Dunfanaghy, Ireland
Late June 1696
The men were never going to stay long in Nassau. They were big fish now, too big for a backwater outpost with sixty residents. As they spent a small slice of their fortune in the two taverns in Trott’s struggling village, they would have known they were vulnerable there, clustered together under the good graces of a corrupt British governor, with a dragnet stretched across the planet seeking them out. Nicholas Trott did his best to persuade the men to stay, hosting a feast for the prospective Bahamians at his home. (“One of the men broke a drinking glass,” Philip Middleton later recalled, “and was made to pay eight checqueenes for it.”) Trott’s respect for the new arrivals, however, did not extended to the Fancy itself. After Every’s gang had handed the ship over to the governor, he assigned responsibility for the ship to men whose “incapacity or number were not sufficient to secure her from hurtfull accidents,” as a subsequent missive to the Board of Trade reported. James Houblon’s “extraordinary sailor” ended her short but eventful existence as a wreck, never to sail again. Phillip Middleton would later call it a “sad sight”—the ship that had outrun all its enemies, that had kept the men alive on a journey of more than ten thousand miles, now foundered in the shallow waters of the Nassau harbor.
Nicholas Trott’s hospitality persuaded six or seven of the Every gang to stay, to disappear into the small-town life of a remote colonial outpost and be forgotten. There appears to have been some sexual intrigue shaping the decision as well. A few of the men who remained behind married Nassau women. (Quartermaster Adams seems to have married one of them in a matter of days.) But the rest were eager to move on.
Within a week or two, the men had sorted into three distinct escape pods. One group of twenty-three pirates acquired a sloop in town; they embarked on a return trip straight back to England, assuming they could slip through the disorganized border control on the Thames docks and slink their way back to their families and loved ones. The largest group opted for the same strategy of seeking out pirate’s nests that had steered them to Madagascar and Nassau—only this time on a grander scale. Those pirates went to the American colonies.
The pull toward the American mainland was partially a simple matter of proximity. Charleston was only four hundred miles away. But there were legal reasons to head to America as well. The colonies had developed a reputation for both nurturing and tolerating piracy, a reputation that Rhode Island’s Thomas Tew had amplified just a few years before with his 1693 Red Sea robberies.
The reputation turned out to be a valid one, as least as far as Every’s gang was concerned. Not one of the fifty men who sailed for the Carolinas were ever convicted of crimes associated with the Gunsway attack. Some had brushes with the law; some disappeared. But not a man among them was ultimately punished for his crimes. According to some accounts, Every’s crew openly boasted about their heroic days on the Indian Ocean. In early 1697, James Houblon received a letter from a scandalized colonist in Pennsylvania who had overhead Every veterans “regaling their fellow patrons” at a tavern with the stories of their exploits aboard the Fancy. The atmosphere was so lax that the pirates barely bothered to conceal their identities. “They brag of it publicly over their cups,” Houblon’s correspondent noted.
The colonies had another asset in their favor: a thriving market for slave labor. Presumably some of the slaves that that had been captured in Guinea or acquired in Réunion traveled with the crew to the Carolinas and were sold off along with the remnants of the Gunsway treasure. According to Philip Middleton, some of the slaves were sold in Nassau to Trott and his men. Assuming some of them stayed on the island, they would have played an early role in the demographic transformation of the Bahamas, a country where today more than 80 percent of the population is of African descent—one small piece of the vast diaspora that slavery produced.
Two months after making his initial offer to Nicholas Trott, Henry Every left Nassau accompanied by twenty of his original crew, including Henry Adams and John Dann. With the world’s most wanted man in their party, they dared not risk a direct return to England. Instead, Every and the others bought a single-masted sailboat called the Sea Flower and set sail for northeast Ireland. In what must have been one of the least romantic honeymoons in history, Henry Adams brought his new bride along for the trip.
Sometime in late June, the Sea Flower sailed into the small harbor of Dunfanaghy, nestled at the western edge of Sheephaven Bay, roughly a hundred miles northwest of Belfast. According to Dann’s account, on their arrival they were confronted by a “landwaiter”—effectively a customs official—who eventually allowed them to continue their travels toward Dublin in exchange for a bribe of £3 per man. Dann traveled with Every—who was still using the alias Benjamin Bridgeman—for six miles, before the captain announced that he was going to break off from the company and head out on his own. “I heard he went over for Donaghedy in Scotland,” Dann later recalled. “I heard him say he would go to Exeter when he came into England, being a Plymouth man.”
As Every and his crew dispersed across the British Isles, back in London at East India House the special committee on pirates was ramping up its manhunt efforts. The proclamation from the Lords Justices offering a reward for Every’s capture was released several weeks after the Sea Flower landed in Ireland. The company paid to have a hundred copies of it printed and shipped off to its factories in India. (They added an additional reward of 4,000 rupees for any Indian informants who led them to Every.) By late July, Isaac Houblon and his fellow committee members had learned that Every had landed in Nassau and was rumored to have left with a small crew, headed back to England and Ireland. The company’s secretary, Robert Blackborne, immediately dispatched a flurry of letters to local authorities in port towns across the British Isles, requesting that they be on the lookout for Every and his men. “Captain Henry Every now goes by the name of Bridgeman,” Blackborne advised. “It will be an admirable service to the Kingdom and as such recommend to your favor to capture any of them that shall come into your parts.” Just as Every’s crimes were endowing the company with new naval power in the Indian Ocean thanks to Samuel Annesley’s scheme, the manhunt back home bound the company’s agents into a close partnership with law enforcement authorities. Blackborne, after all, was merely a corporate secretary, transcribing minutes of board meetings and writing letters to company representatives overseas. But with Every on the loose, he had taken on a new responsibility: issuing an all-points bulletin for the nation’s most wanted man. The company arranged to have agents on alert, ready to be dispatched to interrogate and bring back to London any suspects that local law enforcement detained. Whatever political tensions and scandals had compromised the relationship between the government and the company, the threat posed by Every and his crimes forced the two institutions into a united front—so united, in fact, that the East India Company took on many tasks that would have traditionally been delegated to the state.
John Dann continued his travels to Dublin, then sailed to Holyhead in Wales. After a brief sojourn in London, he traveled north to his hometown of Rochester, where he booked a room in a local inn. It turned out to be a disastrous homecoming. Dann had traveled more than ten thousand miles, carrying his profits from one of history’s largest heists sewn into the lining of his jacket. But during his first day back in Rochester, an inquisitive maid cleaning his room noticed the unusual weight of the coat while folding his clothes. She reported him to the authorities, who found more than a thousand Turkish coins “quilted up in his jacket.” The town mayor seized the coins and threw Dann in jail under suspicion of robbery.
Dann’s arrest was just the beginning. Over the course of the summer, seven more men from Every’s crew were apprehended in Liverpool, Dublin, Newcastle, and in the West Country near Every’s birthplace. The special committee spent close to a thousand pounds in reward money and in “gratuities” doled out to officials who had assisted with the dragnet. They even covered the cost of transporting the prisoners back to London, where they could be tried together in the most public forum possible. The East India Company—and its close collaborators in the British government—had been eager to throw the full force of the law against the Gunsway pirates ever since John Gayer’s letter detailing the atrocities had arrived London in late 1695. Now they had eight of them in custody. At long last, the world—and Aurangzeb most of all—would have a chance to see England’s true position on piracy.