Surat, India
Mid-September 1695
It only took a matter of hours after the battered crew of the Fath Mahmamadi pulled into the Surat harbor for word to spread through town that Abdul Ghaffar’s ship had been attacked by English pirates, with “severall of their Men killed in fight, and others barbarously used.” In the chief factor’s quarters overlooking the dockyards, Samuel Annesley would have immediately grasped that the news of more British piracy did not bode well for the East India Company. Many Surat residents already suspected that the company was supplementing its trade revenue by stealing directly from Indian merchant ships, through some kind of quiet partnership with the pirates. That hearsay turned into a direct accusation when Abdul Ghaffar, Surat’s wealthiest merchant and the owner of the Fath Mahmamadi, learned that English pirates had plundered his ship. As Arnold Wright, Annesley’s biographer, puts it: “The avenging finger of Abdul Guffor was pointed toward Annesley and his colleagues as the real authors of the crime.”
By September 12, a mob of enraged locals had gathered at the gates of the East India Company factory, demanding vengeance for the company’s abuses. Circulating among them was Khafi Khan, taking notes and interviewing the crew of the Fath, gathering evidence for the report he would eventually send back to Aurangzeb. At first, Annesley took the gathering protest in stride. He ordered the gates of the factory closed, assuming he could wait out the storm. “He knew the capabilities of the place for defence,” Wright explained, “and had no misgivings as to the outcome of a fight between the well-armed inmates and the miscellaneous crowd of ruffians which the bazaars of Surat were able to furnish in times of disorder.”
A few hours later, the Mughal military commander at Surat, Usher Beg, arrived at the gates “with a troop of horses clattering at his heels.” He secured admission to the factory by claiming that he had a message from Surat’s governor, but the message turned out to be a ruse. Instead, Beg was there to put Annesley and his men under house arrest while the authorities investigated the plundering of the Fath. Commander Beg claimed he and his troop had been dispatched to the factory to protect the English from the mob outside the gates, but Annesley suspected that something more sinister was afoot. Yet Annesley had some reason to take Beg at his word; the Englishman had enjoyed friendly relations with the mutassaddi (governor) of Surat, I’timad Khan, and had kept the company on his good side with a reliable stream of bribes over the years. It was better, Annesley figured, to accept the house arrest and the protection of the Mughal guard and allow the fury in the streets to subside.
With the company men secured behind the factory walls, the agitators on the street—led by the town’s elder clerics—made a direct petition in front of the governor, demanding that Annesley and other key agents of the company be executed for their alleged involvement in the crime. The governor listened patiently to the long list of grievances, but declined to pass judgment. He did, however, promise to convey the facts of the case to Aurangzeb, and deliver whatever punishment the Grand Mughal considered appropriate. Just as Annesley had resigned himself to a few days of house arrest, the governor likely assumed he could buy himself—and the company—some time by deferring to Aurangzeb’s wishes. It would take weeks for an account of the Fath Mahmamadi piracy to reach the court at Delhi; by that time, the whole affair would hopefully have blown over, and his lucrative partnership with the East India Company would be back in business. If Aurangzeb sided with the protestors, I’timad Khan could always point to the potential lost revenue that would result from evicting the company altogether. Even if you accepted the improbable premise that the pirates were hired thugs working for the East India Company, Aurangzeb was gaining more from the tariffs and bribes that the company paid to the Mughal authorities as a cost of doing business in Surat than whatever he was losing to piracy.
That financial calculation collapsed just two days later, when the Gunsway and its traumatized survivors anchored in Surat. “The capture of the Imperial pilgrim ship in Mohammedan eyes was more than a crime,” Wright observed. “It was sacrilege.” The British were not just guilty of stealing from wealthy merchants; they had committed appalling acts of sexual violence against the women of Aurangzeb’s extended court, women who were taking part in the most sacred journey in the Muslim faith. It was hard to imagine a crime better engineered to infuriate Aurangzeb. Henry Every—wittingly or not—had transgressed the most cherished of the Universe Conqueror’s possessions: his fortune, his faith, and his women.
During his conversation with the victims and survivors, some of whom were personal acquaintances, Khafi Khan heard a troubling refrain. In the frenzy of their attacks, some of the British were heard to say that they were taking revenge for the siege of Bombay, suggesting that they had themselves been imprisoned during that long standoff five years before. By definition that would have made them members of the extended family of the East India Company, if not direct employees. Those accounts would prove to be a key piece of evidence in the case. Nothing we know about the members of Every’s crew suggests that any of them were participants in the siege of Bombay. But the truth is we know very little about Every’s crew, almost as little as we know about Every himself. It is entirely possible that some of them men who signed up for the Spanish Expedition had in fact worked for the company and had suffered through the siege. Or perhaps invoking the siege was the sort of anti-Muslim slur an Englishman at that time might have uttered, a seventeenth-century version of “Remember the Alamo!” Whatever the reality, the story did not paint the company in a sympathetic light. If Gayer and Annesley had helped plot this attack as retaliation for the siege of Bombay, it was not just sacrilege. It was an act of war.
The protests at the governor’s mansion took on a fever pitch. “The town is so defiled that no prayer can be offered up acceptable to God til Justice is done,” Abdul Ghaffar thundered. As Ghaffar and the clerics relayed the astonishing facts of the case to I’timad Khan, the governor recognized that the stakes had changed, for good. This was a storm that would not quickly blow over. The mob was gathering outside his gates now, not just the gates of the factory. If he failed to punish the English sufficiently, his own life could be in danger. Without waiting for guidance from Delhi, Governor Khan ordered that every Englishman in Surat be rounded up and imprisoned in the East India Company factory. Annesley and his colleagues were chained in heavy iron, “like a company of Doggs.” For a stretch of time, the English were deprived “the libertye of a Penn and Ink,” their communication with the outside world cut off entirely.
After an initial blackout, the correspondence with Bombay Castle was restored. (Annesley developed a secret code in his messages, convinced that his captors were reading his exchanges with Gayer.) By Annesley’s own account, it was a miserable existence, waiting in chains for the wrath or mercy of Aurangzeb’s judgment, knowing that at any minute the mob could storm the gates and exact their revenge directly. “It is needless to write of the indignities, slavish usages and tyrannical insultings wee hourly bear day and night,” he wrote to Gayer, once his “Penn” had been restored, “and to expatiate on so hateful a subject woud no wayes redress or alleviate our sufferings.”
To his captors, Annesley continually made the case that it ran against the company’s interests to sponsor piracy when so much of their revenue depended on the good grace of their trading partners in Surat and Bombay. “For nine years past,” he wrote to Governor Khan, “[there] have been the same false aspersions on us and all along wee have at last merchants and not pyrates. If wee were the latter, wouldst wee live amongst them and so many 100,000 rupees’ worth of goods to the City?” Privately, I’timad Khan was sympathetic. Publicly, his hands were tied. He didn’t dare liberate prisoners that had at least a circumstantial connection to the crew of the Fancy before Aurangzeb weighed in on the case.
News of the Gunsway affair reached Delhi sometime in the early fall of 1695. It may have been delivered directly to Aurangzeb by Khafi Khan himself. Accompanying the narrative of British atrocities were two key pieces of evidence, designed to enrage the Grand Mughal: survivors of the Gunsway attack, some of them potentially relatives of Aurangzeb, testifying to the moral depravity of the British pirates; and coins that had been minted in Bombay, bearing the image of King William, evidence of the British thumbing their noses at the Universe Conqueror’s sovereign power. The emissaries from Surat made a stern argument about the culpability of the company in the attacks on the Gunsway and the Fath. Piracy was not something the East India Company merely turned a blind eye to, the Surat contingent argued. Piracy was a key part of their business model. Khafi Khan had done the math: “The total revenue of Bombay, which is chiefly derived from betel-notes and coco-nuts, does not reach to two or three lacs of rupees. The profits of the commerce of these misbelievers . . . does not exceed twenty lacs of rupees. The balance of the money required for the maintenance of the English settlement is obtained by plundering the ships voyaging to the House of God, of which they take one or two every years.”
Not surprisingly, the case against the British fell on receptive ears. (As Wright put it, “To such a fanatical and arrogant [ruler], the audacious crimes of Every were calculated to be as a spark introduced into a barrel of gunpowder.”) Appalled by the sacrilegious acts of the English “infidels,” Aurangzeb ordered his men to seize the assets of the Surat factory, and to prepare for an assault on Bombay Castle. The East India Company had tested the Universe Conqueror’s patience one too many times. The attacks on the Fath and the Gunsway had given the lie to the long charade of the English as business partners with the Mughal empire. Their true colors had been revealed in Every’s lawless deeds: the company was an invading force, threatening Aurangzeb’s sovereign rule and desecrating his religious beliefs. It was time to expel them.