The company was already committed to “find out the pyrates that infest the seas,” or at least to finding one pirate in particular. The key phrase in the Grand Mughal’s edict came in the second half, where Aurangzeb proposed that the company “give security” and “a cannon to accompany” the merchant ships of Muslim India. Aurangzeb presented it as a concession that the British would have to make in order to stay in his good graces. But Annesley saw it as something else: an opening. In a letter to Gayer, Annesley drew an analogy to the Grand Mughal’s faujdars, the military officers assigned to serve as law enforcement in specific territories across the land. The East Indiamen were already among the most imposing vessels in the water, ideally suited to protect the ships of Aurangzeb and merchants like Abdul Ghaffar. Perhaps the Grand Mughal could be persuaded to grant the company the same authority at sea that he granted his police commanders on land? “As his land faujdars are responsible on account of their salaries to make good robberies on the roads,” Annesley proposed to Gayer in a letter in late 1695, “[the company could] satisfy all such losses on the salt water. These great and noble benefits will sufficiently atone for our present disgrace and loss and set the English nation for ever out of danger of such abuses again.” Annesley thought the new role would also help the company’s bottom line, suggesting that they might be able to charge Aurangzeb as much as 400,000 rupees per year for their services as a nautical security force.
At first, Gayer resisted Annesley’s scheme, in large part because the company, in its weakened state, lacked the resources to provide sufficient protection to Aurangzeb’s ships. But Annesley continued to make the case. In his mind, protecting the Mughal convoys was not merely a short-term solution to the Gunsway crisis, or a new line of business for the company. He began to imagine an arrangement where the company itself would hold a kind of sovereign power at sea. The ships, he argued, would be “in the Nature of Castles and those under our Command as in our harbours [which] the Lawes of Nature and hospitality obliges us to defend.” Deputize the British as the legal authority empowered to protect the rule of law on the Indian Ocean, and the whole balance of power in the region would settle on a new equilibrium. In its current situation, Annesley recognized, the company’s authority was restricted to its fragile hold on Bombay island. The shackles and the prison guards would have been a daily reminder to Annesley that even on the grounds of the company’s factory in Surat its dominion was severely limited. But if Aurangzeb recognized their authority to protect the Muslim treasure ships and other commercial vessels from piracy, their sovereign power would expand meaningfully, over water if not yet over land.
The historian Philip Stern has argued, persuasively, that this strategy—first dreamed up by Samuel Annesley under house arrest in the Surat factory—would prove to be a critical turning point in the relationship between India and England, one that is inevitably neglected in the traditional version of the rise of the British empire in the subcontinent. The standard account, according to Stern, imagines the East India Company as “a commercial body that only ‘turned’ sovereign—accidentally, haphazardly, and unwillingly—with the Company’s great territorial acquisitions in Bengal following Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the assumption eight years later of revenue and governance responsibilities in the Mughal office of diwan.” In Stern’s retelling of the story, the assumption of sovereign power has much deeper roots, extending back to Annesley’s schemes of a “salt-water faujdar.” “To fight piracy was to claim to be able to draw fundamental distinctions between just and unjust violence, public and private right, and honorable and dishonorable behavior at sea,” Stern writes. “It was also to assert the right to enforce those distinctions and exercise a certain form of imperium over the sea lanes.”
Gayer eventually saw the merits of Annesley’s strategy, and secured the blessing from the court of committee back at East India House to propose a settlement with Aurangzeb: the company would compensate the Grand Mughal for his losses, and assume the responsibility of protecting his ships. In the first weeks of 1696, it seemed as though the prisoners at the Surat factory were on the edge of being released, but the negotiations with Aurangzeb’s court dragged on for months, in part because the Grand Mughal himself was still simmering over Every’s sacrilegious acts. According to Khafi Khan, Aurangzeb’s righteous fury was ultimately sabotaged by I’timad Khan, the Surat governor in Annesley’s pocket. “He saw all these preparations,” Khan wrote, “and he came to the conclusion that there was no remedy, and that a struggle with the English would result only in a heavy loss to the customs revenue.” Annesley’s biographer, on the other hand, credits the Indian politician Asad Khan, who recognized that the “renewal of warfare against the [company] would probably be a very onerous business, and that in any event it would react disastrously on the Imperial revenue.” Both men appear to have ultimately come around to the argument Gayer had been making from the outset: that the company was too much of a profit center for the Mughal regime to expel it. “After sundry false alarms,” according to Wright, “the welcome tidings of the arrival at Surat of the court’s orders for the reopening of the port reached the factory on June 27 and the same day the Governor caused the irons to be removed from the prisoners and the guard to be withdrawn.” Nine months after Henry Every’s assault on the Gunsway, the East India Company was back in business.
During the months leading up to that release, as John Gayer weighed his options in Bombay Castle and Annesley tugged at his chains in Surat, it would have seemed beyond fantasy that the East India Company would become an imperial force on the subcontinent barely sixty years later: a company/state ruling over a hundred million subjects. But Annesley’s vision and Gayer’s negotiating skills transformed the crisis into an opportunity for the company to expand its dominion. What seemed like an existential crisis for the East India Company became, against all odds, the first stirrings of empire.
Alternate histories are, almost by definition, indistinguishable from fiction, but here the narrative requires only a few small tweaks to result in a radically different outcome. Had a deal not been struck with Aurangzeb to resolve the Gunsway crisis, had Samuel Annesley not perceived the opportunity lurking in the Grand Mughal’s initial demands, the East India Company might well have been forced to abandon Surat and Bombay. Stripped of its cash cow, and vilified by the weavers and other protectionist groups, the company could easily have collapsed under the weight of challenges at home and abroad. No doubt a loose network of successor firms would have been back at Surat and Bombay within a matter of years, rubbing shoulders with the Dutch and the Portuguese. But would the English have ultimately conquered India if dozens of smaller firms had served as the commercial conduit between the two nations? It is impossible to say for sure, but certainly the odds would have been worse.
The English had been traders in a strange land—sometimes welcome, sometimes on the edge of exile—for more than eighty years, ever since Jahangir had first granted them the ability to “sell, buy, and to transport into [the] country at their pleasure.” But now, watching over the Muslim treasure fleet as it made its pilgrimage to Mecca, keeping the seas free of pirates, the English had an asset they had not possessed before, a new power that would come to define their relationship to the subcontinent: the force of law.
27
HOMECOMINGS
Dunfanaghy, Ireland
Late June 1696
The men were never going to stay long in Nassau. They were big fish now, too big for a backwater outpost with sixty residents. As they spent a small slice of their fortune in the two taverns in Trott’s struggling village, they would have known they were vulnerable there, clustered together under the good graces of a corrupt British governor, with a dragnet stretched across the planet seeking them out. Nicholas Trott did his best to persuade the men to stay, hosting a feast for the prospective Bahamians at his home. (“One of the men broke a drinking glass,” Philip Middleton
later recalled, “and was made to pay eight checqueenes for it.”) Trott’s respect for the new arrivals, however, did not extended to the Fancy itself. After Every’s gang had handed the ship over to the governor, he assigned responsibility for the ship to men whose “incapacity or number were not sufficient to secure her from hurtfull accidents,” as a subsequent missive to the Board of Trade reported. James Houblon’s “extraordinary sailor” ended her short but eventful existence as a wreck, never to sail again. Phillip Middleton would later call it a “sad sight”—the ship that had outrun all its enemies, that had kept the men alive on a journey of more than ten thousand miles, now foundered in the shallow waters of the Nassau harbor.
Nicholas Trott’s hospitality persuaded six or seven of the Every gang to stay, to disappear into the small-town life of a remote colonial outpost and be forgotten. There appears to have been some sexual intrigue shaping the decision as well. A few of the men who remained behind married Nassau women. (Quartermaster Adams seems to have married one of them in a matter of days.) But the rest were eager to move on.
Within a week or two, the men had sorted into three distinct escape pods. One group of twenty-three pirates acquired a sloop in town; they embarked on a return trip straight back to England, assuming they could slip through the disorganized border control on the Thames docks and slink their way back to their families and loved ones. The largest group opted for the same strategy of seeking out pirate’s nests that had steered them to Madagascar and Nassau—only this time on a grander scale. Those pirates went to the American colonies.
The pull toward the American mainland was partially a simple matter of proximity. Charleston was only four hundred miles away. But there were legal reasons to head to America as well. The colonies had developed a reputation for both nurturing and tolerating piracy, a reputation that Rhode Island’s Thomas Tew had amplified just a few years before with his 1693 Red Sea robberies.
The reputation turned out to be a valid one, as least as far as Every’s gang was concerned. Not one of the fifty men who sailed for the Carolinas were ever convicted of crimes associated with the Gunsway attack. Some had brushes with the law; some disappeared. But not a man among them was ultimately punished for his crimes. According to some accounts, Every’s crew openly boasted about their heroic days on the Indian Ocean. In early 1697, James Houblon received a letter from a scandalized colonist in Pennsylvania who had overhead Every veterans “regaling their fellow patrons” at a tavern with the stories of their exploits aboard the Fancy. The atmosphere was so lax that the pirates barely bothered to conceal their identities. “They brag of it publicly over their cups,” Houblon’s correspondent noted.
The colonies had another asset in their favor: a thriving market for slave labor. Presumably some of the slaves that that had been captured in Guinea or acquired in Réunion traveled with the crew to the Carolinas and were sold off along with the remnants of the Gunsway treasure. According to Philip Middleton, some of the slaves were sold in Nassau to Trott and his men. Assuming some of them stayed on the island, they would have played an early role in the demographic transformation of the Bahamas, a country where today more than 80 percent of the population is of African descent—one small piece of the vast diaspora that slavery produced.
Two months after making his initial offer to Nicholas Trott, Henry Every left Nassau accompanied by twenty of his original crew, including Henry Adams and John Dann. With the world’s most wanted man in their party, they dared not risk a direct return to England. Instead, Every and the others bought a single-masted sailboat called the Sea Flower and set sail for northeast Ireland. In what must have been one of the least romantic honeymoons in history, Henry Adams brought his new bride along for the trip.
Sometime in late June, the Sea Flower sailed into the small harbor of Dunfanaghy, nestled at the western edge of Sheephaven Bay, roughly a hundred miles northwest of Belfast. According to Dann’s account, on their arrival they were confronted by a “landwaiter”—effectively a customs official—who eventually allowed them to continue their travels toward Dublin in exchange for a bribe of £3 per man. Dann traveled with Every—who was still using the alias Benjamin Bridgeman—for six miles, before the captain announced that he was going to break off from the company and head out on his own. “I heard he went over for Donaghedy in Scotland,” Dann later recalled. “I heard him say he would go to Exeter when he came into England, being a Plymouth man.”
As Every and his crew dispersed across the British Isles, back in London at East India House the special committee on pirates was ramping up its manhunt efforts. The proclamation from the Lords Justices offering a reward for Every’s capture was released several weeks after the Sea Flower landed in Ireland. The company paid to have a hundred copies of it printed and shipped off to its factories in India. (They added an additional reward of 4,000 rupees for any Indian informants who led them to Every.) By late July, Isaac Houblon and his fellow committee members had learned that Every had landed in Nassau and was rumored to have left with a small crew, headed back to England and Ireland. The company’s secretary, Robert Blackborne, immediately dispatched a flurry of letters to local authorities in port towns across the British Isles, requesting that they be on the lookout for Every and his men. “Captain Henry Every now goes by the name of Bridgeman,” Blackborne advised. “It will be an admirable service to the Kingdom and as such recommend to your favor to capture any of them that shall come into your parts.” Just as Every’s crimes were endowing the company with new naval power in the Indian Ocean thanks to Samuel Annesley’s scheme, the manhunt back home bound the company’s agents into a close partnership with law enforcement authorities. Blackborne, after all, was merely a corporate secretary, transcribing minutes of board meetings and writing letters to company representatives overseas. But with Every on the loose, he had taken on a new responsibility: issuing an all-points bulletin for the nation’s most wanted man. The company arranged to have agents on alert, ready to be dispatched to interrogate and bring back to London any suspects that local law enforcement detained. Whatever political tensions and scandals had compromised the relationship between the government and the company, the threat posed by Every and his crimes forced the two institutions into a united front—so united, in fact, that the East India Company took on many tasks that would have traditionally been delegated to the state.
John Dann continued his travels to Dublin, then sailed to Holyhead in Wales. After a brief sojourn in London, he traveled north to his hometown of Rochester, where he booked a room in a local inn. It turned out to be a disastrous homecoming. Dann had traveled more than ten thousand miles, carrying his profits from one of history’s largest heists sewn into the lining of his jacket. But during his first day back in Rochester, an inquisitive maid cleaning his room noticed the unusual weight of the coat while folding his clothes. She reported him to the authorities, who found more than a thousand Turkish coins “quilted up in his jacket.” The town mayor seized the coins and threw Dann in jail under suspicion of robbery.
Dann’s arrest was just the beginning. Over the course of the summer, seven more men from Every’s crew were apprehended in Liverpool, Dublin, Newcastle, and in the West Country near Every’s birthplace. The special committee spent close to a thousand pounds in reward money and in “gratuities” doled out to officials who had assisted with the dragnet. They even covered the cost of transporting the prisoners back to London, where they could be tried together in the most public forum possible. The East India Company—and its close collaborators in the British government—had been eager to throw the full force of the law against the Gunsway pirates ever since John Gayer’s letter detailing the atrocities had arrived London in late 1695. Now they had eight of them in custody. At long last, the world—and Aurangzeb most of all—would have a chance to see England’s true position on piracy.
Part Five
THE TRIAL
28
A NATION OF PIRATES
London
September-October, 1696
Several months after Aurangzeb released the prisoners at Surat, as the East India Company was resuming its business affairs in Southeast Asia, John Gayer sent a letter back to London, reflecting on the Gunsway crisis and its implications. The British government, he argued, needed to make a strong stand against piracy, at home and abroad. The Drake era—where pirates were often seen as unofficial agents of British interests abroad—might have worked with nations that were declared enemies, or tribal societies like the Spice Islanders wiped out by the Dutch. But with a genuine trading partner like India, the leniency of the Drake era no longer made sense. Gayer argued that the British needed to extend the same authority to the East Indiamen policing the Red Sea that Aurangzeb had granted them in the post-Gunsway pact: “If there not be care taken to suppress pyrates in India and to empower your servants there to punish them according to then deserts, without fear of being traduced for what they have done when they return to their native country, it’s probable their throats will be all cut in a little time by malefactors and the natives of the country in revenge for their frequent losses.” He ended the argument by appealing to their base economic interests. Turn a blind eye to Red Sea pirates, he predicted, and “your Honours’ trade in India [will be] wholly lost.”
Enemy of All Mankind Page 18