Surat, India
May 1695
As the crew of the Fancy careened their vessel on the shores of Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, in the harbor at Surat, another ship was taking on provisions for a different kind of voyage. This ship was a ghanjah dhow, or wooden trading vessel, owned by the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb himself. A visitor surveying the Surat harbor skyline from the other side of the Tapti River would have been able to make out the ship easily from a distance, a giant looming over the galleys and East Indiamen anchored along the banks of the river. At 1,500 tons, with enough room on board to accommodate over a thousand passengers, she was almost certainly one of the largest ships in the world at the time. Aurangzeb had given her the name Ganj-i-Sawai, Persian for “exceeding treasure.” In the news reports and court trials and popular lore that circulated through the English-speaking world, the ship’s name would be anglicized into a simpler form: the Gunsway.
The Gunsway was based out of Surat, along with four smaller vessels belonging to the Grand Mughal that often sailed alongside her. Aurangzeb had commissioned the ships for an explicit purpose: to transport dignitaries—some of them members of his immediate family—to Mecca for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to the holy lands at the base of the Asir Mountains, east of the Red Sea. Along the way, the Gunsway and her escort would stop over at the trading port of Mocha, near the mouth of the Red Sea in modern-day Yemen. With the newfound craze for coffee raging across the capitals of Europe, Mocha enjoyed a flourishing economy as one of the central nodes in the international coffee trade. (Modern consumers savoring their Mocha Frappuccinos at Starbucks pay a distant tribute to the city with each order.) The coffee beans attracted traders specializing in other goods as well, giving Aurangzeb an additional commercial incentive to send the Gunsway on the pilgrimage—a fitting mix of business and piety for a religion that had been founded by a trader a thousand years before.
The manifest for the Gunsway would have been an formidable document. The ship’s hull was loaded with calico textiles, fine porcelain, ivory ornaments, and other valuables. Along with the food required to keep pilgrims and crew alive, the Gunsway carried barrels of spices to trade in Mocha, predominantly peppercorns. The contemporary mind might find something amusing in the idea of a treasure ship weighted down with a condiment that is now so cheap that we give it away for free at restaurants, but in the seventeenth century, pepper was still one of the most highly sought-after luxury goods in the world. Its price had declined from its peak in the Middle Ages, when peppercorns were often worth significantly more than their weight in gold, but even with the decline the pepper barrels could be traded for a fortune at Mocha. Eighty cannons lined the main deck, manned by more than four hundred soldiers, protecting both the treasure and the eight hundred pilgrims on board.
Making the pilgrimage to Mecca during the hajj constitutes one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. (The others are professing faith in the one God and Muhammad as his prophet, prayer performed five times a day, charitable giving, and fasting during Ramadan.) Observant Muslims must participate in the hajj at least once in their lifetime, during the final month of the Islamic calendar. Today, Mecca is a Saudi city with roughly two million inhabitants that, amazingly, triples in size during the hajj. The influx of pilgrims each year is the single largest annual migration of human beings on Earth. (Far more people travel annually during Chinese New Year, but they are distributed in rural regions across China, not converging on a single destination as they do in the hajj.) Each year, the Saudis erect an immense pop-up city outside Mecca consisting of 160,000 air-conditioned fiberglass tents, each housing fifty pilgrims, a desert settlement that makes the temporary housing of Burning Man look like a shantytown.
Because the Islamic calendar follows a lunar cycle, each Islamic year is approximately eleven days shorter than a year following the Gregorian calendar, which means that the actual timing of the hajj shifts backward from year to year. Measured by a Western calendar, a hajj that begins January 1 would be followed the next year by one that commences on December 20. In 1695, the last month of the Islamic calendar corresponded to July on the Gregorian calendar, which meant that the voyage from Surat to Mecca—roughly the same distance as sailing from Istanbul to Gibraltar—would need to begin in late spring to give the traders on board sufficient time to do business in Mocha and other port cities along the way.
The tradition of the hajj dates back to Muhammad’s conquering of Mecca in 629 CE, during which he destroyed pagan icons in an ancient granite temple known as the Kaaba, declaring “Truth has come and Falsehood has Vanished.” After reconsecrating the building as a shrine to Allah, Muhammad then led a pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca in 632, where he delivered his farewell sermon. But the religious significance of the site predates Islam. According to the Quran, the Old Testament figure of Abraham (also considered a prophet in the Islamic tradition) is commanded by God to take his child Ismail (Ishmael in the Old Testament) and his wife Hagar out to a bleak patch of desert that marks the site of modern-day Mecca and leave them there to die of thirst, as a test of his faith. After days of intense suffering, a well miraculously appears in the arid landscape, saving mother and child at the last minute.
If you are a religious person—regardless of your faith—the long chain of influence generated by that experience in the desert five thousand years ago makes a certain kind of sense, no matter what God you happened to worship. When a supreme being has direct contact with a mortal, it makes sense that ripples would continue to spiral out from that encounter fifty generations later. But if you don’t believe in supreme beings, the chain of influence is baffling. Someone has a dream in the desert of a divine presence who commands him to murder his wife and child, and seven thousand years later, six million people travel to the foothills of a desert mountain range once a year to visit the place where it all happened. There are very few echoes in the cathedral of history that have reverberated for so long with such faint origins.
The emergence of pilgrimages as a mass ritual—Muslim or otherwise—marked a watershed in the lived experiences of ordinary people. In an age before tourism, pilgrimages introduced long-distance travel to millions of human beings who would otherwise have spent their entire lives on a much smaller patch of land. By 1695, the hajj had grown into one of the planet’s great melting pots, creating a shared space where North Africans, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians could converge for one month out of the year. They were there to pray, but they were also there for something else, something we would now call the scene. Some of the richest people in the world took months out of their calendar to journey up or down the Red Sea to pray in front of the Kaaba; many of them planned their entire year around the journey, the way so many of us today plan our calendars around summer vacation. The grandeur of the Gunsway was not simply an attempt to create a luxurious cruising vessel for the Grand Mughal’s inner circle. It was also a statement to the world, like a billion-dollar luxury yacht that pulls into harbor for a revival meeting, a way of broadcasting the scale of the Universe Conqueror’s fortune to other pilgrims who would never visit the sublime architecture of Agra or see the Peacock Throne in Delhi.
Of course, transporting all that wealth to a city thousands of miles away in a foreign nation made the ship supremely vulnerable. The eighty guns and four hundred soldiers aboard the Gunsway were there for a reason. But the risk was compounded by the geography of the region. The Red Sea empties out into the Gulf of Aden through a narrow strait just twenty miles wide called the Bab-el-Mandeb. Because the Suez Canal was still centuries away, in 1695 any vessel making the pilgrimage to Mecca—or trading with the port cities of the Red Sea—needed to pass through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden before entering the wider expanse of the Arabian Sea. In modern times, the immense wealth that passes through those straits takes the form of oil, loaded up in the refineries that line the Red Sea. In 1695 the wealth had a different manifestation: jewels, spices, gold, cotton. But then, as now, the bottleneck of the Bab-el-Mandeb made the region uniquely suited for piracy. It is no accident that the Somali pirates, the most notorious of the twenty-first century, operate out of the exact same waters.
Everything that made the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden such an advantageous route for traders also made it a hunting ground.