived and a vast throng of visitors descends on the site. The Khuddam-e-Roza (the shrine’s caretakers) carry an immense, multicolored cloth known as a chadar—which can be over 800 meters long—to mark the beginning of the urs. The colors of the chadar represent the many religions of India, and the whole ceremony has a sublime elegance that befits a shrine built as a “monument to love.”
While the death of Mumtaz Mahal inspired one of the great wonders of the world, the death of Shah Jahan himself had a less uplifting arc. The Grand Mughals of India shared many structural traits with European monarchies—lifetime autocratic rule justified by divine right, a lavish lifestyle supported by taxes and tariffs, surrounded by the proto-bureaucracy of court society—but the Muslim rulers did not share the primogeniture rights of succession that had become nearly ubiquitous across Europe in the feudal age. When a Mughal died, his power did not pass directly to his eldest son. Each male offspring was considered to have a legitimate claim to the throne. The ambiguity inherent in these succession rights meant that the death of a Mughal was often immediately followed by an outbreak of royal fratricide, as the surviving sons battled one another to inherit their father’s title. For all his subsequent expressions of romantic love, Shah Jahan was not above a ruthless play for power in his younger years. When his father, Jahangir, died in 1627, almost two decades after his fateful meeting with William Hawkins, Shah Jahan executed his brother and two nephews in his bid to become Grand Mughal.
Fifty years later, Shah Jahan’s reign would come to an even more brutal end.
Sometime in September of 1657, the sixty-one-year-old Mughal began suffering from a debilitating illness while at court in the new capital city of Delhi. The famous seventeenth-century historian Khafi Khan—who would later write the definitive Indian account of Henry Every’s crimes—claimed in one of his chronicles that Shah Jahan had developed a condition known as a “strangury,” which involves painful, frequent urination, though other accounts report that he suffered from acute constipation. Before long, the Mughal had developed a high fever, and rumors of his imminent demise spread across the land, producing, according to Khan, “much derangement in the government of the country.” This was almost certainly an understatement.
With their father near death, the sons of Shah Jahan immediately began preparing to stake their claims to the throne. Two of the brothers, Prince Shuja and Prince Murad, commenced printing coins with their own likenesses; Shuja even staged a coronation, blithely ignoring the fact that his father was still alive. Both brothers must have known they had slim chances of actually succeeding Shah Jahan, given his fondness for his eldest son, Prince Dara, who was based in Delhi and had served as a kind of surrogate spokesman for his father for years. (Dara also enjoyed the support of his sister Jahanara, who had her own sphere of influence within the Mughal court.) But Dara had one critical vulnerability: his Islamic bona fides were suspect. In the tradition of his distant ancestor Babur, Dara had extensive social and intellectual connections with Sufis, Hindus, and Christians alike. He had even publicly argued that “the essential nature of Hinduism is identical with that of Islam.” Among orthodox Muslims and the religious scholars known as the ulema, Dara was seen as almost a heretic. Fearing a retreat back to the more tolerant era of Babur, they threw their weight behind Dara’s far more pious brother, Aurangzeb.
In late spring of 1658, the struggle to succeed Shah Jahan culminated in a fierce battle between Dara and Aurangzeb on a wide desert plain eight miles outside Agra. The two brothers commanded cavalries riding as many as fifty thousand horses, supported by a battery of war elephants. Along with rifles and cannons, the artillery men had portable rockets made with bamboo rods and iron points. Dara and Aurangzeb commanded their squadrons from their respective howdahs, ornate carriages strapped onto the backs of elephants. At one point in the melee, one of Dara’s Rajputs (members of India’s elite warrior caste) slashed his way through Aurangzeb’s guard with only a sword and attempted to cut the cables that secured the howdah to the prince’s elephant. According to Khafi Khan—whose vivid account of the battle stands as one of the great literary achievements in the history of military writing—Aurangzeb “became aware of this daring attempt, and in admiration of the man’s bravery, desired his followers to take the rash and fearless fellow alive, but he was cut to pieces.”
Across the battlefield, Dara was having a crisis of confidence. “Seeing so many of his noble and heroic followers killed and wounded, [he] was much affected,” Khan wrote. “He became distracted and irresolute, and knew not what to do.” It was the wrong time to waver in second thoughts. As Dara weighed his increasingly limited options from his howdah, a rocket launched by Aurangzeb’s men made a direct hit on the outer edge of the carriage. Unhurt but dazed, Dara dismounted the elephant—“without even waiting to put on his slippers,” Khan noted drily—and took to the saddle of a nearby horse. The sight of the commander’s elephant swaying through the carnage, its howdah unoccupied, only demoralized the troops further. The last straw seems to have been a moment straight out of Peckinpah or Tarantino: as an attendant to Dara reaches up to the dumbfounded prince to hand him a quiver of arrows, an inbound cannonball rips between the two men, severing the attendant’s hand at the wrist. That was it for Dara. “Beholding the dispersion of his followers, and the repulse of his army, prizing life more than the hope of a crown, [he] turned away and fled.”
With Dara on the run, and his other rivals either dead or in hiding, Aurangzeb staged a quick coronation for himself in 1658, while still in pursuit of his older brother. Attempting to turn public opinion against the popular prince, Aurangzeb denounced Dara as an infidel, and encouraged locals to report any sightings. Reduced from an heir apparent living in unimagined opulence to a fugitive wandering the desert with his wife and daughter and only a few servants, Dara slunk westward from Agra to Gujarat. In the summer of 1659, Aurangzeb held a second coronation, this time on a much grander scale, with festivities lasting more than two months. Elaborate fireworks displays lit up the Delhi sky at night, and Aurangzeb distributed awards to thousands of subjects, no doubt trying to win over a court society that had long assumed Prince Dara would succeed Shah Jahan. He began referring to himself using the title Alamgir—“Universe Conqueror.”
While Aurangzeb celebrated in Delhi, Dara made a last-ditch attempt to escape to Persia through the Bolan Pass. He took refuge in the foothills of the Central Brahui mountains, at the estate of Malik Jiwan, a local zamindar (well-to-do landowner). Shortly after their arrival, Dara’s wife collapsed and died from dysentery. For Dara, the walls seemed to be closing in. “Mountain after mountain of trouble thus pressed up on the heart of Dara,” Khan wrote. “Grief was added to grief, sorrow to sorrow, so that his mind no longer retained its equilibrium.” Jiwan initially offered to help escort Dara across the Bolan Pass, but then seems to have had a change of heart. (Or Jiwan had been playing the long game from t
he beginning.) As Dara set off for his mountain exodus, a gang of “ruffians and robbers” descended on him, apparently at Jiwan’s instruction. The zamindar sent word of the capture back to Aurangzeb, still immersed in the concerts and pyrotechnics of his second coronation. The newly ascendant Mughal had Dara transported back to Delhi, where the prince was placed on the back of a “dirty female elephant” and carried through the streets in chains. The spectacle appears to have backfired; rather than brand Dara as an apostate, the public shaming brought out a vast throng of supporters. The sight of ordinary Delhi citizens weeping for their fallen prince convinced Aurangzeb that “for public peace and reasons of the State, [it would be] unlawful to allow Dara to remain alive.”
Enemy of All Mankind Page 6