Henry Every and the Ganj-i-Sawai

The case

The last firm sighting of Henry Every is in Ireland in the summer of 1696, where he came ashore from a sloop with a few companions and a quantity of gold and jewels. After that he disappears. He was the most wanted man in the English-speaking world, with a reward of £1,000 on his head offered jointly by the Crown and the East India Company, and he was never found.

Every was a Devon seaman, probably born in 1659, with a background in the navy and the slave trade. In 1694 he was first mate of the Charles II, one of several English ships hired to serve Spain against French smugglers in the Caribbean. The squadron spent months idle at Corunna in northern Spain. The men's wages went unpaid and the promised Spanish commission did not arrive. On the night of 7 May 1694 Every and about two dozen others seized the ship while her captain lay ill, gave those who would not join them the chance to go ashore, and sailed out of the harbour.

They renamed her the Fancy and went south, raiding along the African coast and rounding the Cape into the Indian Ocean. At the island of Johanna in the Comoros in February 1695, Every wrote an open letter to English captains insisting he had harmed no English or Dutch ship and proposing a recognition signal. His real target lay further north: the annual fleet that carried pilgrims and trade between the Red Sea ports and Surat, the main port of the Mughal empire.

In August 1695 the Fancy joined several other pirate ships at the mouth of the Red Sea, among them Thomas Tew's Amity, and Every was chosen to lead them. The convoy slipped past in the dark, but the pirates gave chase. They first took the Fateh Muhammed, a large vessel belonging to a leading Surat merchant. Then, on 7 September, they caught the Ganj-i-Sawai, the emperor Aurangzeb's own ship, a huge vessel returning from Mocha with pilgrims, officials and treasure.

The Ganj-i-Sawai should have been able to defend herself. She carried dozens of guns and hundreds of armed men. But one of her own heavy guns exploded as the Fancy closed, killing many of the defenders and spreading fire and panic, and the pirates boarded and fought for two or three hours before she fell. What followed is described in Indian and East India Company sources as days of torture, rape and killing, as the pirates searched for valuables and assaulted women among the passengers. One of the pirates later spoke at his execution of barbarities he had committed. The loot ran to hundreds of thousands of pounds in gold, silver and jewels.

The consequences fell on other Englishmen. In Surat, crowds turned on the East India Company's people, and the Mughal governor confined them. Aurangzeb shut several Company trading posts and threatened to end English trade in India altogether. The Company agreed to compensate the losses, and in England the government declared Every and his crew enemies of all mankind and launched what has been called the first worldwide manhunt.

Every took the Fancy across to the Bahamas, where the governor of New Providence, Nicholas Trott, let in a captain calling himself Henry Bridgeman after a substantial bribe. The crew then scattered: some to the American colonies, others to Britain and Ireland. Two dozen were eventually caught. Every was not one of them.