Enemy of All Mankind

by Steven Johnson

  However oblique, Khan’s description of the “dishonor” those women were subjected to made an indelible mark on the story. The crimes of Henry Every and his men would be numerous: mutiny, murder, torture, theft. But after Khan, the rape of the Gunsway women would always loom large in the charges leveled against them. The pamphleteers and balladmongers would continue to sing the praises of Every’s chivalrous behavior, but among the authorities that eventually became bound up in the case—Aurangzeb’s court, the East India Company, and the English government—the gang rape aboard the Gunsway went unchallenged as a central fact in the case.

  Where in all of this depravity can we find Aurangzeb’s granddaughter? Gayer had made the vague allusion to a “great Umbraw’s wife related to the king” as well as “one person of quality” who committed suicide. (“Umbraw” is an anglicized version of the Urdu word umara, meaning a grandee of the royal court.) Certainly there were relatives of the Grand Mughal on board the vessel when Every attacked her; it seems likely from Gayer’s account that at least some of them were “abused” by the pirates, or driven to suicide by the threat of that abuse. Was one of them a young princess, traveling to Mecca as a religious pilgrim, who was captured and brought aboard the Fancy and presented to Every himself? And what transpired in that encounter, if it did happen? Subsequent events and testimony make it seem likely that some kind of interaction did take place between Henry Every and one of Aurangzeb’s relatives—whether a granddaughter or some more distant connection. But was it merely a continuation of the sexual violence erupting on the Gunsway, or could it have somehow been closer to the legend that evolved over the subsequent decades, the unlikely multicultural romance of the English pirate and his Muslim bride?

  According to Philip Middleton’s testimony, Henry Every never boarded the Gunsway during those violent days in September. But he must have sensed that his men had crossed a line from thieves into something far more repugnant: torturers, rapists, enemies of all mankind. A sailor with Every’s experience and cunning would have recognized immediately the consequences that those actions would trigger, once word of them finally reached the mainland. The crew of the Fancy were in new waters now. Every’s prediction that unimaginable wealth was to be found in the treasure fleets of the Red Sea had been validated, as had his dark prophesy that his men would “exceed his desire” given the chance. The question was whether the second prophesy coming true would undo the triumph of the first.

  Against extraordinary odds, Henry Every had made his fortune. But he must have realized, listening to the screams echoing across the water from the Gunsway, that his men’s actions had now made him something else: the world’s most wanted man.

  21

  VENGEANCE

  Surat, India

  Mid-September 1695

  It only took a matter of hours after the battered crew of the Fath Mahmamadi pulled into the Surat harbor for word to spread through town that Abdul Ghaffar’s ship had been attacked by English pirates, with “severall of their Men killed in fight, and others barbarously used.” In the chief factor’s quarters overlooking the dockyards, Samuel Annesley would have immediately grasped that the news of more British piracy did not bode well for the East India Company. Many Surat residents already suspected that the company was supplementing its trade revenue by stealing directly from Indian merchant ships, through some kind of quiet partnership with the pirates. That hearsay turned into a direct accusation when Abdul Ghaffar, Surat’s wealthiest merchant and the owner of the Fath Mahmamadi, learned that English pirates had plundered his ship. As Arnold Wright, Annesley’s biographer, puts it: “The avenging finger of Abdul Guffor was pointed toward Annesley and his colleagues as the real authors of the crime.”

  By September 12, a mob of enraged locals had gathered at the gates of the East India Company factory, demanding vengeance for the company’s abuses. Circulating among them was Khafi Khan, taking notes and interviewing the crew of the Fath, gathering evidence for the report he would eventually send back to Aurangzeb. At first, Annesley took the gathering protest in stride. He ordered the gates of the factory closed, assuming he could wait out the storm. “He knew the capabilities of the place for defence,” Wright explained, “and had no misgivings as to the outcome of a fight between the well-armed inmates and the miscellaneous crowd of ruffians which the bazaars of Surat were able to furnish in times of disorder.”

  A few hours later, the Mughal military commander at Surat, Usher Beg, arrived at the gates “with a troop of horses clattering at his heels.” He secured admission to the factory by claiming that he had a message from Surat’s governor, but the message turned out to be a ruse. Instead, Beg was there to put Annesley and his men under house arrest while the authorities investigated the plundering of the Fath. Commander Beg claimed he and his troop had been dispatched to the factory to protect the English from the mob outside the gates, but Annesley suspected that something more sinister was afoot. Yet Annesley had some reason to take Beg at his word; the Englishman had enjoyed friendly relations with the mutassaddi (governor) of Surat, I’timad Khan, and had kept the company on his good side with a reliable stream of bribes over the years. It was better, Annesley figured, to accept the house arrest and the protection of the Mughal guard and allow the fury in the streets to subside.

  With the company men secured behind the factory walls, the agitators on the street—led by the town’s elder clerics—made a direct petition in front of the governor, demanding that Annesley and other key agents of the company be executed for their alleged involvement in the crime. The governor listened patiently to the long list of grievances, but declined to pass judgment. He did, however, promise to convey the facts of the case to Aurangzeb, and deliver whatever punishment the Grand Mughal considered appropriate. Just as Annesley had resigned himself to a few days of house arrest, the governor likely assumed he could buy himself—and the company—some time by deferring to Aurangzeb’s wishes. It would take weeks for an account of the Fath Mahmamadi piracy to reach the court at Delhi; by that time, the whole affair would hopefully have blown over, and his lucrative partnership with the East India Company would be back in business. If Aurangzeb sided with the protestors, I’timad Khan could always point to the potential lost revenue that would result from evicting the company altogether. Even if you accepted the improbable premise that the pirates were hired thugs working for the East India Company, Aurangzeb was gaining more from the tariffs and bribes that the company paid to the Mughal authorities as a cost of doing business in Surat than whatever he was losing to piracy.

  That financial calculation collapsed just two days later, when the Gunsway and its traumatized survivors anchored in Surat. “The capture of the Imperial pilgrim ship in Mohammedan eyes was more than a crime,” Wright observed. “It was sacrilege.” The British were not just guilty of stealing from wealthy merchants; they had committed appalling acts of sexual violence against the women of Aurangzeb’s extended court, women who were taking part in the most sacred journey in the Muslim faith. It was hard to imagine a crime better engineered to infuriate Aurangzeb. Henry Every—wittingly or not—had transgressed the most cherished of the Universe Conqueror’s possessions: his fortune, his faith, and his women.

  During his conversation with the victims and survivors, some of whom were personal acquaintances, Khafi Khan heard a troubling refrain. In the frenzy of their attacks, some of the British were heard to say that they were taking revenge for the siege of Bombay, suggesting that they had themselves been imprisoned during that long standoff five years before. By definition that would have made them members of the extended family of the East India Company, if not direct employees. Those accounts would prove to be a key piece of evidence in the case. Nothing we know about the members of Every’s crew suggests that any of them were participants in the siege of Bombay. But the truth is we know very little about Every’s crew, almost as little as we know about Every himself. It is entirely possible that some of
them men who signed up for the Spanish Expedition had in fact worked for the company and had suffered through the siege. Or perhaps invoking the siege was the sort of anti-Muslim slur an Englishman at that time might have uttered, a seventeenth-century version of “Remember the Alamo!” Whatever the reality, the story did not paint the company in a sympathetic light. If Gayer and Annesley had helped plot this attack as retaliation for the siege of Bombay, it was not just sacrilege. It was an act of war.

  The protests at the governor’s mansion took on a fever pitch. “The town is so defiled that no prayer can be offered up acceptable to God til Justice is done,” Abdul Ghaffar thundered. As Ghaffar and the clerics relayed the astonishing facts of the case to I’timad Khan, the governor recognized that the stakes had changed, for good. This was a storm that would not quickly blow over. The mob was gathering outside his gates now, not just the gates of the factory. If he failed to punish the English sufficiently, his own life could be in danger. Without waiting for guidance from Delhi, Governor Khan ordered that every Englishman in Surat be rounded up and imprisoned in the East India Company factory. Annesley and his colleagues were chained in heavy iron, “like a company of Doggs.” For a stretch of time, the English were deprived “the libertye of a Penn and Ink,” their communication with the outside world cut off entirely.

  After an initial blackout, the correspondence with Bombay Castle was restored. (Annesley developed a secret code in his messages, convinced that his captors were reading his exchanges with Gayer.) By Annesley’s own account, it was a miserable existence, waiting in chains for the wrath or mercy of Aurangzeb’s judgment, knowing that at any minute the mob could storm the gates and exact their revenge directly. “It is needless to write of the indignities, slavish usages and tyrannical insultings wee hourly bear day and night,” he wrote to Gayer, once his “Penn” had been restored, “and to expatiate on so hateful a subject woud no wayes redress or alleviate our sufferings.”

  To his captors, Annesley continually made the case that it ran against the company’s interests to sponsor piracy when so much of their revenue depended on the good grace of their trading partners in Surat and Bombay. “For nine years past,” he wrote to Governor Khan, “[there] have been the same false aspersions on us and all along wee have at last merchants and not pyrates. If wee were the latter, wouldst wee live amongst them and so many 100,000 rupees’ worth of goods to the City?” Privately, I’timad Khan was sympathetic. Publicly, his hands were tied. He didn’t dare liberate prisoners that had at least a circumstantial connection to the crew of the Fancy before Aurangzeb weighed in on the case.

  News of the Gunsway affair reached Delhi sometime in the early fall of 1695. It may have been delivered directly to Aurangzeb by Khafi Khan himself. Accompanying the narrative of British atrocities were two key pieces of evidence, designed to enrage the Grand Mughal: survivors of the Gunsway attack, some of them potentially relatives of Aurangzeb, testifying to the moral depravity of the British pirates; and coins that had been minted in Bombay, bearing the image of King William, evidence of the British thumbing their noses at the Universe Conqueror’s sovereign power. The emissaries from Surat made a stern argument about the culpability of the company in the attacks on the Gunsway and the Fath. Piracy was not something the East India Company merely turned a blind eye to, the Surat contingent argued. Piracy was a key part of their business model. Khafi Khan had done the math: “The total revenue of Bombay, which is chiefly derived from betel-notes and coco-nuts, does not reach to two or three lacs of rupees. The profits of the commerce of these misbelievers . . . does not exceed twenty lacs of rupees. The balance of the money required for the maintenance of the English settlement is obtained by plundering the ships voyaging to the House of God, of which they take one or two every years.”

  Not surprisingly, the case against the British fell on receptive ears. (As Wright put it, “To such a fanatical and arrogant [ruler], the audacious crimes of Every were calculated to be as a spark introduced into a barrel of gunpowder.”) Appalled by the sacrilegious acts of the English “infidels,” Aurangzeb ordered his men to seize the assets of the Surat factory, and to prepare for an assault on Bombay Castle. The East India Company had tested the Universe Conqueror’s patience one too many times. The attacks on the Fath and the Gunsway had given the lie to the long charade of the English as business partners with the Mughal empire. Their true colors had been revealed in Every’s lawless deeds: the company was an invading force, threatening Aurangzeb’s sovereign rule and desecrating his religious beliefs. It was time to expel them.

  22

  A COMPANY AT WAR

  Bombay Castle, Bombay

  Fall 1695

  The Gunsway attack might reasonably have seemed an act of war to Aurangzeb, given the evidence presented to him by Khafi Khan and the other Surat emissaries. But if it was an act of war, it was a strange one, at least measured by contemporary definitions. Strictly speaking, the military conflict that threatened to erupt in the fall of 1695 was one between an empire and a corporation much more than it was a conflict between two sovereign nations. William III had not declared war against India in any formal sense. (He was too busy fighting the French in the closing acts of the Nine Years’ War, and grieving the death of Queen Mary, who had succumbed to smallpox at the end of 1694.) Even if William III had intended to engage with India militarily, the simple fact of the matter was that the East India Company was far better situated to conduct such an operation. The company possessed richer and more reliable information networks connecting London to the subcontinent; they had a fleet already sailing in the region; and their headquarters in Bombay was, literally, a fort. The Royal Navy had its own fleet, of course, but in every other respect they were far less suited to wage war in Southeast Asia than the company was.

  The modern mind—accustomed to the geopolitical structures that cohered in the centuries after Every—struggles to find an equivalent for this strange relationship between crown and corporation. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that England outsourced the problem—and the opportunity—of India to a private subcontractor. That private company was effectively given carte blanche to negotiate trade deals, engage in naval battles, acquire territory—all powers that are now reserved for nation-states, not private companies. If that distribution of authority seems strange to us now, it was not necessarily any more intelligible to the participants at the time, in part because the categories were so new. What was the proper role and responsibility of a multinational corporation in its dealings with a foreign power? No one really knew. This was a time, as the historian Philip Stern observes, when “national territorial states did not have a monopoly on political power and in which sovereignty was composite, incomplete, hybrid, layered, and overlapping.”

  A comparable ambiguity applied to Every and his men: Could you make a living as a pirate plundering Muslim treasure ships and still consider yourself within the sphere of legitimacy as an English citizen, the way Francis Drake had managed to do? This, too, was an open question in the fall of 1695. Yes, Henry Every had clearly run afoul of British law by stealing a ship that belonged to the Spanish Expedition investors, but they had arguably breached their contract with the crew by failing to compensate them for their labors. Every lacked a letter of marque, but his actions at sea, and his public letter to the British authorities promising not to attack British ships, suggested a man trying to define a space for himself and his crew at the very edges of legitimacy.

  All of which meant that the key English participants in the crisis—Every, Annesley, Gayer, the directors of the company back in London, even King William himself—were all probing the limits of their respective roles, because those roles had not been entirely defined yet. They were, effectively, helping to define these new institutions by exploring their boundary conditions. There were three distinct categories: pirates, corporations, nations. No one was quite sure where one began and the other ended. Much of the global crisis that
Henry Every’s actions provoked had roots in that underlying confusion.

  From Aurangzeb’s perspective, of course, those blurred boundaries presented fewer taxonomic challenges: pirates, company factors, kings—they were all Englishmen. But for the Englishmen living under Aurangzeb’s reign—for Samuel Annesley and John Gayer most of all—the need to create a conceptual division between the pirates and the corporation, in Aurangzeb’s mind at least, had become an existential one. There would be no more East India Company in India if the Grand Mughal could not be convinced that the distinction was meaningful. On October 12, Gayer composed a letter reporting back to London on the volatile events of the preceding month. He ended with this ominous line: “The Pyrates, being neglected of all hands, begin to grow formidable, and if some Course be nott taken to destroy them, they will yearly increase, having found their trade so beneficiall, and how soon the Companys servants, as well as their Trade, may be sacrificed to revenge the Quarrell of the Sufferers, they know not.”

  Back in London, the company was already facing a different kind of existential threat. Those intoxicating calico fabrics that India had introduced to the world so many centuries before were not just draping the bodies and sitting rooms of well-to-do urbanites. They were also undermining England’s domestic wool trade. All across northern England, a de facto “Make England’s Wool Business Great Again” movement arose, claiming that the hardworking native laborers were being undercut by the artisans of the subcontinent (and the middlemen who brought their foreign wares to British soil). “When the East India ships come in,” they argued, “half our weavers pay.” The charges also invariably featured a pronounced tone of sexual shaming. “Calico madams” were destroying one of Britain’s most enduring industries through their suspiciously sensual embrace of cotton. Real Englishwomen, apparently, wore wool. It was a message that resonated even among the chattering classes back in London. The balladmongers spun songs about the calico madams; poems and pamphlets renounced them. (“None shall be thought / a more scandalous Slut / Than a tawdry Calico Madam,” one of them declared.) Daniel Defoe described the craze for cotton as a “Disease in Trade . . . a Contagion, that if not stopped in the Beginning, will, like the Plague in Capital City, spread itself o’er the whole Nation.”