The Gulf of Aden
Spring 1695
The charms of Madagascar were not generally apparent to the first generations of Europeans to visit the island. One observer described the place as “Swarms of Locusts on the Land, and Crocodiles or Alligators in their Rivers.” In 1641 an Englishman named Walter Hamond became so enamored with the island and its native Malagasy people (he wrote a pamphlet calling them “happiest people alive”) that he led a group of English Puritans to build a community at Saint-Augustin Bay—the Indian Ocean version of the Mayflower Puritans who had helped settle Massachusetts two decades earlier. Hamond inaugurated what would prove to be an enduring literary tradition of Europeans spinning elaborate fantasies of an island utopia off the eastern shore of Africa, a tradition that Every would play a central role in as well. In one of his missives, Hamond called Madagascar the “richest and most fruitful island in the world.” It is unclear how many of his fellow settlers shared his opinion. The colony had disintegrated by 1646.
Other Europeans tried to get a foothold in the years that followed. The French established Fort Dauphin to the east of Hamond’s settlement. The Portuguese extracted slave labor from the native populations where they could. But the island retained its autonomy, along with a certain reputation for lawlessness. By the time Henry Every arrived there in the early months of 1695, Madagascar was a pirate’s den.
At Saint-Augustin Bay, and in other secluded harbors to the north, the crew of the Fancy enjoyed a productive idyll as they prepared for their Red Sea assault. It is unclear whether Every was aware of the exact timing of the hajj that year, or whether he simply knew that the western monsoon winds of late summer were likely to generate a significant amount of shipping traffic in the Gulf of Aden in August. Either way, he seems to have recognized that the most propitious time for an attack would not arrive until summer. Biding their time, the crew careened the Fancy again. They savored the Danish brandy they had pilfered back on Cape Verde. They traded a few guns and some gunpowder to the Malagasy for a hundred head of cattle, and spent most of March feasting on roast beef. By late spring, they had sailed for the Comoro Islands, where they enticed another forty men from a French ship to join their number. (After plundering the French ship for rice, they sunk it in the harbor, which may have made their case slightly more persuasive.) The pirates also bartered for hogs and vegetables, before escaping to sea after three East India Company ships appeared on the horizon.
With more than 150 men under his command, and the summer months rapidly approaching, Every decided it was at last time to execute the plan he had been mulling over since those long days and nights in the A Coruña harbor. The Fancy sailed along the coast of modern-day Somalia, headed toward the Gulf of Aden. Stopping over in a town the pirates called Meat—in actuality, Maydh—their efforts at trading were rebuffed by the local Muslim community. “The people would not trade with us,” the ship’s coxswain John Dann would later say of the town, “and we burnt it.” According to some accounts, the pirates went so far as to plant gunpowder beneath the local mosque, demolishing it as an act of revenge.
That demolition raises an interesting question: To what extent were Every and his men animated by the fact that they had set their sights on a target that was specifically Muslim—those “Moor” ships making their annual pilgrimage? Was their mercenary desire for treasure enhanced (or legitimized) by the idea they were also going to be waging war on the infidels? Certainly they would have described themselves as “anti-Muslim,” if you had asked them. But was that a core faith, or just a convenient one?
It is difficult to say from such a distance. On the one hand, the crimes Every’s men would later commit on board one of those Moorish ships were horrendous ones, ones they might well have refrained from had they captured a ship populated by Christians. But the fact that they were targeting Muslim vessels in the first place had an obvious financial justification. To paraphrase the classic Willie Sutton line about bank robbery, the Muslim ships were where the money was.
But the mosque at Maydh was different. There was nothing to be gained by destroying it. Yes, as pirates, you might resort to violence (or the threat of it) to coerce a town that refused to trade with you to hand over whatever you had hoped to barter for. But going out of your way to plant explosives beneath a mosque suggests a deeper level of contempt. It seems likely that at least a few of the key men on board the Fancy—if not Every himself—harbored actively anti-Islamic views.
Entering the Gulf of Aden, it quickly became apparent that Every was not alone in his scheme to prey on the Red Sea pilgrims. First, they encountered two American privateering ships, the Dolphin and the Portsmouth Adventure, with a combined crew of 120 men. Together, they sailed to Perim, a crab-shaped volcanic island in the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. “We lay there one night,” Philip Middleton would later recall, “and then three more came. One commanded by Thomas Wake fitted out from Boston in New England; another, the Pearl Brigantine, William Mues Commander, fitted out of Rhode Island; the third was the Amity sloop, fitted out at New York. They had about six guns each. Two of them had 50 men on board and the Brigantine between 30 and 40.” The Amity was no stranger to these parts. At her helm was the legendary Thomas Tew, the pirate whose successful Red Sea heist two years before had inspired Every’s original scheme.
The convergence of all these pirates—traveling thousands of miles independently to arrive on the same tiny island in the mouth of the Red Sea—tells us something about just how irresistible the siren song of the Grand Mughal’s wealth was in 1695. All told, the six ships held 440 men. In the summer of 1695, they probably represented a significant fraction of all working pirates on the planet. During the golden age of piracy in the early 1700s—when a generation of buccaneers inspired by Henry Every wreaked havoc in the Caribbean—official estimates at the time put the total global pirate population at roughly two thousand. Assuming that number is higher than the global pirate population in 1695, before Every’s mythological story drove the next generation to sea, the pirates clustered together in the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb that June might well have represented fully half of all the pirates on the seven seas at that moment in history.
No doubt Every experienced mixed feelings watching these other vessels sail into his hunting grounds. On the one hand, they would all be vying for the same treasure, and after an entire year as captain of the Fancy—with largely unchallenged control over his own destiny—his future actions might well be mediated by the leadership on board the other ships. But on the positive side, Every had been struggling from the beginning to build up enough manpower to take on the well-fortified ships of the Indian fleet. If the six ships anchored in the Perim harbor could agree to work together, they might well have enough force to challenge Aurangzeb’s mightiest vessels.
According to Middleton’s testimony, the six captains convened after consulting with their crews and set out the terms for their alliance. Articles of agreement were almost certainly drawn up. The fact that they would consolidate forces at this critical moment was not, in itself, surprising. If they managed to overtake one of the Indian treasure ships, there would be plenty of loot to go around. What was surprising about the alliance between the six ships was their choice of a leader. Thomas Tew was, on paper, the obvious candidate. Every had done most of his trade on the western coast of Africa, and was by all accounts a newcomer to piracy as a full-time profession. Tew had just pulled off a heist of historical proportions in the very waters they were currently sailing. But something in the chemistry of those two men, and the crews they commanded, led to a different outcome. “They all joined in partnership,” Philip Middleton reported, “agreeing Captain Every should be the Commander.”
For twelve months, Henry Every had kept his men alive and eluded capture with little more than a fast boat and a cunning plan at his disposal.
Now he had an armada.