Henry Avery, The Pirate King

No pirate was ever so well known in his day as Captain Avery of the Fancy, who has been the inspiration for many pirate myths and characters. Operating in the last years of the 17th Century, Avery and his fleet terrorised the Atlantic and Indian oceans until 1696, and became the focus of the world's first global manhunt.As always with pirates, little is known of their early life, but what is known of Avery is he was born  near Plymouth on the 23rd of August, 1659. He served in the Royal Navy during the Nine Year's War, and afterwards became a slave trader off the African coast. In 1693 he became a mariner again, as first mate on the Spanish warship of forty-six guns, the Charles II. But after the ship's owners failed to pay their wages, so on the evening of the 7th of May, 1694, Avery led a mutiny against the captain, put him ashore with five or six loyalists, and sailed the ship for the Indian Ocean to begin their pirate career.

Henry Avery, the Pirate King

In 1695, The Fancy sailed to the Arabian Sea, where a 25-ship convoy of Grand Mughal vessels was making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, including the treasure-laden flagship Ganj-i-sawai and its escort, the Fateh Muhammed. Avery joined forces with several other pirate vessels, and found himself in command of a small pirate squadron, including a sloop captained by English pirate Thomas Tew. As the pirates gave chase, the smaller vessels in the squadron gradually fell behind, and at some point Tew was killed in an engagement with a Mughal ship. Avery had more success, and captured the escort ship the Fateh Muhammed and then the Ganj-i-sawai, having broken the ship's mast in a broadside. The bloody hand-to-hand battle on deck waged for several hours. The pirates took heavy losses but the spoils were astronomical. Avery had captured up to £600,000 in precious metals and jewels, making him the richest pirate in the world, equivalent to around £52.4 million in present day money. Avery and his crew then tortured and killed a great number of the passengers and raped women of all ages. Some women stabbed themselves with daggers or jumped overboard, committing suicide to escape this fate.The plunder of Emperor Aurangzeb's treasure ship had serious consequences for England, with Avery's attack damaging relations so terribly that the very existence of English trade in India was threatened. When the damaged Ganj-i-sawai finally limped its way back to harbour in Surat, news of the pirates' rape of the Muslim women was considered an unforgivable violation of the Hajj. The local Indian governor, Itimad Khan, immediately arrested the English subjects in Surat and kept them under close watch, partly as a punishment for their countrymen's depredations and partly for their own protection from the rioting locals. Aurangzeb was livid, and quickly closed four of the company's factories in India and imprisoned the officers, nearly ordering an armed attack against the English city of Bombay with the goal of forever expelling the English from India.
To appease Aurangzeb, the East India Company promised to pay all financial reparations, while Parliament declared the pirates hostis humani generis ("enemies of the human race"). In mid-1696 the government issued a £500 bounty on Avery's head and offered a free pardon to any informer who disclosed his whereabouts. When the East India Company later doubled that reward, the first worldwide manhunt in recorded history was underway. The Crown also promised to exempt Avery from all pardons and amnesties it would subsequently issue to other pirates. 
Avery meanwhile sailed to New Providence, and under the name of Henry Bridgeman and claiming to be an unlicensed slave trader, offered the Governor £860 to let them stay and not ask questions. New Providence was underfunded and underpopulated, and at serious risk of French attack, and so the Governor agreed. As the manhunt for Avery escalated, the Governor by now having realised who he was, covered for him in exchange for the Fancy, as well as fifty tons of ivory tusks, one hundred barrels of gunpowder, several chests of firearms and ammunition, and an assortment of ship anchors. As the heat mounted, and the governor himself coming under suspicion, he had the Fancy destroyed to remove the key piece of evidence that Avery was in his town.
Regardless the Governor was forced to either put a warrant out for Every's arrest or, failing to do so, effectively disclose his association with the pirate. Preferring the former choice for the sake of his reputation, he alerted the authorities as to pirates' whereabouts, but was able to tip off Avery and his crew before the authorities arrived. Avery's 113-person crew then fashioned their hasty escape, vanishing from the island with only twenty-four men ever captured, six of whom were executed. His last words to his men were a litany of conflicting stories of where he planned to go, doubtless intended to throw pursuers off his trail.

Avery's crew split up, while Avery was spotted in Dublin harbour in June 1696, with about twenty other men in the sloop Sea Flower. They aroused suspicions while unloading their treasure, and two of the men were subsequently caught. Avery, however, was able to escape once again. His fate after this encounter is unknown.

Madagascar

Piracy around Africa has always been (and to some extent, still is) rife. Largely a site for slave trading, between 1680 and 1725 Madagascar was a bona fide pirate stronghold. This was not as long-lived as the piracy of the West Indies, but it was far more lucrative, not to mention barbarous. While the pirates of the West Indies were concentrating on looting coastal towns and raiding bulky Spanish treasure ships, others looked to the glittering riches of the East for their plunder, and the small, awkwardly defended two-masted grabs and gallivats of the Mogul and Arab fleets. While piracy continued in these waters throughout the 17th century, it was not until the last decade that the English government became concerned. Lord Bellomont, who was then governor of New York and New England, wrote to the Lords of the Admiralty in 1699:

"The vast riches of the Red Sea and Madagascar are such a lure to seamen that almost no withholding them from turning pirates."

Many famous buccaneers operated out of Madagascar, not least the legendary William Kidd, who was a privateer turned pirate, put on trial and hanged in 1701. Kidd's turn to piracy was as a conclusion of the war with the Spanish, and as Defoe puts it in his history, 'Privateers in Time of War are a Nursery for Pyrates against a Peace.' Kidd's trial helped to stoke the myth of a flourishing pirate commonwealth in a tropical paradise with vast holdings of gold and jewels, which, for a pardon, pirates seemed willing to share with the depleting English Exchequer. Henry Every was one of the most successful pirates in history (more on him later) who managed to buy his pardon with a sum greater than the national debt.

A map of Madagascar, circa 1702-1707

Pirates around Madagascar plundered merchant ships in the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. They deprived Europe-bound ships of their silks, cloth, spices, and jewels. Vessels captured going in the opposite direction (to India) lost their coin, gold, and silver. The pirates robbed the Indian cargo ships that traded between ports in the Indian Ocean as well as ships commissioned by the East India Companies of France, England, and the Netherlands. As late as 1721, British and colonial ships were still supplying these Madagascar pirates with stores and ammunition, in exchange for slaves which were sold in the West Indies.

The seas around Madagascar were treacherous, and many ships were wrecked on its shore. While there were English and French colonies on Madagascar at the time, the island is covered in jungle and three times the size of Great Britain, making it difficult for shipwrecked sailors to locate them. Added to this, was the peril of hostile natives. 

Robert Drury

Robert Drury was one unfortunate lad who, aged 14, was part of a slaver ship called the Degrave. The ship ran aground off the southern coast of Madagascar in 1701 and the crew were forced to abandon her, and were taken prisoner by the king of a native clan. The crew attempted escape but failed, and most were cut to pieces, except for Drury and a couple of other youths. Drury was a slave to the natives for 10 years, eventually becoming the king's royal butcher. During a war with a neighbouring kingdom, an emissary came to speak to the king who was Drury's master. The emissary also spoke privately to Drury, and told him if he managed to escape to the west coast, his people would help him onto the first British ship they saw. Drury did escape, and followed the Olinahy river to St Augustine bay on the west coast. There Drury found a community of stowaways and other European cast-offs living under the local clan, and eventually, through his new European friends, news would return to his father who asked a certain Captain Mackett to go to the coast to have him returned to England on his ship, the Masselage. Drury returned to England on September 9th, 1717. Upon his return, Drury published his journal, and gave one of the earliest exploratory accounts of southern Madagascar. He would return to Madagascar again to become a slave trader and pirate. 

Drury's description of the geography of southern Madagascar was held with some scrutiny. In Defoe's history, he writes: 

'It must be observed, that our speculative Mathematicians and Geographers, who are, no doubt, Men of the greatest Learning, seldom travel farther than their Closets for their Knowledge, &c. are therefore unqualify'd to give us a good Description of Countries: it is for this Reason that all our Maps and Atlasses are so monstrously faulty, for these Gentlemen are obliged to take their Accounts from the Reports of illiterate Men.'

Thanks for reading folks, see you next Wendesday for more pirate fact fun! - Captain