Enemy of All Mankind

by Steven Johnson

  Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past. But this scene in the Indian Ocean in 1695 is a different kind of nexus, one of those rare moments where multiple long arcs collide in spectacular fashion: the Indian wealth that had first started to accumulate with those cotton fabrics invented in the centuries before the birth of Christ; the itinerary of the pilgrims defined by Muhammad’s own trek to Mecca a thousand years before (and perhaps by Abraham’s before that); the vast power of Aurangzeb, handed down through the generations of Muslims ruling the subcontinent; the faltering fortunes of the East India Company, struggling to maintain its footholds in Surat and Bombay; the long history of piracy and its radical egalitarianism. Tell any of those different stories on its own, and the events of September 1695 would still register prominently on each timeline.

  What unites all those different threads? Two hundred men, six thousand miles from home, clustered together on a ship, low on supplies, intent on making their fortune.

  There is general agreement about three things that transpire once the Fancy pulls close enough to the Gunsway to mount an attack. First, a cannon explodes on the decks of the Mughal ship, killing a half dozen men, gravely wounding others, and creating a general scene of chaos and destruction just as the Gunsway is preparing to fire back on Every’s ship. Second, one of Every’s first volleys turns out to be a spectacularly lucky one, striking the mainmast of the Gunsway and causing the mainsail and all of its rigging to collapse, crippling the ship and adding to the existing chaos triggered by the malfunctioning cannon.

  The third undisputed fact is this: by the end of the encounter, Every and his men capture a fortune worthy of the Gunsway’s name—“exceeding treasure.” In the immense hull of the ship, they find astounding quantities of gold and silver, along with jewels, ivory, myrrh, frankincense, saffron, and other delights. From the time news broke of Every’s plunder, a debate has raged over exactly how much the pirate managed to steal from the Indian treasure ship. Captain Johnson, in his General History of the Pyrates, expressed the difficulty of calculating the amount: “It is known that the Eastern People travel with the utmost Magnificence, so that they had with them all their Slaves and Attendants, their rich Habits and Jewels, with Vessels of Gold and Silver, and great Sums of Money to defray the Charges of their Journey by Land; wherefore the Plunder got by this Prize, is not easily computed.” Some estimates suggest that the treasure was worth around £200,000, roughly $20,000,000 in today’s currency. The East India Company later priced the stolen goods at three times that number. However you calculate it, Every’s plundering of the Gunsway ranks as one of the most lucrative heists in the history of crime.

  But once you look behind those three undisputed facts—the exploding cannon, the collapsed mainmast, and a plunder of historic proportions—the story of Every and the Gunsway bifurcates into two competing narratives. In one account—the narrative that would be sung by the balladmongers and sensationalized by the pamphleteers back in London for decades to come—the pirates board the ship and engage the Indian warriors in hand-to-hand combat for two hours before overcoming them. With the ship now under their control, the men discover, to their astonishment, dozens of Muslim women in hijabs cowering belowdecks. The emeralds and diamonds that adorn their garments signal that they are members of Aurangzeb’s court.

  One of those veiled faces, according to this account, belongs to Aurangzeb’s granddaughter. Somehow the pirates determine her true identity, and bring her, sobbing in terror, before Every himself. According to Van Broeck’s 1709 narrative, “the Captain no sooner beheld the Lady in Tears, but melted into Compassion.” What follows from that moment is an Indian Ocean rendition of the Pocahontas story: the Westerner entranced by the “native’s” exotic beauty, finding love at the end of a dangerous voyage. (The twist in this story, of course, is that the “native” is far more affluent than the Westerner.) The story goes that Every proposes to the Mughal princess on the spot, having at long last found “something more pleasing than jewels.” Married in front of a Muslim cleric, “the happy newlyweds were said to have spent the whole trip back to Madagascar engaged in conjugal bliss.”

  Daniel Defoe’s rendition of the story, recounted in his 1720 book The King of Pirates as a first-person narrative in Every’s voice, gives a similar account of the Mughal princess’s appearance in Every’s quarters (though Defoe upgrades her to a queen): “Such a Sight of Glory and Misery was never seen by Buccaneer before; the Queen (for such she was to have been) was all in Gold and Silver, but frighted; and crying, and at the Sight of me she appear’d trembling, and just as if she was going to die. She sate on the Side of a kind of a Bed like a Couch with no Canopy over it, or any Covering, only made to lie down upon; she was, in a Manner, cover’d with Diamonds, and I, like a true Pirate, soon let her see that I had more Mind to the Jewels than to the Lady.” As in Van Broeck’s account, Every treats the Mughal queen with respect, but in the Defoe version, a romance between the two fails to blossom. Apparently the pirate captain has designs—honorable, amorous ones—on one of her ladies in waiting: “There was one of her Ladies who I found much more agreeable to me, and who I was afterwards something free with, but not even with her either by Force, or by Way of Ravishing.”

  The love story of the Devonshire pirate and his Mughal bride seems, to the modern eye, implausible at best. Annesley’s biographer records that Every “carried off as captive a young Mohammedan lady of good family who was proceeding to her home after performing the pilgrimage to Mecca.” But the key word in that sentence is surely “captive,” a word not conventionally associated with conjugal bliss. Even in some of the more sentimental accounts of Every’s courtship, you can hear the doubts creeping into the narrator’s voice. “I have heard that it has been reported in England that I ravish’d this Lady,” Defoe’s narrator writes, “and then used her most barbarously; but they wrong me, for I never offer’d any Thing of that Kind to her, I assure you.” Defoe has Every defending the actions of his crew as well: “If any of the Princess’s Women were lain with, said I, on Board the other Ship, as I believe most of them were, yet it was done with their own Consent and good Will, and no otherwise; and they were all dismiss’d afterwards, without so much as being put in Fear or Apprehensions of Life or Honour.”

  Van Broeck offers a comparable defense of Every’s honor: “Instead of ravishing the Princess, which some Accounts have made mention of, [he] pay’d the Respect that was due to her high Birth, took her and her Attendance into his own Ship, and after despoiling the Vessel of all its Wealth suffer’d it and its Crew to steer on to their intended Port.” Yes, he and his crew might have “despoiled the Vessel” of all its wealth, but at least Every had given the princess the respect she deserved. No matter what those other “accounts” might have you think.

  What were those mysterious accounts? The fact that there was a challenge to the popular narrative of Every as a lovestruck pirate—not only respecting the princess by asking for her hand in marriage, but also agreeing to a service officiated by a Muslim cleric—was itself a meaningful development in the relationship between England and India. European sailors—whether pirates, merchants, or naval officers—had been committing barbaric crimes in remote parts of the world for at least two centuries, from Drake’s bloody march across the harbor towns of Central America to the genocide perpetuated by the Dutch in the Spice Islands of Indonesia. But stories of those atrocities rarely made it back to the European capitals, to call into question the moral righteousness of those bold explorers. Back home, they were heroes, not mass killers. But Henry Every and his men would not be able to outrun the infamy of their actions. In the attack on the Gunsway, the victims produced their own rival version of the events, a counternarrative that was far less forgiving.

  The fact that this narrative emerged to challenge the soft-focus, idealize
d account of the Gunsway affair was partly a reflection of the power dynamics that existed between India and England at the time. The thirteen thousand Bandanese murdered by the Dutch off the Indonesian mainland in the early 1600s had no warships or ambassadors or clerks to record and protest the atrocities committed against them. But Henry Every was taking on a ship that belonged to the wealthiest man in the world, a man who commanded an immense state apparatus that rivaled any of the “civilized” governments of Europe.

  The second narrative emerged for another reason, too—one of those fortuitous moments where the perfect witness just happens to be at the right place at the right time. While Every was mounting his attack on the Gunsway, an emissary for the commander of the inland town of Rahiri had arrived in Surat to conduct some transactions that would later take him to Bombay. The emissary’s name was Khafi Khan. Whether Khan successfully delivered the goods back to his employer is not known, but in Surat, he stumbled across something that would be far more meaningful: a story of abuse and murder so shocking that he immediately recognized its political significance. Khan was uniquely suited to make such a recognition because he was not just a courier; he also happened to be an aspiring historian, and would go on to great acclaim as the authoritative chronicler of Aurangzeb’s regime. The Indian fleet had suffered several outrageously unlucky breaks in their confrontation with Every. But in Khafi Khan, fortune turned in their favor for once: a master storyteller landing in Surat just in time to intercept a ship bearing news of the crime of the century.

  20

  THE COUNTERNARRATIVE

  The Indian Ocean, 50 miles west of Surat

  September 11, 1695

  Khafi Khan based his account of the Gunsway raid on direct testimony from its survivors, delivered after the Mughal ship finally made it to Surat, a week after Every had first spotted her. Early versions of Khan’s narrative circulated through Aurangzeb’s extended court network, eventually reaching the Universe Conqueror himself. They were ultimately published as part of Khan’s broader history of the Mughal dynasty, a sweeping chronicle that extended from Akbar’s reign to the then present-day rule of Aurangzeb himself. The son of a historian, Khan spent much of his life in the employ of Aurangzeb in various positions, serving as his eyes and ears as a kind of traveling court reporter. It was this occupation that gave his accounts of the Gunsway affair such immediacy. It also made his account more true to life than the thirdhand fantasies spun by the balladmongers. The grand romance of Every and the Mughal princess belonged to the tabloid hacks, telling stories based on indirect accounts. Khan was something else: a historian effectively functioning as journalist, interviewing witnesses who had been passengers on the Gunsway when Every’s men boarded her.

  Khan dives almost immediately to the question that Aurangzeb would have first asked: How did a ragged band of pirates conquer a ship at least three times their size and force? As an answer, he dutifully reports the improbable opening volley and the exploding cannon, but he offers up a third explanation, one that most European accounts would subsequently ignore: that the captain, a debauched aristocrat named Ibrahim Khan, had a crisis of nerve. After the collapse of the mainmast, Every’s men clambered aboard the ship from both the port and starboard sides and engaged the Muslim warriors in a frenetic swordfight straight out of an Errol Flynn movie. Some of Aurangzeb’s men fought off the invaders valiantly, but Ibrahim Khan seems to have lost his wits in the chaos of Every’s attack:

  The Christians are not so bold in their use of the sword, and there were so many weapons on board the royal vessel that if the captain had made any resistance, they must have been defeated. But as soon as the English began to board Ibrahim Khan ran down into the hold. There were some Turki girls whom he had bought in Mocha as concubines for himself. He put turbans on their heads and swords into their hands, and incited them to fight. These fell into the hands of the enemy, who soon became perfect masters of the ship.

  The story of Captain Khan’s cowardice is so bizarre that it likely had some kernel of truth to it. It is sometimes retold with comic undertones: a hapless captain sending a posse of women in drag to defend his ship. But the reality must have been terrifying for the women living through it. Imagine the experience from the vantage point of those Turkish “concubines”—sex slaves bought and paid for like so many barrels of coffee beans, imprisoned in the hold of a royal ship. Imagine lying there in the dark, hearing the deafening sound of the cannon exploding above you, smelling the burning planks and the gunpowder wafting belowdecks. And then, out of nowhere, your captor—the man who has almost certainly been raping you repeatedly for the past month at sea—dashes into your cramped quarters, drapes you in a turban, and presses a cutlass into your hands. Imagine staggering out into the melee on the main deck, trying to make sense of the anarchy that surrounds you.

  As horrific as it must have been, the Muslim captain’s actions would pale beside the offenses the English were about to commit. At the end of combat, twenty-five men (and, presumably, women) were dead on the Gunsway side, with almost as many gravely wounded. In all the chaos, Every had not lost a single man. (Justifying this devastating defeat, Captain Khan later spun his own account, claiming that Every had attacked his ship with an army of 1,200 pirates.) The pirates immediately began searching the ship for treasure. Some of the immense wealth aboard the Gunsway was easy to find: the piles of gold and silver bullion, the barrels of valuable spices. Dozens of Every’s men began lugging the booty back to the Fancy under the watchful eye of the quartermaster, Joseph Dawson, whose job it would be to divide up the spoils once they had been fully extracted. But the pirates knew an imperial ship like the Gunsway would almost certainly have additional valuables hidden somewhere on board. To determine the location of that concealed booty, the men reverted to the standard practice of pirate inquisition: torture.

  The exact techniques used by the pirates to compel the Gunsway’s officers to reveal the ship’s hidden treasure were not recorded in any account of the 1695 attack. But the subsequent outrage suggests they were severe ones. As a guide, we can only use firsthand and reported accounts of other pirates attempting to extract the same information from other crews. According to a dispatch in the American Weekly Mercury, the eighteenth-century pirate Edward Low—whose articles of agreement are one of the four main pirate constitutions to have survived to the modern age—“cut and whipped some and others they burnt with Matches between their Fingers to the bone to make them confess where their Money was.” The Dutch journalist Alexandre Exquemelin described the technique of “woolding” used to extract the location of treasure from uncooperative sources: “They strappado’d him until both his arms were entirely dislocated, then knotted the cord so tight round the forehead that his eyes bulged out, big as eggs. Since he still would not admit where the coffer was, they hung him up by his male parts, while one struck him, another sliced off his nose, yet another an ear, and another scorched him with fire.”

  But even these acts are secondary charges, in Khan’s account. The real offense centers on the female passengers of the Gunsway. The fury of battle, the fifteen months at sea in a bubble of unchecked masculinity, the anti-Muslim bigotry that Every’s men had exhibited destroying the Mosque in Maydh, and the sudden discovery that the ship they have just boarded contained dozens of women, some of them adorned with jewels more valuable than the pirates’ collective net worth—all these forces coalesced to trigger an eruption of sexual violence that lasted for days. The key passage from Khan—echoed in a long chain of court reports, letters, and word-of-mouth gossip—tells the story in two sentences:

  When [the pirates] had laden their ship, they brought the royal ship to shore near one of their settlements, and busied themselves for a week searching for plunder, stripping the men, and dishonoring the women, both old and young. . . . Several honorable women, when they found an opportunity, threw themselves into the sea, to preserve their chastity, and some others killed themselves with knives and
daggers.

  There is a strange reluctance in the literature of piracy to center the camera on these kinds of offenses—strange because that literature is otherwise happy to feed you the gore and terror of the pirate’s life in such intimate detail. If you want to read about Thomas Tew dying on board the Amity, holding his small intestines in his hand, or Edward Low ripping the beating heart out of a prisoner, there are a thousand pages in the archives that will give you that experience, uncensored. Gang rape, on the other hand, gets condensed down to a euphemism: Then the men dishonored the women.

  A similar description of the events appears in a private correspondence filed weeks later by John Gayer of the East India Company, after he met with Khafi Khan in Bombay. Echoing Khan’s narrative, Gayer reported:

  It is certain the pirates, which these people affirm were all English, did do very barbarously by the people of the Gunsway and Abdul Gofor’s Ship, to make them confess where their money was, and there happened to be a great Umbraw’s wife (as we hear) related to the king, returning from her pilgrimage to Mecca, in her old age. She they abused very much, and forced several other women, which caused one person of quality, his wife and nurse, to kill themselves to prevent the husbands seeing them (and their being) ravished.

  Ravish, dishonor: To the modern ear, the words sound too mannered, too circumspect for the crime they describe. We should not mince words: Every’s men were rapists of the worst order.

  Khan’s language displays the same discretion as Gayer’s, no doubt to avoid offending Aurangzeb’s fundamentalist beliefs. A religious culture that insists on veils for its women will not take kindly to vivid descriptions of the sexual crimes committed against them. But Khan stressed in both his own writing and his testimony to Gayer one shocking fact that conveys, by transitivity, just how offensive the English assault on the Gunsway was: members of Aurangzeb’s court had deliberately chosen to stab themselves in the heart or throw themselves overboard to avoid the “dishonor” that Every’s men would otherwise subject them to. Whatever happened during those long days and nights while Henry Every’s men terrorized the women of the Gunsway, it was so horrendous that suicide seemed the better option. Years later, in his dying words, John Sparkes would claim that “the inhuman treatment and merciless tortures inflicted on the poor Indians and their women still affects my soul.”