East London
August 1693
If Henry Every spent his childhood living in fear of being abducted into slavery by Barbary pirates, the experience seems to have not had much of an influence on his subsequent ethical feelings about the institution of slavery itself. The first clear reference to Every in the historical record—after his Royal Navy engagement as a young man—comes from an agent of the Royal Africa Company (RAC), Thomas Phillips, who reported in 1693 that Every had taken up a career as a slave trader, working for the governor of Bermuda. At the time, the RAC claimed a monopoly on all English slave trade in the region. British history often conveniently neglects the sheer scale of the company’s involvement in the slave trade during this period, focusing instead on the fact that slavery was largely abolished in England itself—if not in her colonies—by the late 1700s. But as the historian David Olusoga observes, “the Royal African Company transported more Africans into slavery than any other British company in the whole history of the Atlantic slave trade . . . around a hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children passed through the company’s coastal fortresses on their way to lives of miserable slavery.” According to the RAC agent Phillips, Henry Every had built a career for himself in the early 1690s as an interloper, working outside the official monopoly of the RAC, sometimes capturing the English traders themselves along with their African captives. Typically for Every, even Phillips’s unmistakable reference contained two aliases for the man. “I have nowhere met the negroes so shy as here,” the agent wrote, “which makes me fancy they have had tricks played on them by such blades as Long Ben, alias Every, who have seized them and carried them away.”
But Every would not truly enter the main stage of history until the following year. An affluent investor and MP named James Houblon had gathered a group of relatives and tradesmen in London to fund a new speculative venture. One of twelve children, Houblon was a member of a prestigious London family with extensive ties to the East India Company; his brother John would be the first governor of the Bank of England. (His portrait appeared on a £50 note issued during the 1990s.) The enterprise—which went under the name Spanish Expedition Shipping—planned to assemble a squadron of ships loaded with guns and cannon, which would then set sail for the West Indies, trading some of the arms to the Spaniards there. Houblon had made a small fortune importing Spanish wines and other foodstuffs, and he had used his connections with Madrid to secure a trading and salvage license from Carlos II. The Spanish Expedition would make its real money, Houblon and his investors believed, by salvaging treasure from sunken Spanish galleons in the Caribbean. Led by an Irish admiral named Don Arturo O’Byrne, the fleet consisted of four vessels: the James, the Dove, the Seventh Son, and the flagship, a sleek newly constructed forty-six-gun “ship of force” named the Charles II.
Houblon had commissioned the Charles II specifically for the Spanish Expedition, the ship constructed in the East London dockyards near where the East India Company built its own vessels. In addition to the extensive armaments onboard the ship, the Charles II was uncommonly fast and agile. Documents that survive from the period suggest that Houblon was particularly enamored of the ship. He called her a “great merchant-man . . . a stout frigate of forty guns and an extraordinary sailer.” Houblon and the other investors had gone to the expense of building such an intimidating flagship so that the squadron could defend itself against any would-be attackers off the coast of Spain or in the West Indies. Just a year earlier, John Houblon had written an impassioned note to the Board of Trade, begging for a convoy of men-of-war to accompany his merchant ships returning from Lisbon. More than a dozen Barbary pirate ships were prowling the coast, he warned, and “French privateers off of the coast of Portugal intercept[ed] and [took] several English and Irish ships.” Several months later, James Houblon sounded a similar note in a petition to the Privy Council, asking for naval support for ships he had dispatched to trade with Spain. “The ships will be very richly loaden with Spanish wooll and [considerable monies], and other rich comodityes,” he wrote. “Wherefore they humbly pray you Lords be pleased to order a speedy convoy to fetch home the said ships, suitable to the richness of the fleete and the Danger they will run.” By investing up front in their “stout frigate of forty guns,” Houblon and the other Spanish Expedition investors would no longer need to plead for help from the Privy Council. The Charles II could outrun whatever danger it might encounter on its journey.
Houblon and his fellow investors recruited their crew by promising regular wages, with a month’s advance paid up front on signing up for the expedition—a far more generous deal than anything the Royal Navy would have offered. Because the Spanish Expedition would quickly prove to be an utter failure—at least in terms of its initial objectives—the venture ultimately triggered a number of lawsuits that give us a documentary record of the financial package granted to some of the crew. One high-ranking sailor on the Dove was offered four pounds, ten shillings per month, with a total package of £82—roughly the equivalent of $20,000 in today’s currency—for the entire voyage. With such well-heeled backers, the food and grog aboard the ship promised to far exceed what you would have found in the mess of a Royal Navy ship (at least for the ordinary seamen on board). Prospective crew would no doubt have expected to supplement their wages with some of the eventual plunder, making the whole proposition even more enticing.
In August 1693, Houblon paid a personal visit to the squadron as it took on provisions while anchored on the Thames. Houblon promised that the families of the crew would be compensated during their long journey, and wished them bon voyage. Shortly thereafter, the four ships raised anchor and began sailing toward the mouth of the Thames and out onto the open sea.
Roughly two hundred men were aboard the four vessels. The fleet was notable for the experience of its officer class. John Knight, captain of the Dove, was reputed to be a “sober, diligent, and knowing man” who had already commanded a number of ships in voyages to the West Indies. The pilot aboard the Charles II was a veteran Spanish navigator named Andres Garsia Cassada. The original captain of the Charles II was John Strong, who had led a successful salvage operation off the coast of modern-day Haiti several years before. But Strong would die early in the voyage, replaced by an alcoholic mariner by the name of Charles Gibson.
Below the officer class, the biographical details get blurrier. There was Thomas Druit, first mate of the James; Joseph Gravet and David Creagh, second mates on the Charles, along with Henry Adams, who would ultimately be promoted to quartermaster on the ship. The steward on board the James was a fifty-year-old sailor named William May, a “very sickly man,” by his own account, who had served his “King and Country for thirty years.” Also aboard was forty-nine-year-old coxswain John Dann, originally from Rochester, along with a forty-five-year-old sailor from Newcastle upon Tyne named Edward Forsyth. At the other end of the generational spectrum were an ambitious but unseasoned young sailor in his early teens named Philip Middleton, a seventeen-year-old Londoner named John Sparkes, and William Bishop, an eighteen-year-old sailor on his first voyage at sea, who later claimed to have been forced into service on the James against his will.
One of the most intriguing characters to sign up for the Spanish Expedition was the second mate of the Dove, a veteran seaman and scientist named William Dampier. In his early forties, Dampier had already circumnavigated the globe once, in a rambling series of voyages that lasted almost the entire decade of the 1680s. (He would go on to become the first man in history to circumnavigate the earth three times.) A few years after the Spanish Expedition’s spectacular demise, Dampier published a memoir of his travels called A New Voyage Round the World. While the book was surprisingly silent about Dampier’s connection with the Charles II—at the time, the subject of much speculation in the popular press—the book went on to be a bestseller, and helped inaugurate a tradition of travel writing that would become one of the eighteenth century’s most popular nonfiction genres. Novelists, as well, were deeply influenced by Dampier’s tales: both Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels drew heavily from A New Voyage Round the World.
The travelogues so impressed the admiralty that Dampier was ultimately granted command of a warship, HMS Roebuck, on which he made a historic voyage to Australia, where he documented the continent’s unique flora and fauna. His botanical studies—as well as pioneering work that he produced on the connection between trade winds, tides, and ocean currents—made him a role model for Charles Darwin, who read extensively from Dampier’s travel narratives and naturalist studies during the voyage of the Beagle. Today, a portrait of William Dampier hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The fact that Dampier was so circumspect about his time aboard the Charles II—in books that otherwise documented his travels in exhaustive detail—was likely a strategic move. Throughout his career, Dampier operated at the blurred boundaries between pirate and privateer, maintaining a level of legitimacy that would keep him in good graces with the Royal Society and the British Admiralty. An association with the Charles II threatened to undermine that delicate positioning, thanks to another crew member who had joined the Spanish Expedition, one whose fame would for a time far eclipse that of William Dampier: the first mate of the Charles II, Henry Every.
Every was likely in his late thirties, tall and in impressive physical condition. He had striking gray eyes and wore a “light coloured Wigg,” according to one of his shipmates. He was embarking on what must have seemed at the time to be a promising but not particularly exceptional voyage. He would have had at least a dozen comparable expeditions under his belt at that point in his life. Did First Mate Every have an inkling, standing on the deck as the Charles II made its way down the Thames, that this mission might mark the turning point in his life? On that question, as on so many questions about young Henry Every’s life, the historical record is silent. But one fact is clear: Every would end the journey with an elevated rank, from first mate to captain, from an anonymous sailor to the world’s most notorious criminal.
For five other members of Spanish Expedition Shipping, the voyage would end with a different kind of elevation: hanging from a noose at Execution Dock.