The fantasy of the pirate utopia resonated so widely that the story reappeared in multiple formats throughout the early 1700s. The Theatre Royal in London staged a play called The Successful Pyrate, a somewhat slapstick account of Every’s life, focusing on his years in his rogue state on Madagascar. In his bestselling A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Charles Johnson interrupts the usual tales of daring raids on the high seas with surprisingly detailed accounts of a veritable pirate constitutional convention held on Madagascar. “The next day the whole colony was assembled,” Johnson wrote, “and the three commanders proposed a form of a government, as necessary to their conservation . . . They looked upon a democratical form, where the people were themselves the makers and judges of their own laws, the most agreeable . . . The treasure and cattle they were masters of should be equally divided.” Henry Newton had used the Every gang trial to assert a master narrative in which pirates were the enemies of all mankind. But in Johnson’s rendition, the pirates become almost the mirror image: “Marine Heroes, the Scourge of Tyrants and Avarice, and the brave Asserters of Liberty.” As one of the Madagascar settlers describes it, “They were not pirates, but men who were resolved to assert that liberty which God and nature gave them, and own no subjection to any, rather than was for the common good of all . . . [They] were vigilant guardians of the people’s rights and liberties, [who] saw that justice was equally distributed.” According to Johnson’s account, the pirates gave their “democratical” state a name that would echo in the radical imagination back in Europe for years to come: Libertalia.
Every’s crimes on the Indian Ocean ultimately helped define and fortify institutions that would come to dominate the modern world. Thanks to Samuel Annesley’s ingenuity, the Gunsway affair would give the East India Company new powers that would ultimately lead to their imperial rule over the subcontinent; the contretemps with Aurangzeb forced the British government to clarify its long-ambiguous legal attitude toward piracy in international waters. Institutions like central governments or multinational corporations often seem as grand and formidable as the buildings they occupy. But the institutions themselves—and the power they wield—are invariably shaped by smaller conflagrations at their boundaries, defining the limits of their authority. Pirates occupied that role in the 1600s. Yet Every’s story also lit a different fuse: the deeply populist vision of a society where the stratifications of wealth and privilege could be replaced by a much more equitable form of social organization. In time, that vision would lose its association with the sea dogs and the mutineers, and with Henry Every himself; pirates would be domesticated into children’s books and theme park rides. But the pirate collective’s radical dream of economic and political liberation would find new, more reputable vessels in the centuries to come.
To a certain extent, Every and the generation of pirates that followed him were drawn to those still nascent political structures by the intense challenges presented by the ocean itself. In those first centuries of the Age of Exploration, the ocean was a place that demanded constant experimentation. Life at sea is human culture at its most extreme, in one sense. You are surrounded by things that pose existential threats to you, thanks to your biology: water, thirst, starvation. And yet our cultural ingenuity gives us the opportunity to survive in such a hostile environment, even make a living from it. But humans had to invent new tricks to pull off such an impressive feat. Some of those tricks were technological: better maps and compasses and clocks. But some of them were political: new ways of organizing a polity, or distributing wealth.
We should not romanticize the populist strain that runs through Every’s life as a pirate. The pirates helped cultivate a mythos—the underclass that fights its way to a more just society—that would be embraced by political progressives and revolutionaries endlessly over the centuries that followed. But those pirates were also, unquestionably, a gang of xenophobic sexual predators. The pirates tortured other human beings for purely mercenary ends. They burned a mosque as pointless act of retribution. They captured slaves and treated them as a kind of liquid currency instead of as human beings. They spent multiple days on a ship raping religious pilgrims. Karl Marx once said of capitalism that you had to think of it simultaneously as the best thing and the worst thing that had ever happened to human society. To make sense of the pirates—and of Henry Every most of all—we have to adopt a similar split consciousness. They were heroes to the masses. They were the vanguard of a new, more equitable and democratic social order. And they were killers and rapists and thieves, enemies of all mankind.
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THE GUNSWAY CRISIS was ahead of its time in another way: in the asymmetrical relationship between the key actors, and the global scale of the event’s ultimate consequences. One of the most striking things about the story of Every and his crew is the ability of such a small group of humans—working entirely outside the official institutions of power—to trigger events that would be heard around the world. The mix of fear, admiration, and disproportionate influence that Every unleashed on the planet represented a turning point in the evolution of the world system. It’s a script we know by heart in the age of al-Qaeda and ISIS: rogue agents working outside the confines of traditional nation-states, using an act of violence to spark a geopolitical crisis and a global manhunt. But the first drafts of that script were written by Every and his men more than three centuries ago.
That watershed says less about Every himself than it does about the “new world order” that was coming into place in the late 1600s. The events reverberated so extensively not because of the power or cunning of a single individual, but rather because of the complex web of relationships that brought those two ships together that day in September 1695: the wealth of the Grand Mughals, the rising imperial ambitions of the British nation, the emerging importance of the nation-state, the birth of the modern multinational corporation, the increasingly vital networks of global trade, and the challenge to national borders and sovereignty that pirates posed. In a less-interconnected system, two hundred men would have had no way of triggering a truly global crisis with tangible effects on at least three different continents. Henry Every just happened to be one of the first to light up that network, and in lighting it up, Every and his men made it clear just how interdependent the whole system was, how easily it could be disturbed by seemingly minor players. The cannon explosion and the mainmast strike were a preview of Franz Ferdinand in the streets of Sarajevo: a single act of violence that threatens to set the world on fire.
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TWO MONTHS AFTER the execution, James Houblon received his letter from the appalled Philadelphian, griping about the open display of the Every crew in the colonies. The letter is of historical interest in that it shines a light on the lax legal atmosphere for pirates in the colonies at the end of the seventeenth century. But it also illuminates another region on the map of Henry Every’s life. According to the correspondent, Every’s men claimed they “took an Indian princess captive, whom Every spirited away for himself, and left his men with several bags of gold apiece.”
Perhaps these men were posers pretending to be part of Every’s gang to impress the locals, drawing upon thirdhand mythology to make their stories more enticing. But the overheard conversation had to have happened by late 1696, probably within weeks of the November executions at Execution Dock—years before the heroic (and largely fictional) biographies would be published. Had the myth of Every and his Muslim bride already made it to Philadelphia through word-of-mouth channels? Or were those men in the Philadelphia pub telling the honest truth: they had been there in September 1695, off the coast of Surat, and they had seen with their own eyes Bold Captain Every “spirit away” his Indian princess. And if those are the facts, they raise an even more provocative question: Where did the Indian princess go?
Is it conceivable that the mysterious Mrs. Adams could have been the
Indian princess, disguised for some reason for their entry into Ireland? Perhaps Every feared that her association with him—not to mention her ties to Aurangzeb—would make her an additional prize, were the authorities to capture Every himself. And so she took on a new identity, pretending to be his quartermaster’s bride, and even parted ways with Every to keep up the illusion once they’d made it past the landwaiter, then waited until Every sent the signal to return to him.
But for that scenario even to be admissible into evidence, you have to accept at least some of the Van Broeck mythology of Every as the great romancer, which has significant plausibility problems. The princess, in that scenario, would have to be on some level willingly along for the ride, not a captive. Was it possible—given the reality of life circa 1695—for a well-to-do Muslim woman to see a band of pirates as an opportunity, as an escape route from the harem life awaiting her back in Delhi? Is there a more plausible version of Van Broeck’s farcical account, with its instantaneous marriage proposal, where Every and the princess do form some sort of alliance? Perhaps Every’s men do recognize her stature, and bring her to their captain, probably assuming that he will want her as a sexual conquest. It is apparent in the first seconds of the encounter that she belongs to a higher station than Every. She is the sophisticate, not the “noble savage.” Every acknowledges the gap that separates them somehow. Perhaps he even tries to make the encounter into a lesson for his crew, given his well-documented concerns about their dangerous “hunger.” Perhaps he does act with chivalry, as a message to his men. And the princess has her own complaints: she’s a woman with a grandfather who happens to be the most orthodox Muslim in the four-hundred-year reign of the Mughal Dynasty. Perhaps she sees Every and the Fancy as her one chance to break free from her life of pampered oppression, not so much love at first sight as the lesser of two evils. And out of that small initial link a stronger bond is formed. She passes as Mrs. Adams and heads to London to lay low for a few weeks, and then, one day, the letter comes in the post and she catches that stagecoach to be reunited with Every.
The reality is probably much drearier or darker than the fabulist accounts of the pirate king or the great romancer. If the crew of the Fancy did, in fact, present an Indian princess to Every, he may well have “ravished” her in the criminal sense of the word. She would almost certainly not have spoken English, so whatever communication existed between them would have been extremely limited. And even if she had stayed on board the Fancy of her own volition, she might have died on the long voyage to the Bahamas. All we know for certain is the legend that developed around her: the pirate king and his Muslim bride. That legend itself is of historical interest, in the simple but remarkable fact that this rousing tale of a working-class hero—one of the first such tales to be amplified by the popular press—would end with a biracial marriage performed by a Muslim cleric. Today, of course, the idea of a working-class British man marrying a woman born into a well-to-do family from South Asia would be—in most circles—a routine matter, thanks to the global networks that were first coming into being in Every’s time, and to the long battle against racism and religious intolerance that would be fought over the centuries that followed. But in Every’s era, a multicultural romance of that sort was practically unheard of. And so, in the end, given the obscurity of her true biography, the meaning of the Indian princess has less to do with actuality and more to do with aspiration. It may not have been possible, in the last years of the seventeenth century, for a Muslim princess to run away with an English commoner and live happily ever after. But it was possible for an audience of readers to want that outcome, to imagine a world where such an alliance could be celebrated, not shunned.
The details of Henry Every’s life—or at least the two-year stretch of it where he became a pirate—were far better documented than the life of the Indian princess. But the end of his life remains equally mysterious. No plausible evidence suggests that Every made it back to Madagascar, and Libertalia itself appears to have largely been a fantasy, spun by the balladmongers and scribes dreaming of a better way back in class-stratified London. (When Woodes Rogers visited the pirate community on Madagascar in 1710, he found that the population had “dwindled to between 60 and 70, most of them very poor and despicable, even to the Natives, among whom they had married.”) According to Charles Johnson, Every lost most of his fortune trying to launder it through gold dealers shortly after his return. In that version of the story, he died in poverty—and, almost as amazingly, in obscurity—in Devon, twenty years after his return.
But the truth is, no one really knows what happened to Henry Every. He had the full glare of a global spotlight on him for a few years, and somehow he snuck back into the shadows.
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SAMUEL ANNESLEY’S PLAN for a “salt-water faujdar” suffered a few major setbacks in its first years of implementation. One of the first captains hired by the East India Company to protect the Mughal fleet turned out to be William Kidd, who set off for the Indian Ocean in 1696 in a brand-new, thirty-four-gun ship, the Adventure Galley. Kidd’s official mission turned out to be more challenging that he had originally anticipated, and he soon converted to piracy himself, at one point capturing an Indian Armenian ship called the Quedagh Merchant, provoking almost as much outrage as the Gunsway affair. Kidd proved to be less skillful at evading capture than Henry Every, however; he was arrested in Boston several years later and ultimately sent back to England for trial. He was hung at Execution Dock in May 1701, five years after the Every gang met the same fate.
Kidd is generally considered the last of the “Red Sea Men”; with Mughal and merchant ships under increasingly effective protection from the English faudjar, the pirates shifted focus to the Caribbean and left India to the legitimate traders. (Young Philip Middleton, who had testified against his former mates in the Old Bailey trial, became one of those traders, working for the East India Company in Bengal.) In the decades that followed, the military force that Annesley had first imagined while chained in irons in the Surat factory grew increasingly central to the company’s presence in India. By the 1750s, the company maintained a small army of three thousand troops on the subcontinent; by the 1800s, they would number in the hundreds of thousands.
Aurangzeb would go on to outlive many of his descendants, dying in 1707 at the age of eighty-nine. In his final years, the Universe Conqueror sensed that the Mughal dynasty was on unstable ground. “After me, chaos,” he is said to have predicted. It turned out to be an accurate forecast. For fifty years after his death, the Indian state was characterized by a “a string of weak emperors, wars of succession, and coups by noblemen.” All the while, the East India Company consolidated its power over the region, culminating in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, after which the corporation assumed official control of the subcontinent, an administrative reign that would last for a hundred years.
If Samuel Annesley had played an important role in that rise to power, his contributions were hardly recognized by the company he had spent the first few decades of his adult life serving. Shortly after the Every affair, he was fired for allegedly mismanaging the accounts at the Surat factory. He remained in Surat as a private trader, with varying success, and lived until the then-impressive age of seventy-seven. Near the end of his life, he fell on hard times and began plotting a return to England. “Such a continual succession of troubles in an unhealthy climate,” he wrote in a letter, “makes me rather desirous of a quiet retreat in my native country than to continue any longer in India.” But it was too late to arrange the voyage back. He died in Surat in 1732. After his initial voyage to India at the age of nineteen, Annesley never saw England again.
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DID HENRY NEWTON’S MASTER narrative—England’s formal renunciation of piracy—ultimately win out, despite the disaster of the first Every trial? In the long run, yes. Every certainly inspired the Golden Age pirates that terrorized the Caribbean in t
he early 1700s, but from the Old Bailey trial on, the British government adopted a unified front about the legal status of the pirates. Newton’s opening line from the first trial—“Suffer pirates, and the commerce of the world must cease”—became a core principle. John Gayer’s pleas from Bombay Castle were turned into official state policy. The East India Company’s trade with the Mughal empire and the merchants of Surat recovered, particularly after the execution of William Kidd. With East Indiamen patrolling the waters, Red Sea piracy declined, and the pilgrim ships once again made their journey to the hajj unmolested. England—and her colonies—slowly shed their reputation as a nation of pirates.
In March 1701, King William III released a “Proclamation for the Apprehension Of Pirates,” reiterating the firm antipiracy position they had attempted to dramatize with the Old Bailey trial and borrowing some of the techniques that they had used in the initial bounty that had been put on Every’s head. Any pirates who turned against their former shipmates and reported them to the authorities would “receive our Most Gracious Pardon for the Piracies before that committed by him”—along with a third of any treasure seized by the state based on their information. Any British subject living outside the law as a pirate could receive full clemency—and a meaningful reward—by turning in one of his fellow criminals.
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