Some women were even active participants in the political arena. Aurangzeb’s sisters had played a major role in the palace intrigue that surrounded his violent ascent to the throne. Some consider Aurangzeb’s sister Roshanara Begum to be the mastermind behind his attacks on Dara, the presumed successor to Jahangir. Whatever gratitude Aurangzeb felt toward Roshanara eventually dissipated, and over time, he grew closer to his sister Jahanara, who had sided with Dara in the ascension fight. But his relations with both women were complicated by one crucial edict, dating back to the time of Akbar: sisters of the Grand Mughal were not allowed to marry, for fear of producing offspring that might challenge the already fraught line of royal succession. According to multiple contemporary accounts, Aurangzeb expended a significant amount of effort keeping his two sisters from engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with men. In one account written by the French traveler François Bernier, Aurangzeb invited one of Jahanara’s lovers to meet with him in his chambers, and offered the young man a betel nut as a gesture of hospitality. “Little did the unhappy lover imagine that he had received poison from the hand of the smiling monarch,” Bernier wrote. “He died before he could reach home.” In his Memoirs of the Mughal Court, the Italian Niccolao Manucci claims that Roshanara kept “nine youths in her quarters for her pleasure.” When Roshanara’s secret was uncovered, Aurangzeb had the nine men “destroyed in less than a month by various secret tortures.” According to Manucci, the Grand Mughal went on to poison Roshanara herself for her offenses.
The rogue sex lives of the Mughal princesses made for salacious travelogues, but the daily reality of Mughal court society was one of patriarchal oppression. That reality was dominated by the institution of the harem, the gilded prison containing as many as five thousand women: the Mughal’s wives and concubines, supported by their extended family of mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts, attended by ladies-in-waiting and female slaves, guarded by eunuchs. The elite women within the harem—the wives and concubines and their direct relatives—had an almost schizophrenic existence: they enjoyed standards of living unrivaled by almost any society on earth, while at the same time possessing almost no personal liberty. “These ladies lived in grand apartments luxuriously furnished, with lovely gardens, fountains, tanks and water channels attached to them,” writes Soma Mukherjee, in her history of the Mughal princesses. “They wore beautiful and expensive clothes made from the finest material and adorned themselves with jewelry from head to toe.” But their contact with the outside world was heavily regulated; on their rare excursions outside the harem, their faces were veiled in observance of purdah. Marriages were forced upon them, while their husbands were free to accumulate as many wives and concubines as they pleased. They were pampered aristocrats in the wealthiest society on the planet, and they were tightly controlled captives.
The fact that so many women in Aurangzeb’s court were allowed to travel not just outside the harem’s walls but all the way to modern-day Saudi Arabia tells us something about the importance of Islam inside the harem culture. Rigorous study of the Quran was an obligatory part of every Mughal princess’s education. Aurangzeb’s eldest daughter, Princess Zeb-un-Nissa, had memorized the entire Quran by the time she was seven years old. Their religious customs would occasionally warrant travel outside the harem to visit to a shrine or other holy places. But for a young woman in the court of Aurangzeb, the pilgrimage to Mecca would have been, by far, the longest journey of her life, and the only one outside the boundaries of the Universe Conqueror’s dominion.
What would that experience have been like behind the veil of the Mughal princess, whoever she was? She and her sisters in the harem lived truly extraordinary lives, certainly compared to the vast bulk of society at the time: with so much wealth yet so little freedom, with the jewelry and the fountains and the sexual chains. But almost all our accounts of them come from the outside—most frequently through the observations of true outsiders like Manucci and Bernier. There were no Samuel Pepyses or Anne Franks among the Mughal princesses, or at least none whose words survived into the historical record: no diarist who could leave behind an honest record of what it felt like to be a woman in the Grand Mughal’s court. It is obvious to our modern eyes that the harem was an institution of oppression, patriarchy rendered into stone. But would it have seemed like oppression to a woman who had been assiduously sheltered her entire life from any alternate reality? Or were there secret radicals in the harem, women who dreamed of a different way of organizing society? Had some of them wondered—rightly or wrongly—whether Europe itself offered a more appealing model, with its unveiled women, its monogamous marriage customs, its occasional female heads of state?
How you happen to answer those questions changes the way you think about the events that would transpire in September 1695, on the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean. It changes the way you think about Henry Every himself. Surely the Indian princess sailing back toward Surat must have understood that men had been granted far more liberty and power under the laws and conventions of the Mughal regime. Whether she had a language of oppression to describe that reality, she must have felt its sting, its reduced possibilities; she must have heard about—if not experienced directly—its ritualized rape. It seems plausible, at the very least, that those experiences would have left some kind of scar. The question is: Was that scar deep enough to make her want to escape?
Part Three:
THE HEIST
18
THE FATH MAHMAMADI
The Indian Ocean, west of Cape St. John
September 7, 1695
For more than a month, the newly formed pirate armada waited for monsoon season to arise, bringing the southwest winds that would carry the merchant ships back to Surat through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. With temperatures regularly climbing above a hundred degrees, there was no escaping the desert heat on Perim. (Even the water in the island’s small natural harbor would have been in the low nineties at the height of summer.) The long wait made the men increasingly concerned that Every’s plan was ill-conceived. “After they had lain there some time,” John Dann would later recall, “they were apprehensive the Moors ships would not come down from Mocha, so they sent a pinnace thither, which took two Boats. They brought away two men, which told them the ships must come down.” (Without a Suez Canal on the other end of the Red Sea, the merchant ships had nowhere else to go.) A few days later, they received word that the “Moors ships” were, at long last, headed toward the strait.
But when the first merchant vessels finally appeared on the last Saturday of August, it initially seemed as though Every and his men had made a catastrophic error. Somehow, after a year’s worth of preparation for this very moment, a convoy of roughly twenty-five merchant ships returning from Mocha managed to slip through the strait in the cover of night without the pirates detecting them. (No record exists of the punishment doled out to the multiple lookouts on watch that night, but presumably it was a severe one.) Only after the pirates captured a much smaller vessel the next morning did they realize their disastrous oversight.
According to Middleton, the pirates “consulted whether they should follow them or stay there.” It was a difficult choice. The Indian ships had a near insurmountable head start, and one of the pirate ships, the Dolphin, was taking on water. But Every knew he had at his command the fastest vessel in the Indian Ocean. If any boat could overtake the Indian convoy, it was the Fancy.
After a quick consultation, the men decide to give chase, but with a streamlined fleet. The sixty men aboard the Dolphin were transferred to the Fancy, and the Dolphin was burned and sunk, on account of her being what John Dann later called an “ill sailor.” It was clear that the Pearl had almost as meager a chance of keeping up with the Fancy, so the men lashed a rope between the two vessels and the fleet set sail toward the long-vanished Indian ships. Even lugging the Pearl behind her, the Fancy was the fastest ship in the convoy. Only the Portsmouth Adventure �
�kept them company,” as Dann recalled. The Susanna would eventually catch up to the pirate fleet, but Thomas Tew’s Amity drifted back beyond the horizon and lost contact with the other ships. Tew might have been the most celebrated Red Sea man at that moment in history, but the Amity was no match for the Fancy in the water.
For days, the pirate lookouts scanned the horizon for signs of their prey. Every steered the Fancy east-northeast, out of the Gulf of Aden into the Arabian Sea. Without a ship to follow by sight, Every set a course for Surat and Bombay, assuming that one of the two ports was the treasure fleet’s ultimate destination. Ten days passed with no sign of their target. The men were hungry and restless; their long wait on Perim had left them short on provisions. Their prospects grew even more depressing when, on the tenth day of pursuit, the lookout spotted land for the first time: the distant outline of Cape St. John, north of Bombay.
Those ten days and nights must have been agonizing ones for Every. He had traveled six thousand miles, assembled a battalion of four hundred men, and settled into the ideal spot to poach the most valuable treasure ships in the world—and then he had let them slip out of his sight. By the end of those ten days, with the early monsoon season winds rising and Cape St. John now visible, it was entirely possible that the ships had made it safely to harbor and were already unloading their goods beyond Every’s reach.
But on the seventh of September, at long last, their luck improved. They caught sight of a handful of ships that had broken off from the main convoy. The largest of them was the heavily armed merchant ship Fath Mahmamadi, owned by one of the wealthiest traders in India, Abdul Ghaffar. A contemporary of Ghaffar’s claimed that the merchant “drove a trade equal to the English East-India Company, for I have known him to fit out in a year, above twenty sail of ships, between 300 and 800 tons.” For the first time since Every had concocted his scheme more than a year before, he had an actual Moor’s treasure ship in his sights. Every quickly commanded his crew to sail ahead of the convoy, and then anchor overnight and wait for them—a risky strategy given the nighttime lapse that had destroyed their plans in the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb.
At dawn, a heavy mist hung over the water, restricting their visibility. The men stared out into the gray vapor, listening and looking for any signs of the Indian convoy. The wait did not last long. Within a matter of minutes the dark outline of the Fath Mahmamadi emerged from the fog, passing “within about a pistol shot of the Fancy.” Dann later described her as being between “2 and 300 tons, with six guns.” Every ordered the men to let loose with a broadside against the ship. The Fath Mahmamadi responded with three rounds that somehow did no damage to Every’s ships, and then—amazingly—struck her colors in surrender. The ship was theirs.
On board the vessel, the pirates found significant reserves of silver and gold, worth upward of £60,000, the equivalent of around $5,000,000 today. It was a fraction of what Thomas Tew had stolen two years before, but it was certainly more wealth concentrated in one place than Every had ever seen in his lifetime. Divided among the three hundred or so men remaining, the treasure amounted to roughly three times the salaries that the Spanish Expedition had promised them for two years’ worth of work. As captain, of course, Every had an additional share, meaning he probably walked away from the Fath Mahmamadi with enough money to live comfortably on land for half a decade, if not more. Abdul Ghaffar’s treasure represented a life-altering influx of wealth to Every and his men. But Every would have been able to calculate at first sight of the treasure that it was not enough for him to retire from the game altogether.
Every had only forty-eight hours to savor his triumph. A detachment of men took command of the Fath Mahmamadi, and the fleet sailed farther east toward the coast. While anchored off the Cape of St. John on the tenth of September, the lookout sounded another alert. The sails of a far more formidable boat had appeared on the horizon. It was the Gunsway, making her final approach toward Surat. Within minutes, the Fancy was in pursuit again, under full sail.
The Gunsway must have made an intimidating first impression, once Every had sailed close enough to get an accurate assessment of her. A ship large enough to carry a thousand passengers—compared to the two hundred or so men crowded together on the Fancy—would have towered over the pirate vessels. Not only did the Gunsway have far more guns to defend herself—eighty cannons, hundreds of muskets—but its marksmen would be firing down onto the decks of the smaller ships, giving them a clear advantage in terms of their angle of attack.
Henry Every had made a thousand decisions over the fifteen months that had passed since the mutiny: when to careen his ship, how long to wait in Madagascar, whether to challenge Thomas Tew for the admiralty of the pirate fleet. But those first moments sizing up the full measure of the Gunsway—the threat and the opportunity—presented Every with a truly momentous choice. He had just pulled off a heist that gave him in a matter of hours five years of wages in one zero-fatality operation. He could walk away from the Fath raid one of the most successful pirates of his age, and if he was lucky, he might well encounter a few other strays from the Muslim convoy that were as easily overpowered. And clearly the Gunsway would not surrender as quickly. Every had lost half his armada, and one of his remaining ships was so sluggish that it had made more sense to tow her out of the Gulf of Aden than let her sail under her own powers. A betting man would have to assume that Every would lose in a direct challenge to the Gunsway.
Those calculations might well have played out differently if Every had known what had happened no more than few hundred miles away from him. After drifting behind the Fancy, Thomas Tew and the men of the Amity had their own separate run-in with the Fath Mahmamadi, engaging the Indian ship in batttle. The attack ended in catastrophe for the Amity. During the firefight, a cannonball sliced across Tew’s belly, effectively disemboweling him. According to one report, he died holding his lower intestines in his hands: “When he dropp’d it struck such a Terror in his men, that they suffered themselves to be taken, without making Resistance.” A number of the pirates were captured and taken away as prisoners.
If the violence and gore of Tew’s death was shocking, so was the narrative of his final years. Here was a man who, thanks to his 1693 heist, could have chosen to retire to a life as a landed gentleman in Rhode Island, an American Francis Drake—and never lift a finger performing hard labor again. And yet despite that available future, he had ended his life on the other side of the world, staring at the sky above the Gulf of Aden, holding his bowels in his hands as he bled out on the Amity’s deck.
There is a tantalizing possibility that Every did know about Tew’s horrific death. Some accounts of the battles in the Indian Ocean that late summer claim the Amity had had its fatal encounter with the Fath just a few days before the Fancy had overtaken her. (This chronology offers one potential explanation for why the Fath was so quick to surrender: she had been damaged in the exchange with the Amity, and lacked the firepower for another fight.) In this scenario, when Every boarded the Fath Mahmamadi to inspect its reserves of silver and gold, he would have discovered prisoners captured from the Amity, who would no doubt have informed him of his fellow captain’s shocking demise.
But the more likely scenario is that Every weighed the odds of an attack on the Gunsway oblivious to Thomas Tew’s death. Why would a man who had played his cards so carefully over the past months—artfully trying to carve out a place for himself on the right side of British law, waiting patiently for the monsoon season to bring the Moor ships into his trap—make such a high-risk assault on a ship that seemed destined to blow him out of the water? Perhaps Every had been deceptive in the enigmatic closing lines of his letter; perhaps his “hunger” for treasure was every bit as excessive as his men’s. Perhaps he feared that he himself would be the victim of a mutiny if he didn’t make a run at such a tremendous prize. Or perhaps he simply trusted that the raw speed of the Fancy would enable him to mount an attack on the Gunsway and retreat
quickly if things turned ugly. She sails so hard now, the East India Company correspondent had warned a few months before, that she fears not who follows her.
The same letter had predicted “infinite clamors” at Surat if Every were left unchecked. The decision to make a direct assault on the Gunsway would turn that seemingly hyperbolic warning into prophesy, only with “clamors” that extended far beyond Surat itself. Every and his men were hungry; they were fearless. And they had exceeding treasure in their crosshairs at last.
19
EXCEEDING TREASURE
The Indian Ocean, west of Surat
September 11, 1695
Imagine taking a bird’s-eye view over the coastal waters of the Indian Ocean on that late summer day. To the east you can make out the shipyards and factories lining the Tapti River at Surat. Somewhere in those buildings, Samuel Annesley is reviewing inventories or writing reports to be sent back to London, with no knowledge of the catastrophe that is about to befall him and his colleagues. In the waters outside Surat, the advance guard of the Mecca convoy is making its way into the harbor, their passengers weary from the three-month journey, but relieved to have made it back home without any confrontations with the Red Sea Men. And then farther out at sea, maybe a hundred miles from the coastline, two ships stand out: one twice the size of anything else in the water, proceeding slowly toward the harbor at Surat; the other surging across the waves, sails unfurled, its crew scrambling on the decks to prepare the guns for the coming battle.
Enemy of All Mankind Page 13