Enemy of All Mankind

by Steven Johnson

  There is some speculation that Henry Every might have known Thomas Tew personally, given their mutual connections to the governor of Bermuda. Every might have invoked that association as part of his case for a Red Sea expedition: When I last saw Thomas Tew, he might have told his men, he was scrounging around Bermuda, trying to put a venture together. Now he is rich beyond imagination. That could be our story, too.

  Whatever case Every made to his men, by the time the Fancy left the Cape Verde islands, they were committed to the Red Sea plan. They sailed south along the edge of Guinea, anchoring just offshore, close to coastal settlements that were known to engage in commerce with Europeans. Every ordered the crew to “put out English colors to make the natives come aboard to trade,” Philip Middleton would later recall. They may have lured the Guinean villagers onto the ship by leaving small goods on the beach to attract the interest of the community. In an oral history of the slave trade, the descendent of a West African captured during this period described the deceit the Europeans used to apprehend her ancestor:

  One day a big ship stopped off the shore and the natives hid in the brush along the beach. Grandmother was there. The ship men sent a little boat to the shore and scattered bright things and trinkets on the beach. The natives were curious. Grandmother said everybody made a rush for them things soon as the boat left. The trinkets was fewer than the peoples. Next day the white folks scatter some more. There was another scramble. The natives was feeling less scared, and the next day some of them walked up the gangplank to get things off the plank and off the deck.

  The Guineans had more reason to trust the strange new English ship in their waters than we might now expect. At the end of the seventeenth century, the slave trade was still dominated by the Spanish and the Portuguese; the Royal African Company had only just recently shifted its focus from gold to enslaved humans. But the Fancy’s posture as a merchant vessel turned out to be a trap. Boarding the ship with the hopes of exchanging goods with the Europeans, the Guineans suddenly found themselves imprisoned. According to Middleton, “when they came aboard, [the crew] surprised them, and took their gold from them, and tied them with chains, and put them into the Hold.” On the shore, the remaining members of the Guinean village cried in horror as the British ship raised anchor, their loved ones slowly disappearing over the horizon in the English vessel, never to be seen again.

  What kind of life did those captured Africans experience on board the Fancy? The historical evidence for this is murky. From Middleton’s description, it appears that—initially at least—the Africans were treated as prisoners, potentially as goods to be bartered at another port of trade. We know that seven of the captured Africans would later be sold into slavery, but it is unclear what happened to the others—assuming there were others. It was not unheard of for pirates during this period to free captured slaves, and grant them equal rights as members of the pirate commune. Recent scholars have argued that the pirate crews that terrorized the West Indies were surprisingly multiracial in their composition, with Africans constituting more than 20 percent of the onboard population. As the historian David Olusoga notes in his book Black and British, Francis Drake’s 1577 expedition around the world was “achieved with a crew that was what we would today call inter-racial,” despite the fact that Drake himself was also a slave trader. “In a way we find difficult to relate to,” Olusoga writes, “[Drake] was capable of enslaving black people while seeing other black men as his comrades-in-arms.” In later pirate expeditions, several freed slaves rose to high-ranking positions, most notably Black Caesar, who, according to legend, was a former African chieftain who served as a lieutenant to Blackbeard on the Queen Anne’s Revenge. As working members of the crew, the African pirates would have participated in all the proto-democratic conventions of the pirate collective, which made the pirate ships of the golden age the first Western institution to extend suffrage to people of color.

  Nothing, however, in the historical record—and in Henry Every’s previous career as an interloper in the slave trade—suggests that the captured Africans on board the Fancy were granted similar privileges. On a ship that already posed significant challenges to even the high-ranking officers, they most likely suffered through a brutal existence: manacled belowdecks for days on end, interrupted by stretches of forced labor, all the while wondering what these haggard Europeans had in store for them. Like most pirate ships of the age, the Fancy was a floating commune, a seedbed for radical ideas about wealth sharing and democratic governance. She was also, inarguably, a slave ship.

  The Fancy continued southeast to Fernando Po, an island south of modern-day Nigeria that is now part of Equatorial Guinea. There Every instructed the men to make significant alterations to the ship, removing most of the upper decks, including the captain’s quarters in the sterncastle. These were customary alterations for pirates to make after seizing a ship. Creating a flush upper deck significantly reduced wind resistance at sea, making a fast ship like the Fancy even faster and easier to maneuver while engaged with potential enemy ships. Eliminating structures on the deck would also make it easier for them to pump water if the ship encountered high waves in the turbulent seas around the Cape of Good Hope. The alterations had political undertones as well: in order to maximize both agility in the water and manpower on board, most pirate captains disavowed their exclusive quarters and slept with the rest of the crew belowdecks. The egalitarian ethos of the pirate community extended to the architecture of the ship itself.

  At Fernando Po, the crew also spent weeks sweating through the tedious work of careening the hull of the Fancy. When we think of the existential threats eighteenth-century pirates faced, our mind naturally conjures up enemies who want to sink their ships with cannon fire. But as Every and their men had sailed the warm Atlantic waters off of Africa, their one truly unavoidable nemesis was already clinging to their ship, lurking below the surface: shipworms feasting on the Fancy’s timber.

  Despite their name and appearance, shipworms are, in actuality, mollusks; they are effectively clams disguised as worms. Shipworms burrow into wood that has been submerged in water, releasing bacteria that digest the wood’s cellulose. Left unattended, shipworms could destroy the hull of a ship like the Fancy in four or five months, as Henry David Thoreau would later describe in his poem “Through All the Fates”:

  Far from New England’s blustering shore,

  New England’s worm her hulk shall bore,

  And sink her in the Indian seas . . .

  The renegade nature of pirate life meant that a ship like the Fancy almost never enjoyed access to a dry dock where her hull could be easily repaired. Careening was the only option: deliberately grounding a ship on a beach at high tide, exposing one side of the hull so that the damaged inflicted by shipworms—and by other quiet nemeses like barnacles and rot—could be undone. In tropical waters, seaweed clinging to the hull could increase drag as well. Every captain in command of a wooden ship—which, in the late seventeenth century, meant every captain, full stop—had a countdown clock running in the back of his mind, recording the weeks or months that had passed since his last opportunity to careen his vessel. If you found yourself on a wooden ship trapped in the middle of a vast ocean with no wind, you could be killed by a mollusk as readily as you could die of thirst.

  By early fall of 1694, with the Fancy now snug and streamlined for speed and agility, her hull newly repaired, Every and his men could attempt the journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Shortly after leaving Fernando Po, they engaged in a brief skirmish with two Danish privateers, the first test of the Fancy’s armaments. The Danish quickly surrendered, and the pirates took on “forty pounds of gold dust, chests of fabrics, small arms and fifty large casks of brandy.” Seventeen of the Danish privateers found Every and his “stout frigate” compelling enough to join the crew of the Fancy, which now numbered almost a hundred.

  To round the cape toward Madagascar, Every needed initially to sail i
n the opposite direction, away from the western edge of Africa, almost all the way across the southern Atlantic to Brazil. There he could catch a ride on one of the planet’s most powerful conveyer belts: the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, also known as the West Wind Drift. Utilized by Vasco da Gama in his pioneering voyage around the cape, the West Wind Drift is a vast but leisurely flow of cold water, more than twice the volume of the Gulf Stream, that propels ships from west to east, in southern latitudes safely below the menacing rocks of the cape. The collision between the colder Antarctic waters and the warmer waters of the South Atlantic creates extensive nutrient upwelling along the route, supporting a rich ecosystem of sea life. The crew of the Fancy enjoyed the sight of whales, seals, penguins, and albatrosses as they made their way east toward Madagascar. By riding the West Wind Drift in the southern hemisphere’s summer months, they had little risk of colliding with icebergs.

  Sometime in the first months of the new year—1695—the lookout aboard the Fancy spotted the distinctive clawlike sandspit that extends along the western edge of Saint-Augustin Bay, on the southern coast of Madagascar. The Fancy had made it to safe harbor in the Indian Ocean, on an island widely recognized as a haven for pirates. After a voyage of roughly five thousand miles, it was time to enjoy a few months on land, and prepare for the next act.

  14

  THE GANJ-I-SAWAI

  Surat, India

  May 1695

  As the crew of the Fancy careened their vessel on the shores of Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, in the harbor at Surat, another ship was taking on provisions for a different kind of voyage. This ship was a ghanjah dhow, or wooden trading vessel, owned by the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb himself. A visitor surveying the Surat harbor skyline from the other side of the Tapti River would have been able to make out the ship easily from a distance, a giant looming over the galleys and East Indiamen anchored along the banks of the river. At 1,500 tons, with enough room on board to accommodate over a thousand passengers, she was almost certainly one of the largest ships in the world at the time. Aurangzeb had given her the name Ganj-i-Sawai, Persian for “exceeding treasure.” In the news reports and court trials and popular lore that circulated through the English-speaking world, the ship’s name would be anglicized into a simpler form: the Gunsway.

  The Gunsway was based out of Surat, along with four smaller vessels belonging to the Grand Mughal that often sailed alongside her. Aurangzeb had commissioned the ships for an explicit purpose: to transport dignitaries—some of them members of his immediate family—to Mecca for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to the holy lands at the base of the Asir Mountains, east of the Red Sea. Along the way, the Gunsway and her escort would stop over at the trading port of Mocha, near the mouth of the Red Sea in modern-day Yemen. With the newfound craze for coffee raging across the capitals of Europe, Mocha enjoyed a flourishing economy as one of the central nodes in the international coffee trade. (Modern consumers savoring their Mocha Frappuccinos at Starbucks pay a distant tribute to the city with each order.) The coffee beans attracted traders specializing in other goods as well, giving Aurangzeb an additional commercial incentive to send the Gunsway on the pilgrimage—a fitting mix of business and piety for a religion that had been founded by a trader a thousand years before.

  The manifest for the Gunsway would have been an formidable document. The ship’s hull was loaded with calico textiles, fine porcelain, ivory ornaments, and other valuables. Along with the food required to keep pilgrims and crew alive, the Gunsway carried barrels of spices to trade in Mocha, predominantly peppercorns. The contemporary mind might find something amusing in the idea of a treasure ship weighted down with a condiment that is now so cheap that we give it away for free at restaurants, but in the seventeenth century, pepper was still one of the most highly sought-after luxury goods in the world. Its price had declined from its peak in the Middle Ages, when peppercorns were often worth significantly more than their weight in gold, but even with the decline the pepper barrels could be traded for a fortune at Mocha. Eighty cannons lined the main deck, manned by more than four hundred soldiers, protecting both the treasure and the eight hundred pilgrims on board.

  Making the pilgrimage to Mecca during the hajj constitutes one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. (The others are professing faith in the one God and Muhammad as his prophet, prayer performed five times a day, charitable giving, and fasting during Ramadan.) Observant Muslims must participate in the hajj at least once in their lifetime, during the final month of the Islamic calendar. Today, Mecca is a Saudi city with roughly two million inhabitants that, amazingly, triples in size during the hajj. The influx of pilgrims each year is the single largest annual migration of human beings on Earth. (Far more people travel annually during Chinese New Year, but they are distributed in rural regions across China, not converging on a single destination as they do in the hajj.) Each year, the Saudis erect an immense pop-up city outside Mecca consisting of 160,000 air-conditioned fiberglass tents, each housing fifty pilgrims, a desert settlement that makes the temporary housing of Burning Man look like a shantytown.

  Because the Islamic calendar follows a lunar cycle, each Islamic year is approximately eleven days shorter than a year following the Gregorian calendar, which means that the actual timing of the hajj shifts backward from year to year. Measured by a Western calendar, a hajj that begins January 1 would be followed the next year by one that commences on December 20. In 1695, the last month of the Islamic calendar corresponded to July on the Gregorian calendar, which meant that the voyage from Surat to Mecca—roughly the same distance as sailing from Istanbul to Gibraltar—would need to begin in late spring to give the traders on board sufficient time to do business in Mocha and other port cities along the way.

  The tradition of the hajj dates back to Muhammad’s conquering of Mecca in 629 CE, during which he destroyed pagan icons in an ancient granite temple known as the Kaaba, declaring “Truth has come and Falsehood has Vanished.” After reconsecrating the building as a shrine to Allah, Muhammad then led a pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca in 632, where he delivered his farewell sermon. But the religious significance of the site predates Islam. According to the Quran, the Old Testament figure of Abraham (also considered a prophet in the Islamic tradition) is commanded by God to take his child Ismail (Ishmael in the Old Testament) and his wife Hagar out to a bleak patch of desert that marks the site of modern-day Mecca and leave them there to die of thirst, as a test of his faith. After days of intense suffering, a well miraculously appears in the arid landscape, saving mother and child at the last minute.

  If you are a religious person—regardless of your faith—the long chain of influence generated by that experience in the desert five thousand years ago makes a certain kind of sense, no matter what God you happened to worship. When a supreme being has direct contact with a mortal, it makes sense that ripples would continue to spiral out from that encounter fifty generations later. But if you don’t believe in supreme beings, the chain of influence is baffling. Someone has a dream in the desert of a divine presence who commands him to murder his wife and child, and seven thousand years later, six million people travel to the foothills of a desert mountain range once a year to visit the place where it all happened. There are very few echoes in the cathedral of history that have reverberated for so long with such faint origins.

  The emergence of pilgrimages as a mass ritual—Muslim or otherwise—marked a watershed in the lived experiences of ordinary people. In an age before tourism, pilgrimages introduced long-distance travel to millions of human beings who would otherwise have spent their entire lives on a much smaller patch of land. By 1695, the hajj had grown into one of the planet’s great melting pots, creating a shared space where North Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians could converge for one month out of the year. They were there to pray, but they were also there for something else, something we would now call the scene. Some of the richest people in the world took months out
of their calendar to journey up or down the Red Sea to pray in front of the Kaaba; many of them planned their entire year around the journey, the way so many of us today plan our calendars around summer vacation. The grandeur of the Gunsway was not simply an attempt to create a luxurious cruising vessel for the Grand Mughal’s inner circle. It was also a statement to the world, like a billion-dollar luxury yacht that pulls into harbor for a revival meeting, a way of broadcasting the scale of the Universe Conqueror’s fortune to other pilgrims who would never visit the sublime architecture of Agra or see the Peacock Throne in Delhi.

  Of course, transporting all that wealth to a city thousands of miles away in a foreign nation made the ship supremely vulnerable. The eighty guns and four hundred soldiers aboard the Gunsway were there for a reason. But the risk was compounded by the geography of the region. The Red Sea empties out into the Gulf of Aden through a narrow strait just twenty miles wide called the Bab-el-Mandeb. Because the Suez Canal was still centuries away, in 1695 any vessel making the pilgrimage to Mecca—or trading with the port cities of the Red Sea—needed to pass through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden before entering the wider expanse of the Arabian Sea. In modern times, the immense wealth that passes through those straits takes the form of oil, loaded up in the refineries that line the Red Sea. In 1695 the wealth had a different manifestation: jewels, spices, gold, cotton. But then, as now, the bottleneck of the Bab-el-Mandeb made the region uniquely suited for piracy. It is no accident that the Somali pirates, the most notorious of the twenty-first century, operate out of the exact same waters.