Enemy of All Mankind

by Steven Johnson

  Dara was executed on August 30, 1659. His head was allegedly presented to his brother on a plate.

  By the time Henry Every set sail on the Spanish Expedition, Aurangzeb had occupied the Peacock Throne for more than three decades, a reign that shared many qualities with his violent ascent to power: aggressive military action coupled with a return to religious orthodoxy. Aurangzeb had abandoned the scholarly pluralism of Babur, along with Shah Jahan’s commitment to pioneering architecture. (Aurangzeb’s primary architectural legacy lies in the dozens of Hindu temples he destroyed.) Hindu pilgrims and all non-Muslim merchants had been subjected to new taxes. Extensive military conquests had extended his kingdom to include most of modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. As First Mate Every made his way down the Thames aboard the Charles II, more than 150 million people lived in territories controlled by the Grand Mughal. (At the time, the entire population of Europe was likely less than one hundred million.) Aurangzeb was almost certainly the wealthiest man in the world.

  The Universe Conqueror’s ascent to power was marred by one crucial asterisk. His father’s terminal illness turned out not to be terminal at all. Shah Jahan lived for another eight years after his son clawed his way onto the Peacock Throne. That was eight years too many for Aurangzeb. He condemned his father to spend the rest of his life imprisoned in the Red Fort at Agra, with only a distant view of the Taj Mahal through his cell window to remind him of his former omnipotence.

  8

  HOLDING PATTERNS

  A Coruña, Spain

  Winter 1693-1694

  If the crew aboard the Charles II left England in good spirits, anticipating a profitable adventure at sea, their enthusiasm would prove to be short-lived. The plan had been to make a quick, two-week voyage to the Spanish port city of A Coruña—known to the British as “The Groyne”—taking on supplies and securing additional paperwork there, before riding the trade winds to the West Indies. But for reasons that have never been entirely clear, the voyage to Spain ended up taking five months instead. This was only the first of several misfortunes to befall Spanish Expedition Shipping. Anchored in A Coruña, they were told that the paperwork required for the voyage was still en route from Madrid. As the weeks passed with no sign of the missing documents, the crew’s unrest at the delay was aggravated by the fact that their promised semiannual salaries had yet to be paid. A petition delivered back to James Houblon was met with an order to lock the petitioners in the ship’s brig.

  Even in the best of times, life aboard a seventeenth-century privateering ship was a challenging and claustrophobic experience. The fact that a community of a hundred or more people could survive on the open seas for months at a time, in a vessel with dimensions not much larger than a tennis court, should go down as one of the great achievements in our long history of creating life-sustaining habitats in fundamentally inhospitable environments. A ship like the Charles II was as impressive, in its own time, as the International Space Station is in ours. Carrying forty-six guns on board, the Charles II was likely a little more than a hundred feet from bow to stern, with a galley beam measuring around thirty feet across its width. Counting the three main decks of the vessel, the captain’s quarters at the stern, and the entire space below deck, the Charles II would have offered about six thousand square feet to house more than a hundred men, along with armaments, cargo, and enough food and drink to keep those hundred men alive for months at a time. For the captain and a few select officers, the onboard experience could be reasonably civilized; the stern windows in the captain’s relatively spacious cabin looked out onto the open water, and his private galley enabled him to dine with his officers in style, even if the food was not up to the standards an affluent European might expect on land.

  But belowdecks, it was another matter. In a ship with a hull loaded with cargo, the living quarters for the non-officer crew might be less than a thousand square feet. Ceiling heights were often less than five feet. Imagine squeezing yourself into a typical one-bedroom apartment with a hundred other men, with ceilings a foot shorter than the height of an average adult male, and somehow trying to get a good night’s sleep. Only this apartment is prone to lurch violently from side to side in intense ocean storms without a single window to give you a hint of the horizon line to settle your stomach. And the gunsman sleeping in the hammock next to you has dysentery. That was the reality of life on a ship like the Charles II.

  As horrendous as the sleeping conditions were, they paled in comparison to the food. If they ever build a library of literary disgust, a special wing will no doubt be dedicated to sailors describing the atrocities that they were forced to consume at sea. A few decades after the Charles II set sail for the West Indies, the captain of another privateering mission recounted the horrifying conditions on board as the ship slowly ran through its supplies of food and drink: “We constantly drank our urine, which, though it moisten’d our mouths for a time, excited our thirst the more . . . [O]ur common food was puddings made of very coarse flour and sweetmeats, and salt water instead of fresh to moisten them, and dry’d beef, which was partly destroy’d by ants, cockroaches, and other vermin.” Another privateer from the late 1600s described the Christmas dinner the crew enjoyed on one voyage: “For we had nothing but a little bit of Irish beef for four men, which had lain in pickle two or three years and was as crusty as the Devil, with a little stinking oil or butter, which was all the colours of the rainbow, many men in England greasing their cartwheels with better.”

  Then there was the question of where all that food was supposed to go once it had been eaten. The primary toilet on board was a hole suspended over the bowsprit at the head of the ship. (The modern slang for going to the toilet—“hitting the head”—originated on these vessels.) Needless to say, the close quarters and the nonexistent sanitation—not to mention the travels to exotic lands with parasites and microorganisms that Europeans had never encountered before—meant that the crews aboard these ships often faced catastrophic medical situations. Hollywood representations of pirates and privateers tend to focus on the battle scenes, with cannonballs firing and elaborate swordfights on deck, but the reality of life at sea during this period was that you were more likely to die from the “bloody flux”—as dysentery was called back then—than you were to be struck down in armed combat. While there was some vague awareness by Every’s time that the excruciating—and often fatal—vitamin C deficiency known as scurvy could be treated by adding citrus to the diet, the condition was nonetheless rampant on commercial and military vessels during the period. Sexually transmitted diseases, too, accompanied the seafaring lifestyle, thanks both to encounters with prostitutes in ports of call and to onboard encounters among the sailors themselves. One study of thirty-three Royal Navy ships found that almost 10 percent of the crew suffered from venereal diseases of one sort or another—on some ships, one in four men had contracted them—in an era where now treatable diseases like syphilis were often fatal.

  With their cramped conditions and limited food supplies, the ships were petri dishes for disease and malnourishment—in both senses of the term: the ships’ conditions made them a breeding ground for potential pathogens as well as a tool of scientific research. Ships like the Charles II afforded the medical men aboard tightly controlled experiments: a hundred men sharing almost the exact same circumstances for long periods of time. It is no accident that what many consider to be the first controlled clinical trial in history took place on board one of these vessels, when the Scottish doctor James Lind experimented in 1747 by giving members of his crew different remedies for scurvy—among them cider, sulfuric acid, seawater, and oranges—and carefully observing the results.

  Not all ship doctors were as empirical as Lind. The default cure for most illnesses was still bloodletting. The “bloody flux” was treated with a now comical range of interventions, everything from sitting on a heated brick to being buried up to the neck in hot sand to an unorthodox variation on a moder
n suppository: “Take a hard egg,” one medical guidebook advised, “and peel off the shell, and put the smaller end of it into the fundament or arsehole, and when that is cold take another such hot, fresh, hard, and peeled egg and apply it as aforesaid.”

  The atrocious medical conditions and limited access to proper nutrition meant that the mortality rates for voyages like the Spanish Expedition—even if you don’t count the ventures that ended in shipwreck and a complete loss of life—were appallingly high, in an age where the average life expectancy was just over thirty years. According to a mate on William Dampier’s 1706 voyage around the world, Dampier began his journey with a 183 men under his command. By the time he returned, “after many Dangers both by Sea and Land,” only eighteen remained.

  So if you want to put yourself into the mind of Henry Every, suffering through those long months off the coast of Europe, waiting to be set free to begin the true journey of the Spanish Expedition, you should imagine this: you are living in a floating aquatic coffin with a hundred other sailors, just trying to carve out a few feet of space to sleep every night without contracting smallpox from the men rubbing shoulders with you as you sleep.

  But consider one other thing when you imagine yourself in Henry Every’s situation. Imagine choosing to live your life this way. Because for most of the men, the life at sea was a deliberate choice. For every William Bishop, the teenager who claimed to have been forced into service on the Spanish Expedition, there were probably at least ten Everys or Dampiers, who actively sought out privateering as a career path. The conditions they lived in were far more physically taxing and oppressive—not to mention deadly—than the living conditions of just about any human being currently alive in the twenty-first century, even in the poorest or most remote communities on the planet.

  Why did they sign up in the first place? The wages alone were a temptation. In those alehouses and taverns below London Bridge, an informal market had emerged where able seamen could offer their services to multiple employers—one of the earliest professions to generate that kind of competitive marketplace for labor. (A little more than half a century after the Spanish Expedition left London, sailors would stage one of the first general strikes in labor history. The word “strike” itself derives from their strategy of “striking,” or lowering, the sails of anchored ships as a sign of their refusal to work.) An able seaman signing up for a voyage like the Spanish Expedition could attract basic wages comparable to those of skilled craftsmen like tailors and weavers. And while the provisions were often contaminated with weevils and ants, the sailors were guaranteed food and drink for the length of the voyage as part of their contract—a significant savings in an era where most land-based workers spent almost all their wages warding off starvation.

  There was genuine camaraderie aboard the ship, as well. The sailors entertained themselves with card games and music. Literacy rates were surprisingly high: according to one study, more than 70 percent of sailors could sign their own names on official documents, the standard used by demographic historians to gauge literacy rates in earlier societies. An amateur science and travel writer like William Dampier was hardly the norm, of course, but reading books and pamphlets was an available pastime to many on board. Sexual experiences, too, were part of the attraction: the fantasy of a sexualized “Orient,” liberated from the religious strictures of Christian Europe. Port Royal in southeast Jamaica—for a time the largest city in the entire Caribbean—was known as the “Sodom of the New World.” Not all the sexual contact took place in harborside brothels. While both formal and informal legal codes explicitly forbade sodomy, on some ships meaningful same-sex relationships appear to have been condoned.

  A life at sea also offered access to radically new experiences, something that was otherwise in short supply in the seventeenth century, in both Europe and India, despite their relative affluence. Growing up working class in Devonshire in the 1660s, Henry Every would have had almost no opportunity to encounter other realities beyond the insular world of a fishing town on the English Channel. Novels were still in their infancy; Dampier’s groundbreaking travelogues—which offered a simulated ride on a globetrotting voyage—wouldn’t be published for another forty years. The theater could immerse you in a virtual world, and the church built spaces designed explicitly to dazzle the senses, but the spells of both those spaces were limited, particularly to lower-income people who weren’t attending plays in fashionable London. Travel, on the other hand, was the real thing. If you genuinely wanted to expand your horizons, you had to do it the old-fashioned way.

  All these attractions—the financial incentives, the sexual and geographic adventure of the privateering lifestyle, the whole romance of the sea—were to a certain extent amplified by one of the new inventions of the seventeenth century: the popular press. The early pioneers of print media quickly discovered that there was a paucity of recognizable people whom they could cover in their broadsides and pamphlets. The average British citizen circa 1500 would have heard almost nothing about other human beings outside his or her immediate network of friends, family, and neighbors. The only living people with genuine national name recognition were members of the royal family and some lesser orbit of political figures—along with the upper echelons of the clergy. There were no rock stars or billionaire entrepreneurs or reality-television stars who were properly famous. The printing press had created the possibility—for the first time in human history—of assembling a mass audience, but that audience didn’t have enough social common denominators to be a meaningful (or at least profitable) unit. The exotic and scandalous lives of privateers supplied one of the first solutions to that problem. Figures like Francis Drake became legends in their own time, men from humble beginnings who had sailed their way into affluence and prestige. In this sense, pirates and privateers were forerunners of the modern celebrity. Henry Every would achieve notoriety as the most wanted man in the world, but from a historical perspective, the scale of that notoriety was just as noteworthy: few human beings had ever captured the imagination of so many strangers around the world without commanding an army, presiding over a major religious sect, or being born with royal blood.

  Of course, one of the reasons Every became so famous is the simple fact that his actions made him, for a time, astonishingly wealthy, at least by the standards of a humble Devonshire seaman. Even before they had Every as a role model, the generation of sailors signing up for service on a privateering mission like the Spanish Expedition had the promise of outsize reward to lure them to sea. A venture like the Spanish Expedition could pay out the equivalent of ten years of wages to a first or second mate like Every or Dampier if it got lucky, even after sharing a bounty with the investors back in London. In an age where class mobility was for all intents and purposes nonexistent, heading out to sea in search of treasure was the one viable path to changing your station. All the risk of disease and shipwreck and starvation were worth the potential reward, given the limited options at home.

  But the longer the men of Spanish Expedition Shipping waited at the Groyne, the less likely that financial upside became. Back in London, several wives of the crew had tracked down James Houblon and personally demanded the back pay that was owed to the families according to the contracts their husbands had signed. Houblon icily responded that the men belong to the king of Spain now, and were no longer his concern. Instead of seeking their fortune in the West Indies, the crew were trapped in a bureaucratic holding pattern, without even the solace of reliable wages. When Houblon’s dismissive remarks traveled back to A Coruña, rumors began to swirl that they were all going to be sold into slavery to the Spanish.

  As the crew passed the days and nights in the taverns of A Coruña, increasingly convinced that the Spanish Expedition would never make it to the West Indies, a new plan began to form in the mind of the Charles II’s first mate.

  Part Two:

  THE MUTINY

  9

  THE DRUNKEN BOATSWAIN
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  A Coruña

  May 7, 1694

  In the soft glow of late twilight, with a quarter moon overhead, the medieval fort of A Coruña is still visible as the longboat pulls quietly up against the James.

  On the main deck of the James, First Mate Thomas Druit is on watch. From the longboat, a voice calls, “Is the drunken boatswain on board?” Confused by the question, and unable to make out the speaker’s face in the low light, Druit gives a quizzical reply. The stranger on the longboat mutters a brief warning—the Charles “is going to be run away with”—and then pushes off into the black water.

  If the “drunken boatswain” question is baffling to First Mate Druit, its meaning is all too apparent for other members of the crew. The past few weeks, over drinks in the taverns in A Coruña and in hushed conversations belowdecks on the Charles II, Henry Every and a handful of sailors have been plotting to stage a mutiny aboard the Charles. They have settled on “the drunken boatswain” as a password, a signal that the uprising is under way, at long last liberating the men from their five-month holding pattern in A Coruña’s harbor.

  A few hundred feet away, on board the Charles, Second Mate David Creagh makes his way across the quarterdeck to check on Captain Gibson, who has fallen ill, likely with some combination of fever and alcohol poisoning. Before reaching the captain’s quarters, Creagh encounters a group of men—including the middle-aged sailor William May, Henry Every, and the ship’s carpenter—enjoying a bowl of punch. After a quick visit with Gibson, Creagh sits down with the sailors. They seem to be in unusually good cheer. May proposes a toast: “A drink to the health of the Captain, and the Prosperity of our Voyage.” It is an odd tribute given the grim prospects currently facing the Spanish Expedition, spoken by a man who might well be about to be sold into slavery to the Spanish king. But Creagh raises his glass anyway, and then heads down to his bunk.