Henry Every

Overview

Henry Every — called “Long Ben” by his crew and remembered in the broadside ballads of his own time as “the Arch-Pirate” — was an English pirate whose two-year career in 1694–1696 was brief, prolific, and historically pivotal. His September 1695 capture of the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai in the Indian Ocean produced the richest single prize on record up to that point and triggered a crisis in Mughal-English diplomatic relations that nearly broke the East India Company. Every then dispersed his crew, distributed the proceeds, and disappeared. He was never captured.

Origins

Every was born around 1659 in or near Plymouth, Devon. He served in the Royal Navy through the 1680s — his name appears on muster rolls of HMS Resolution, HMS Edgar, and HMS Albemarle — and was reportedly a midshipman during the 1671 raid on Algiers. By 1693 he was first mate of the Charles II, an English privateer fitted out at Bristol under a Spanish commission for service in the Caribbean against French shipping. The expedition was poorly funded; the crew went unpaid through eight months of refit at La Coruña in northwest Spain; in May 1694 Every led a mutiny, seized the ship, sailed her out of harbour, and renamed her the Fancy.

Career

The Fancy cruised down the African coast through 1694 and rounded the Cape into the Indian Ocean by early 1695. Every made for Madagascar, then a recognised pirate haven, and joined the small loose fleet of European pirates operating against the seasonal Mughal pilgrim convoys that crossed the Arabian Sea between Surat and Mocha for the Mecca pilgrimage and the return voyage with the trade goods of the haj.

In September 1695 Every and a small consort fleet engaged the Mughal convoy returning from Mocha. The principal prizes were the Fateh Muhammed, taken first, and the much larger Ganj-i-Sawai (“Exceeding Treasure”) — the personal ship of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, mounting eighty guns and carrying some pilgrims of the Mughal court along with the season’s accumulated trade revenue from the Red Sea. After a two-hour exchange of fire, in which a Mughal gun burst killing its own crew and disabling the ship’s defence, the Ganj-i-Sawai was boarded.

The aftermath was atrocious: the pirate crew tortured and raped passengers and crew, including (according to East India Company correspondence) several women of the Mughal court, before plundering the ship over the following days. The take was variously estimated at £325,000 to £600,000 in jewels, gold, and silver — per-share returns of perhaps £1,000 per man, an enormous sum at a time when an English seaman earned about £20 a year.

The diplomatic consequences were severe. Aurangzeb arrested every East India Company factor at Surat and closed the Company’s operations at the principal Indian ports; the Company faced collapse. Parliament passed a series of resolutions denouncing piracy and proclaimed the first international bounty on a pirate — £500 from the Crown, doubled by the Company — against Every.

Notable raids & captures

Treasures

Documented

• The <em>Ganj-i-Sawai</em> prize, September 1695

  Variously estimated at \xC2\xA3325,000 to \xC2\xA3600,000 in jewels, gold, and silver — per-share returns of approximately \xC2\xA31,000 per man among the 150-odd crew. The richest single prize on record up to that point. The eventual disposition of Every’s own share is unknown.

Fate

Every made for the Bahamas, where he bribed Governor Nicholas Trott of New Providence with £1,000 worth of ivory tusks and gold for the right to come ashore and disperse the crew. From there the company split up. Some sailed for Ireland and landed at Dunfanaghy in Donegal in June 1696; six of them were tried at the Old Bailey in October 1696 and hanged at Execution Dock in London on 25 November 1696. Every himself dispersed his share into smaller portions and disappeared. He is variously reported to have died in Devon, in Ireland, or in Madagascar, but no account of his subsequent life is corroborated, and the bounty was never claimed.

Legacy

Every’s career marks the moment at which piracy became an international diplomatic problem — the existing legal and administrative machinery for handling individual pirate trials proving wholly inadequate to a case in which one captain’s actions threatened the East India Company’s entire Indian operation. The case prompted the 1700 Piracy Act, the establishment of the colonial Admiralty courts, and the long-running campaign of Royal Navy suppression that effectively closed Madagascar as a pirate haven by 1720.

Every was the first pirate to become a celebrity in his own time; his story was the subject of broadside ballads and a London stage play (The Successful Pyrate, first performed 1712, published 1713) within fifteen years of his disappearance.