Authors: Colin Woodard
Back on the
Charles,
Avery heard the sounds of commotion echoing across the harbor from the
James.
He knew they could wait no longer. He and two dozen of his men rushed out on deck, seized the watchman, and took control of the quarterdeck, where the helm and many of a ship's other controls were located. As their co-conspirators from the other ship arrived in boats, the captain of the
James
opened fire, sending two cannonballs splashing into the harbor next to the
Charles.
The cannon fire alerted the Spaniards manning La Coruna's medieval fortress, who were now readying its guns. Avery barked out orders. Men rushed forward to cut the ship's thick anchor lines or clambered up the ratlines to unfurl the sails; the helmsman brought the ship off the wind, while others hauled the sails into place. Slowly, the
Charles
pulled out of the harbor, under the guns of the fort, and into the open Atlantic.
A few miles out of port, Avery went below decks to speak with Captain Gibson, who was ill and bedridden, and the second mate, Jonathan Gravet, both of whom were now under guard in their respective cabins. By their accounts, Avery treated them with courtesy and even offered Gibson command of the
Charles
if he joined their conspiracy. He refused. Avery nonetheless promised to let both men go ashore come morning in one of the boats, along with any other men who wished to leave. Avery gave Gravet three parting gifts: a coat, a waistcoat, and his own commission as first mate. Gravet later recalled that Gibson's steward, William May, "took me by the hand and wished me well home and bid me remember him to his wife."
In the morning, Gibson, Gravet, and fifteen other men got into one of the
Charles II
's launches and rowed off toward the mainland. "I am a man of fortune, and must seek my fortune," Avery told Gibson before they parted.
***
Later that day, Avery held a general meeting of the ship's company: eighty-five men in all, each of them there voluntarily except for the ship's doctor, whose services they were unwilling to part with. Avery proposed a new and better way of providing for themselves and their families: They would raid ships and settlements as originally planned, only not in the Caribbean, and not for the profit of Houblon. Instead they would sail for the Indian Ocean, where they would go after the richly laden merchantmen of the Orient and keep the plunder for themselves. He'd heard that the island of Madagascar would make a perfect base of operations; located off the southeastern coast of Africa it had no European presence, hundreds of miles of secluded coastline, and natives who would happily trade food and other necessities. When it was all over, Avery told them, they could quietly slip back into England with their riches.
Avery must have been persuasive because the men agreed to his plan and appointed him as their captain. Collectively they laid out an equitable scheme for sharing future plunder. While on most privateering vessels, the captain got between six and fourteen shares to the ordinary seaman's one, Avery would receive only one extra share, his mate an extra half. They would make all major decisions democratically, except during combat, when Avery's command would be absolute. They also voted to rename the ship: From here on out she would be called the
Fancy.
They spent the month of May sailing down the Atlantic, stopping at the island of Moia in the Cape Verde Islands, 350 miles off the West African coast. Moia was a depressing place, a treeless island baking under the tropical sun. It was frequented by mariners for its expansive inland salt ponds, salt being the main food preservative of the era. In the bleak cove that served as Moia's harbor, they found three English merchant ships loading salt the natives had piled for them on the beach. Faced with the
Fancy's
overwhelming firepower, the captains surrendered without a fight. Avery relieved them of provisions and an anchor to replace the one he'd left on the bottom of La Coruna harbor, but politely gave them a receipt for everything he had stolen. Less thoughtfully, he forced nine members of their crew to join his pirate band, probably because they, like the doctor, had special skills required to keep the
Fancy
operational.
Avery apparently regretted looting English ships in time of war. A few months later he wrote an open letter to all English shipmasters, in which he told them they had nothing to fear from the
Fancy
and her men. "I have never as yet wronged any English or Dutch [vessels]," he wrote, "nor ever intend to whilst I am Commander." He signed it "As yet an Englishman's Friend." One can see why Avery would become a hero to the poor and downtrodden, a sort of maritime Robin Hood. He'd risen up against injustice and handled his prisoners with remarkable humanity, taking only what he and his band required for survival.
Not all of Avery's subsequent actions were particularly honorable. His later admirers made much of his upstanding behavior toward English and European captives, but they tended to skip over or make light of his treatment of nonwhite foreigners who fell into his clutches. His crew and captives would later describe many acts of cruelty. Once, on the coast of West Africa, Avery lured a band of local tribesmen aboard his ship with the promise of trade, then stole their gold, clapped them into irons, and sold at least seven of them into slavery. There were numerous instances when his crew captured small, unarmed Arab trading vessels and, after seizing their humble cargoes of rice and fish, proceeded to burn them rather than return them to their captains. While cruising off what is now Somalia, the
Fancy
's crew burned the town of Mayd to the ground because the residents refused to trade with them. Before leaving Asia, Avery and his men would do far worse.
By June 1695, thirteen months after the mutiny in Spain, Avery's gang had captured at least nine vessels and sailed from Maio to Madagascar, from the Cape of Good Hope to the coast of India. They had set up camp in the secluded harbors of Madagascar, given the
Fancy
a thorough overhaul in the Comoros Islands, and gorged themselves on pots of honey purchased from traders in Gabon. Their numbers had swollen to over one hundred, including fourteen volunteers from a Danish merchant vessel and a party of French privateers found stranded on an island near the Mozambique Straits. They had stolen large parcels of rice, grain, brandy, wool, linen, and silks, but only very small quantities of gold, silver, and other easily transportable valuables. If they were to make a real fortune, they had to go after a bigger prize. From their captives they learned that a great fleet would soon be sailing from Mocha, a port on the Red Sea in what is now Yemen, and would pass out of the Red Sea's entrance on its way to Surat, India. Aboard the ships would be thousands of Muslims returning from their annual pilgrimage to the holy shrines of Mecca and dozens of merchants repatriating the profits of their annual trading mission. The convoy's treasure ships—property of the Grand Moghul of India—were the most valuable vessels to sail the Indian Ocean.
Avery and his crew sailed north for the mouth of the Red Sea, where they planned to lie in wait for the Mocha fleet. But they were not the only English raiders with this in mind. Along the way they came across two armed sloops—small, nimble, single-masted sailing vessels—flying English colors. Their captains turned out to be privateers from Rhode Island and Delaware, men who had been given a license to raid enemy shipping in time of war, but had decided, like Avery, to attack the neutral treasure fleet. A day after arriving at the narrows, three more American privateers showed up, including Thomas Tew of New York, who had been a famous pirate himself. Avery and the captains of the five privateers agreed to attack the treasure fleet together and to share the resulting plunder. They lay in ambush behind a tiny island in the passage of Bab-al-Mandab under the blazing sun: four six-gun sloops, the forty-six-gun
Fancy,
and a six-gun brigantine.
The treasure fleet, consisting of twenty-five ships, passed the straits late one Saturday night in August, their lamps unlit, moving so stealthily that the pirates and privateers failed to see the first twenty-four. However they did capture the very last vessel, a slow-moving ketch and, upon interrogating the crew, realized they would have to chase the rest of the fleet across the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. For three days Avery's squadron pursued their quarry. The smaller vessels had trouble keeping pace with the
Fancy.
They burned the slowest of them so as not to be slowed down; a second sloop fell so far behind that it was never seen again.
Finally, near the Indian coast, the pirates spotted a sail on the horizon. This turned out to be the
Fath Mahmamadi,
a ship larger than the
Fancy,
but also slower and armed with only six guns. The crew of the
Fath Mahmamadi
fired one pathetic three-gun salvo as the pirate ships gathered around them. The
Fancy
responded with a deafening twenty-three-gun broadside and a volley of musket fire. The Indian captain surrendered, the
Fancy
came alongside, and Avery's crew poured onto their 350-ton prize. In the holds they found the proceeds of the
Fath Mahmamadi
's trade in Mocha: £50,000 to £60,000 in gold and silver belonging to the ship's owner, the merchant Abd-ul-Ghafur. It was an impressive haul, enough to purchase the
Fancy
fifty times over, but Avery wanted more. He placed the vessel under the control of a detachment of his men—a prize crew—and, together with his fellow captains, continued his pursuit of the great fleet.
Two days later, along the shores of eastern India, a lookout spotted another ship in the distance bound for the Indian port of Surat. The pirates soon caught up with what turned out to be the
Ganj-i-sawai,
a gigantic trading vessel that belonged to Grand Moghul Aurangzeb himself. She was far and away the largest ship operating out of Surat, with eighty guns, 400 muskets, and 800 able-bodied men aboard. Her captain, Muhammad Ibrahim, had reason to be confident of fending off the raiders, having more guns and more than twice as many men as the
Fancy
and the three American privateers combined. The stakes were high, however, for
Ganj-i-sawai
was heavily laden with passengers and treasure.
As soon as the
Fancy
came into range, Captain Ibrahim ordered a gun crew into action. They loaded their heavy weapon and rolled it out of its port. The gunner took aim, lit the fuse, and stood back with the rest of his team, awaiting the cannon's recoil. Instead of a loud report and a burst of smoke, there came a horrifying flash. Owing to some internal defect, the heavy cannon exploded, sending shards in all directions. The gun crew was blown to bits. As Ibrahim was taking in the gruesome spectacle, the
Fancy
returned fire. One of her cannonballs struck the
Ganj-i-sawai
in the lower part of her mainmast, the most critical of locations. The mast partially collapsed, throwing sails and rigging into disarray and compounding the chaos aboard the ship. The loss of sail area meant the
Ganj-i-sawai
began to slow. Her pursuers closed in.
Swords drawn and muskets at the ready, over 100 pirates crouched behind the
Fancy's
rails, waiting for the ships to come together. When they did, lines snapping, sails tearing, their wooden hulls moaning and creaking with the stress, Avery and company rushed over the side and onto the decks of the crippled vessel.
An Indian historian named Muhammad Hashim Khafi Khan, who was in Surat at the time, wrote that given there were so many weapons aboard the
Ganj-i-sawai,
the crew would certainly have defeated the English pirates "if the captain had made any resistance." Captain Ibrahim apparently panicked and fled below decks to the quarters of a group of Turkish girls he had purchased in Mocha to serve as his personal concubines. "He put turbans on their heads and swords into their hands and incited them to fight," Khafi Khan wrote. Resistance aboard the Indian ship collapsed. Avery's men began their plunder.
According to the stories that would later circulate in the waterfront pubs of England, Avery behaved chivalrously. One of the most popular accounts told of how he found "something more pleasing than jewels" aboard the captured ship: the Moghul Emperor's granddaughter, en route to her wedding with a vast dowry and a gaggle of beautiful handmaidens. Avery, it was said, proposed to the princess and, upon receiving her consent, married her right then and there with the assistance of a Muslim cleric. In this version of the story, which was published in London in 1709, "The rest of the crew then drew lots for her servants and, to follow the example of their commander, even stay'd their stomachs 'till the same priest had said Grace for them." The happy newlyweds were said to have spent the whole trip back to Madagascar engaged in conjugal bliss.
The true story is less romantic. Trial documents and accounts of Indian witnesses and English officials make it clear that Avery presided over an orgy of violence. For several days, the pirates raped female passengers of all ages. Among the victims was one of the Moghul emperor's relatives—not a young princess, but the elderly wife of one of his courtiers. Khafi Khan reported that a number of women killed themselves to avoid such a fate, some by jumping into the sea, others stabbing themselves with daggers. Survivors said the pirates treated many of the captives "very barbarously" in an effort to make them confess where they had hidden their valuables. One of Avery's crew, Philip Middleton, later testified that they murdered several men aboard the captured ship. Fact and legend only agree on the scale of the treasure the pirates loaded aboard the
Fancy:
a trove of gold, silver, ivory, and jewels worth £150,000 or more.
Once the pirates were satisfied, the
Ganj-i-sawai
was allowed to sail on to Surat with her surviving crew and passengers. The pirates left in the opposite direction, heading south toward Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. On the island of Réunion, halfway to the Cape, Avery and the privateer captains divided their plunder and went their separate ways. Most of the crew received an individual share of £1,000, the equivalent of twenty years' wages aboard a merchant ship. Avery put to his crew that they sail directly for Nassau to avoid the emperor's revenge. In November 1695 the
Fancy
began its long journey, halfway around the world, to New Providence Island.