In purchasing the ninety slaves on Réunion, Every was performing a crucial job familiar to most master criminals: money laundering. As horrific as it now sounds, slaves were the closest thing to universal currency in the trading centers they were likely to visit, and unlike the “Arabian gold” in the pockets of the Fancy’s crew, the slaves betrayed no connection to the Gunsway heist. If Every was going to adopt the guise of slave trade interloper Benjamin Bridgeman, a hundred Africans manacled in the hold made the story that much more plausible.
Every also needed the extra labor the slaves provided on board because almost fifty of his men chose to disembark on the island for good, perhaps planning to make their way to the celebrated pirate utopia of Madagascar. Half of them were French and a third were Danes. “They were afraid, if they came to England, and were caught they would should be hanged, and they thought themselves there secure,” Middleton later explained. But Every had another itinerary in mind. He had firsthand experience with the corrupt colonial outpost in the Bahamas; if they could make the five-thousand-mile voyage to New Providence (now Nassau) without detection, they might be able to ditch the Fancy and then disperse. According to John Dann, some of the crew opposed Every’s plan and threatened to mutiny, arguing that they would be safer in the French settlement of Cayenne in South America than in New Providence among the British, however corrupt they might be. “But Captain [Every] withstood it,” Dann noted. The Fancy would sail to the Bahamas.
A conventional voyage from East Africa to the West Indies would be broken up with multiple stops at friendly harbors along the way—the Dutch Cape Colony on the southern tip of Africa, or the British outpost at St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic—to take on water and other provisions. But Every had to assume that a bounty was already on his head. (Unbeknownst to him, the Royal Proclamation was still six months away.) They would have to make it to the Bahamas somehow avoiding all contact with European ports.
Parting ways with the Pearl and Susanna, and at last liberated to sail at full capacity, the Fancy rounded the cape and made its way to the tiny, uninhabited island of Ascension, a thousand miles west of Africa. (While much of the lore of Every’s pirate career revolves around the speed of the Fancy, the navigational prowess evident in his journey should not be underestimated.) Their arrival at Ascension happened to coincide with the nesting season of the island’s giant sea turtles; the crew brought fifty of them on board and lived almost exclusively on turtle meat for the remainder of their voyage. Amazingly, seventeen men opted to remain on Ascension, preferring life as virtual castaways on one of the planet’s most remote islands to risking arrest by the British authorities in New Providence.
In the final days of April, the Fancy reached the outer islands of the Bahamas, no more than a day or two from New Providence itself, with 113 free men and 90 slaves on board. Every’s risky strategy of avoiding all the traditional layover sites for provisioning had paid off, though only barely. As Every contemplated his final approach to the New Providence harbor, only two days of rations remained in the galley.
24
MANIFEST REBELLION
Bombay Castle
Late 1695
After Khafi Khan had completed his interviews with the Gunsway survivors at Surat, he continued on his original mission, porting goods for Abdur Razzak, the commander of Rahiri. Khan followed the coastal route south from Surat, and sometime in the late fall of 1695, he found himself on the outskirts of Bombay. Razzak turned out to have an old connection with John Gayer, and he had taken the liberty to write the East India Company governor to alert him that his emissary would be in the region. Perhaps the two men could meet and attempt to reach some kind of resolution to the current standoff, Razzak suggested. Barricaded in Bombay Castle, waiting for Aurangzeb to launch his inevitable attack on the company headquarters, Gayer leapt at the opportunity to make his case directly to Khan. He sent word to the brother of his chief of staff, who delivered an invitation to Khan in person, proposing a summit between the two men on the grounds of Bombay Castle.
Reading Khan’s epic history of the Aurangzeb era now, his antipathy toward the British traders jumps off the page. (“During these troubles,” he writes of his entente with Gayer, “I, the writer of this work, had the misfortune of seeing the English of Bombay.”) But the contempt he felt for the company did not compromise his characteristically perceptive reporting skills. The account he left behind of his visit with Gayer gives us an unparalleled glimpse of the negotiations between the British and Mughals at the very height of the crisis.
Khan’s first sight, on entering the Castle grounds, was an imposing display of the company’s military guards standing at attention in full dress:
Every step I advanced, young men with sprouting beards, handsome and well clothed, with fine muskets in their hands, were visible on every side. As I went onwards, I found Englishmen standing, with long beards, of similar age, with the same accouterments and dress. After that I saw musketeers, young men well dressed and arranged, drawn up in ranks. Further on, I saw Englishmen with white beards, clothed in brocade, with muskets on their shoulders, drawn up in two ranks, and in perfect array. Next I saw some English children, handsome and wearing pearls on the borders of their hats.
In all, Khan estimated that he passed seven thousand musketeers, a number that seems high given the scale of the British operation at that moment in history. After passing through the gauntlet, Khan was ushered directly to Gayer’s offices, where the governor greeted him with an embrace and offered him a chair. (Presumably they had a translator between them, but Khan makes no mention of it.) The two men chatted for a few minutes about their mutual acquaintance Abdur Razzak; Gayer tried to establish a civil tone by singing Razzak’s praises to his emissary. Before long, though, the conversation turned to the more urgent—and contentious—issues of the day. Why, Gayer asked his guest, were his factors in Surat still in irons?
Khan replied, poetically, “Although you do not acknowledge that shameful action, worthy of the reprobation of all sensible men, which was perpetrated by your wicked men, this question you have put to me is as if a wise man should ask where the sun is when all the world is filled with its rays.”
Gayer pushed back. “Those who have an ill-feeling against me cast upon me the game for the fault of others,” he said. “How do you know that this deed was the work of my men? By what satisfactory proof will you establish this?”
Here Khan was on firm ground, at least in terms of his access to the participants. “In that ship I had a number of wealthy acquaintances, and two or three poor ones, destitute of all worldly wealth,” he explained. “I heard from them that when the ship was plundered, and they were taken prisons, some men, in the dress and with the looks of Englishmen, and on whose hands and bodies there were marks, wounds and scars, said in their own language, ‘We got these scars at the time of the siege of Sidi Yakut, but today the scars have been removed from our hearts.’ A person who was with them knew Hindi and Persian, and he translated their words to my friends.”
Gayer laughed openly at the accusation, but he did not deny the facts as Khan presented them. “It is true they may have said so,” he conceded. “They are a party of Englishmen, who, having received wounds in the siege of Yakut Khan, were taken prisoners by him.” But they were not employees of the East India Company, Gayer explained, and the company itself had repudiated their actions in the strongest terms.
Initially, Khafi Khan countered with flattery, smiling at Gayer and saying, “What I have heard about your readiness of reply and your wisdom, I have [now] seen. All praise to your ability for giving off-hand, and without consideration, such an exculpatory and sensible answer!” But then, beneath the smile, Khan delivered a threat, referencing the fact that the company had printed coins with the English king’s face on them: “But you must recall to mind that the hereditary Kings of Bijapur and Haidarabad and the good-for-nothing Sambha have not escaped the hand
s of King Aurangzeb. Is the island of Bombay a sure refuge? What a manifest declaration of rebellion you have shown in coining rupees!”
Here as well, Gayer chose not to dispute the facts of Khan’s brief. Instead, he turned the tables by casting blame on the Hindustan currency. “We have to send every year a large sum of money, the profits of our commerce, to our country, and the coins of the King of Hindustan are taken at a loss,” he explained. “Besides the coins of Hindustan are of short weight, and much debased; and in this island, in the course of buying and selling them, great disputes arise. Consequently we have placed our own names on the counts, and have made them current in our own jurisdiction.” The British had nothing against Aurangzeb as a sovereign, Gayer argued. They just needed a stable currency, as businessmen.
The conversation appears to have ended in a stalemate. But at least the two sides were talking. Gayer may have hoped for a more extended visit, but Khan decided it was best to keep the exchange professional: “[The Englishman] offered me entertainment in their fashion,” he wrote, “but I accepted only air . . . and was glad to escape.”
25
SUPPOSITION IS NOT PROOF
Nassau, The Bahamas
April 1, 1696
For the generation of pirates that came to prominence in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the town of Nassau would serve as both safe harbor and a tropical pleasure dome of unchecked debauchery. But in 1696, the capital of New Providence island was a village fighting for survival. Originally called Charles Town, the village had been burned to the ground by the Spanish in 1684. The year before Every arrived, the Bahamas’ proprietor governor Nicholas Trott renamed the settlement Nassau, after William III’s original title, Prince of Orange-Nassau. Trott’s rebuilding efforts had been hindered by the long war with the French, which had severely reduced the influx of trade to the islands. The village was so starved of resources that it had not yet been able to construct a proper pier in its harbor. The French had just taken the nearby island of Exuma; rumors circulated that the Bahamas were next in line. Trott did have at his disposal a newly constructed fort, with twenty-eight guns. But Trott had no warships to fend off a French naval assault, and with only sixty residents on the island, he barely had enough men to operate the cannons in the fort.
Those bleak circumstances must have weighed heavily on the proprietor governor’s mind when a mysterious longboat rowed into the harbor on the first day of April in 1696, bearing an unusual offer from a slave trader named Benjamin Bridgeman.
Henry Every had enjoyed the luxury of many months to ruminate on what his eventual strategy would be once the Fancy finally reached the Bahamas. He had been entirely isolated from any form of human communication, beyond the two hundred or so men on board the ship, for almost the entire year. With no access to news reports—or even the word-of-mouth gossip exchanged while provisioning at friendly harbors—Every had no way of determining his status as a fugitive from justice. Seven months had passed since the Gunsway attack. Perhaps the outrage had subsided back in India; perhaps the authorities in Nassau had heard nothing of his exploits. Even before its heyday as a pirate’s den, Nassau had had a reputation as a town that operated at the blurred edges of British law, usually turning a blind eye to pirates or slave interlopers. It was even possible that Every and his men would be greeted as heroes. But it was equally possible that they would be greeted as wanted men, enemies of all mankind.
With his characteristic prudence, Every decided to test the waters first. He anchored the Fancy north of the deserted Hog Island, out of sight of the New Providence harbor. (Hog Island was rebranded in the 1960s as Paradise Island, and now houses the sprawling Atlantis vacation resort.) Every called the men on deck and outlined his plan. The crew of the Fancy would attempt to buy the protection of the Nassau governor by offering him a bribe. All the sailors would contribute a portion of their holdings to the fund: twenty pieces of eight and two pieces of gold. Respecting the pirate’s tradition of equitable profit sharing, Captain Every contributed twice what the other men donated to Trott’s payoff. As always, whether the pirates were plundering or bribing, the articles of agreement were sacrosanct.
Every wrote a letter to Trott, adopting his old slave-trading persona. (The fact that he was carrying ninety slaves on board the Fancy made the alias even more persuasive.) Philip Middleton later claimed to have read the letter with his own eyes. The terms proposed to Trott involved a simple quid pro quo: “Provided he would give them liberty to come on shore and depart when they pleased,” Middleton recalled, “they promised to give the said Governor twenty pieces of eight and two pieces of gold a man, and [the Fancy] and all that was in her.”
The Fancy had served Every and his men spectacularly over the nearly two years that had passed since the mutiny at A Coruña. Now she was a liability. She had once been so snug that Every “feared not who would follow her.” But he had different kinds of fears now. He no longer needed to outrun his enemies. Now it was time to disperse.
One of Every’s top officers, Henry Adams, boarded the longboat with a handful of other sailors, and bearing the note from Benjamin Bridgeman, they rowed their way into the New Providence harbor. The proposal must have sounded suspicious when Trott first laid eyes on it. Why would a British captain give up so much—including his ship—simply for the opportunity to enter the harbor? Trott must have assumed that the gold and pieces of eight being offered to him in tribute had not been acquired through legal means. The Fancy—“and all that was in her”—were undoubtably stolen goods. In Trott’s defense, however, the proclamation announcing the global manhunt for Every would not be issued for another three months. Situated eight thousand miles from Surat, with the usual communication channels with Europe compromised by the French Navy, it is entirely possible that Trott had heard nothing of the Gunsway controversy. He must have known that agreeing to Benjamin Bridgeman’s terms would entail going into business with a pirate. But he most likely had no idea that the pirate in question happened to be the most notorious one on the planet.
Bridgeman’s offer had an appeal that went beyond the economic reward of the bribe itself. He had no way of knowing, from reading Bridgeman’s letter, just how “snugg” the Fancy was, but having a warship with forty-six guns to defend his fledgling colony would give him a significant new resource if the French did attack the island. And the influx of men would, overnight, triple the town’s population. Even if only a fraction of Bridgeman’s crew remained at Nassau, Trott might well have enough manpower, with a warship and the new fort, to put up a legitimate fight against the French. Surely the authorities back home would prefer that he negotiate a deal with an Englishman—however shady his past—if it meant holding on to a promising new outpost in the West Indies.
Whatever his moral calculations, Trott sent a response back, writing in “very civil terms,” Middleton later reported, “assuring Captain Every that he and his company should be welcome.” They had a deal: the crew of the Fancy could come ashore at their liberty, and in return, Trott would get a warship, forty-six cannon, and a small fortune in stolen goods.
More than a year later, when it became apparent that the governor had not only given sanctuary to the world’s most wanted man but also taken possession of a stolen ship, the original investors in the Spanish Expedition sued Trott, attempting to recover in damages some of the losses from their catastrophic venture. In his deposition, Trott claimed that the town had no choice but to welcome Every to the island. “Even if the people of Providence had been stronger,” he testified under oath, “it would have been necessary to have invited the ship in, for on the 4th of April the French had taken the [nearest] of the salt ponds and were meditating an attack on Providence, had they not heard of the arrival of this ship, which had 46 guns.” Asked whether he realized at the time that the men were pirates, Trott professed his innocence: “How could I know? Supposition is not proof.”
“Not long thereafter, a gr
eat ship rounded Hog Island,” the historian Colin Woodard writes, “her decks crowded with sailors, her sides pierced with gun ports, and her hull sunk low in the water under the weight of her cargo. Adams and his party were the first to come ashore, their longboat filled with bags and chests. The promised loot was there: a fortune in silver pieces of eight and golden coins minted in Arabia and beyond.” According to Middleton, the crew of the Fancy left behind “fifty Tons of Elephants [tusks], forty six Guns mounted, one hundred Barrells of Gunpowder or thereabouts, [and] severall Chests of Buccanneer Guns.”
As the crew finished unloading their goods, Henry Every rowed ashore in the longboat and was greeted by Nicholas Trott. The two men then retired for a private conversation.
Henry Every would not set foot on the decks of the Fancy again.
26
THE SALTWATER FAUJDAR
Surat, India
Winter-Spring 1696
Shackled “like a company of Dogges” in the Surat factory, Samuel Annesley had been stripped of his personal liberty, but he did have one luxury at his disposal: a near infinite supply of time to think. As the imprisonment stretched into the winter of 1695, an idea began to form in his mind. Perhaps the company could turn the catastrophe of the Gunsway attack into an opportunity. The idea might have been originally triggered by the formal language that Aurangzeb had issued, once Khan’s account of the raid reached him: if the East India Company wanted to continue its business on the subcontinent, it would have to “find out the pyrates that infest the seas, or else to make satisfaction with the merchants for their effects robbed from the Gunsway for which to give security to that value and with the merchant ships a cannon to accompany them, as no mischief comes to them whether they are bound, if any damage ensues to make satisfaction.”
Enemy of All Mankind Page 17