Enemy of All Mankind

by Steven Johnson

  Holt dismissed the excuse out of hand: “None of them say you were at the consult. But one says that you said ‘God damn you; you deserve to be shot through the head’ and held a pistol to him.”

  “I never was any higher than the under deck,” May protested. “I was coming up the hatch-way, and Captain Every was standing and commanding the ship.”

  “Every was no officer,” Holt interjected. “He had nothing to command. He was under Captain Gibson, and took the ship from Gibson.”

  “My Lord, I knew nothing of the ship’s going away,” May pleaded.

  “You should have stuck to Captain Gibson, and endeavored to suppress the insolence of Every. Captain Gibson was the commander. You ought to have obeyed him and if any had resisted him, or gone to put a force upon him, you should have stood by him.”

  “I was surprised,” May responded weakly.

  May then turned to question of the empty seats on the pinnace, and his ambiguous parting words with Gravet. The transcript conveys the sense of a man working as furiously as he can within the legal structure of the courtroom proceeding, trying turn the state’s evidence against the prosecution, despite his limited knowledge of the law.

  “When I came out again, they began to hurry the men away,” May said. “Here was Mr. Gravet, the second Mate . . . I told him he should remember me to my wife, [as] I am not like to see her, for none could go, but who they pleased. For when those men were in the boat, they cried out to have a bucket or else they should sink, they having three leagues to go. And I do not know how they could go so far with more, when their boat was like to sink with those that were in her, as some of the King’s evidence have testified.”

  Shortly thereafter, Judge Hedges intervened. “You seem to say that you were under a constraint and a terror,” he said from the dais. “Did you make any complaint or discovery so soon as you had liberty, or at your first coming into the King’s Dominion?”

  May replied that he had “discovered” the whole affair to a magistrate in Rhode Island, before returning to England, and had been on his way to London to confess his crimes when he was apprehended. He then launched into a long story about his earlier illness during the voyage to the Red Sea. He reiterated his claim that he had missed significant stretches of the voyage, recovering from a fever on land. Every, May claimed, had attempted multiple times to get him back on the Fancy, but his illness had made it impossible.

  “When Captain Every came in again,” May protested, “I could not go nor stir.”

  “Do not call him Captain,” Holt barked. “He was a pirate.”

  * * *

  —

  ONCE THE PRISONERS had concluded their pitiable attempts at self-defense, the solicitor general rose to make a closing argument for the prosecution. He began by reiterating the global implications of the verdict that Henry Newton had established at the outset of the first trial: “[The accused] could not find shelter in any other part of the world, and I hope you will make it appear such crimes shall not find shelter here . . . These are crimes against the laws of nations, and worse than robbery on land.” He addressed the claims that the defendants had been overpowered by the mutineers, forced into service against their will: “Now they have only this to say for themselves: that they were forced to do what they did. But it has been proved to you that they were not forced. It was said: all might go that would.”

  Holt took over and reviewed the state’s evidence one more time before commanding the jury to retire to its quarters and render a verdict. After a few hours, they returned with a question: Was there any evidence that John Sparkes in particular had consented to run away with the ship?

  Holt dismissed the question briskly. “He was with them at the carrying off of the ship, and at the taking of the several prizes, and had his share afterwards. What is consent? Can men otherwise demonstrate their consent than by their actions?”

  This simple question of consent—did William May and the others choose to join the mutiny, or were they compelled against their will—had truly momentous implications. It wasn’t just a matter of life or death for the pirates. The entire objective of the trial—to establish to the world, and particularly to Aurangzeb, that England was at last determined to renounce piracy—would be sabotaged if the jury decided that May and the others were telling the truth about their opposition to the mutiny. Whatever schemes Annesley and Gayer had concocted to placate the Universe Conqueror back in India could be wiped away in an instant if the Lords Justices in Old Bailey failed to get a single conviction in back-to-back trials. Hedges, Holt, and their collaborators on the East India Company’s special committee had done everything possible to create the ideal show trial to display the state’s antipiracy stance. But now the plot of the show itself threatened to take a disastrous twist. One jury had already shrugged off the accusations of piracy. Could the second jury do the same to the charges of mutiny?

  The jurors returned to their quarters and deliberated for a “very little time.” When they emerged again, they stood together in the jury box. The clerk asked them if had reached a unanimous verdict. They answered in the affirmative.

  “Ed Forsyth, hold up thy hand,” the clerk instructed and then turned to the jury. “Look upon the prisoner. Is Edward Forsyth guilty of the piracy and robbery whereof he stands indicted, or not guilty?”

  For each of the accused, the jury delivered its verdict. They were all guilty as charged.

  Lord Justice Holt had the final word, as the convicted criminals were ushered out of the courtroom to await their sentencing in Newgate Prison. “Gentlemen,” he said to the jury, “you have done extremely well, and you have done very much to regain the honor of the nation, and the city.”

  31

  EXECUTION DOCK

  The East End, London

  November 25, 1696

  Several days after the second trial ended, the six convicted mutineers—including Joseph Dawson, who had pled guilty twice—were brought back to Old Bailey for sentencing. Standing at the bar for one last time, each man was asked in turn by the clerk why they should not be sentenced to death for their crimes.

  Dawson answered first, with an air of resignation: “I submit myself to the King and the honorable Bench.” Forsyth maintained his innocence; the trial transcripts only note that he “went on to justify himself, etc.” Judge Hedges intervened to explain that “the prisoners at the bar have had a very fair trial, and been fully heard upon your defense.” But the jury’s verdict has been rendered, the judge continued. The question now was whether the state had any reason not to execute the men for their capital crimes.

  Giving up on his last-minute defense, Forsyth announced, “I desire to be sent to India to suffer there.”

  William May returned to his health complaints, and he, too, proposed an overseas assignment in lieu of execution. “My Lord, I being a very sickly man never acted in all the voyage,” he protested. “I have served my King and Country this thirty years, and am very willing to serve in the East India Company where they please to command me, and desire the honorable Bench to consider my case, and if I must suffer, I desire to be sent into India to suffer there.”

  “I am an ignorant person,” James Lewes conceded, “and leave myself to the King’s mercy.” John Sparkes requested the same mercy from the crown. Young William Bishop offered perhaps the most tragic of the statements. “I was forced away,” he said, “and when I was but eighteen years old, and am now but twenty-one, and desire the mercy of the King and the Court.”

  The pleas for mercy went unanswered. Judge Hedges announced the sentences by steering the indictments back to the original international crimes of piracy, as though the acquittals of the original trial had never happened.

  “You have been found guilty upon three several indictments, for the same detestable crimes committed upon the ships and goods of Indians, of Danes, and your own fellow-subjects,” he announced. “T
he law for the heinousness of your crime hath appointed a severe punishment, by an ignominious death, and the judgement that the law awards is this: that you and everyone of you be taken from to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there you, and every one of you be hanged by the necks, until you, and everyone of you be dead. And the Lord have mercy upon you.” Only Joseph Dawson, who had pled guilty in both trials, was spared.

  On November 25, 1696, two and a half years after they had—willingly or not—thrown in their lot with Bold Captain Every, the five men were lead out of Newgate Prison and marched through the streets down to the wharfs at Wapping on London’s East End, not far from the dockyards where the Charles II had been originally built.

  The specific location of Execution Dock is a matter of dispute among London historians. Three different pubs today claim to reside at the site of the original dock. But however ambiguous its exact location may be, we can imagine the general scene with some accuracy, given how closely public executions were covered by the tabloids of the day. The grim spectacle of the public hanging was, in a real sense, the closest equivalent in Every’s age to the modern experience of major sporting events: an act of physical violence viewed live by teeming crowds and indirectly experienced by thousands thanks to media coverage.

  Execution Dock faced the river, for symbolic reasons. The pirates who were hanged there—their bodies often left to decay for days—sent a message to the nautical community: Do not delude yourself into thinking that you are beyond the reach of the law when you sail past the mouth of the Thames and into open water. The riverside placement forced the audience to crowd into a flotilla of rowboats, anchored against the tide in front of the dock. Imagine all those prurient spectators, bobbing in the Thames for hours, waiting for the condemned to appear before them, eagerly anticipating the ritual sacrifice. Imagine a flurry of activity on the steps leading down from Wapping Street to the shoreline: the crowd lunging to its feet, full-throated, as the five prisoners made their way toward the gallows.

  As in most public executions, there were last words to be delivered. On a bustling urban river, with no technical ability to amplify speech beyond the limits of human vocal cords, most of the words spoken by the prisoners went unheard by the throngs floating in the Thames. But they were quickly amplified textually by the press. Within a month, a pamphlet had been published, promising “An Account of the behaviour, dying speeches, and execution of . . . William May, John Sparcks, William Bishop, James Lewis, and Adam Foresith for robbery, piracy and felony, at the execution-dock.”

  Most of the confessions followed the conventional script of a crime-doesn’t-pay morality play. Forsyth, for instance, observed that “besides the Guilt of his Offences, and the present capital Punishment, his Wicked Life, attended with many Hardships and Hazards he had undergone in his Robberies, was little less than a Punishment; for wickedness . . . brings great many troubles and afflictions along with it.”

  The last words of young John Sparkes, however, were the most haunting. He appeared to have been genuinely traumatized by sexual violence onboard the Mughal ship. “He expressed a due sense of his wicked Life,” the pamphleteer reported, “in particular to the most horrid Barbarities that he had committed, which though upon the Persons of Heathen and Infidels, such as the forementioned poor Indians, so inhumanly rifled and treated so unmercifully; declaring that his Eyes were now open to his Crimes, and that he justly suffer’d Death for such Inhumanity, much more than his Injustice and Robbery, in Stealing and Running away with one of his Majesties Ships, which was of the two his lesser concern.”

  John Sparkes may have technically been convicted of mutiny aboard the Charles II, but he went to his grave atoning for the crimes he committed on the Ganj-i-sawai.

  Their last words recorded, the five men stood on the gallows as a noose was tied around each of their necks. Pirates executed at the dock were subjected to an unusually cruel form of hanging, using a shorter rope than usual. The reduction in length meant that the neck would not break when the platform beneath them was pulled away. Enemies of all mankind did not deserve the split-second execution of a severed spinal cord. Instead, they were asphyxiated. Deprived of a sudden death, the five pirates dangled from the noose, their bodies twitching as they slowly suffocated in front of the jeering crowd.

  With a guilty verdict and a public execution, the British government—and the East India Company—had managed to produce the show trial that they had originally planned. They had at last established a compelling ending for the dominant narrative. John Everingham’s contract was renewed, and the printer released the court transcripts—with only a brief allusion to the unsuccessful first trial—as a twenty-eight-page bound volume within a matter of weeks. The publication went through multiple printings, and was read throughout the British empire. Its final lines left no doubt where the Crown stood regarding the crimes of piracy:

  According to this sentence, Edward Foreseth and the rest were executed, on Wednesday, November the 25th, 1696; at Execution-Dock, that being the usual Place for the Execution of Pirates. FINIS.

  EPILOGUE:

  LIBERTALIA

  A few days before his stolen coins were found quilted into his jacket—starting the whole chain of events that would lead to five of his shipmates hanging at Execution Dock—John Dann stumbled across Henry Adams’s new bride in the London suburb of St. Albans. She was boarding a stagecoach by herself for an unknown destination. Dann and Mrs. Adams chatted briefly, and the former quartermaster’s wife let it slip that she was headed off to meet with Henry Every.

  The story of Dann’s chance encounter with Mrs. Adams comes from Dann’s original deposition, recorded by the authorities shortly after his arrest. If his account is true—and there is no apparent reason why Dann would fabricate such a detail—it paints an intriguing picture of Henry Adams’s new bride. According to multiple testimonies, Adams had arrived in the Bahamas with the rest of the crew of the Fancy, and within a matter of weeks he had met and married the woman we know only as Mrs. Adams. Somehow, he had persuaded her to join him and nineteen of his mates for a two-thousand-mile journey to Ireland in a small sailboat. Against significant odds, they had made it to safe harbor, bribed their way past the landwaiter in Dunfanaghy, and found themselves on British soil again, with their share of the treasure largely intact.

  And then, after all that, Henry Adams and his wife had parted, leaving her boarding a stagecoach alone to meet with Captain Every at some undisclosed location. The fact that Dann seems to have had a civil conversation with her at St. Albans suggests that she had embarked willingly on the journey to Ireland, that her marriage to Henry Adams had been a voluntary one. But it is difficult to imagine the chain of circumstances that had left her, just a few weeks after arriving in Ireland, heading off for a secret rendezvous with her new husband’s captain.

  No doubt many innocuous explanations exist. Perhaps Adams and Every were together, and she just happened to forget to mention her husband’s presence at the meeting. Perhaps Dann didn’t bother to mention Adams to the magistrates interrogating him, assuming they were mostly interested in Every. Perhaps Dann made the whole thing up to get credit for pointing the state in the direction of their most wanted man. But if that was his strategy, then why not actually invent even more detail? Why wouldn’t he have named a specific location for the rendezvous?

  You can spiral down the chain of what-ifs for hours. But if you go with the simplest interpretation of Dann’s testimony, there is something culturally suspicious—given the conventions of 1696 Britain—about Henry Adam’s wife heading off to see Every by herself a month after marrying her husband. And that raises the question of whether a romantic entanglement was bringing Mrs. Adams to Captain Every. Did Every somehow steal his quartermaster’s bride?

  Whatever dim light it may shine on the romantic liaisons inside the Every gang, that brief section of Dann’s testimony where he describes
his meeting with Mrs. Adams has a significance that extends beyond the love lives of the pirates. Mrs. Adams’s passing remark while boarding the stagecoach is the last legitimate trace of Henry Every’s existence in the historical record. In early August 1696, a month after his return to Ireland, as Dann and Middleton were being interrogated, the most wanted man in the world simply disappeared. To this day, no one knows what happened to him.

  * * *

  —

  HENRY EVERY THE MAN might have vanished in August 1696, but the mythological Henry Every would become increasingly visible over the next few decades. In 1709, Van Broeck published his mini biography, The Life and Adventures of Captain John Avery, written from the (almost certainly fictitious) vantage point of one of Every’s crew. Van Broeck’s account was the first published narrative to cast Every as a romantic suitor, dazzled by the tragic beauty of Aurangzeb’s granddaughter. The story ends with Every and his bride happily settled in Madagascar, where Every established a thriving pirate kingdom. With a fleet of forty warships and fifteen thousand men, Captain Every—according to Van Broeck’s account—appears to have had a second act as an urban planner: “Towns were built, communities established, fortifications built, and entrenchments flung up, as rendered his Dominions impregnable and inaccessible by sea and land.”

  In Van Broeck’s hands, the story of Every had been transformed from the conventional pirate fantasy of the self-made man into something even more outlandish: an ascension, as Van Broeck put it, “from Cabin Boy to King.” Bound up in that legend are two related utopian ideals that would have been mesmerizing to commoners back in England. First, the dream of extreme class mobility: that you could be born into a working-class family in Devonshire and, through the sheer force of your own daring and charisma, work your way not only into a vast fortune but also onto a royal throne, with thousands of loyal subjects and the granddaughter of the world’s wealthiest man as your bride (albeit with somewhat strained relations with your in-laws). The second utopian impulse lies in the idea of a pirate kingdom itself: the egalitarian ethos of the pirate ship’s collective brought ashore and rendered on a much larger scale.