Every man for himself
Jun. 25th, 2025 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThe second pirate book of the weekend was Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt.
Several years ago I read Johnson’s book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was about a cholera outbreak in London and the scientist who tracked down where it happened, thus proving that cholera was a waterborne disease. I recall it was very fun and informative, although given that I read it 15 years ago I don’t recall as much else as I wish I did.
In this one, we aren’t chasing a disease, we are chasing a man–pirate captain Henry Every (or Avery, in some books), plus his crew.
The short version of Every’s career as a pirate is this: First, he had some sort of regular maritime career, which we don’t know very much about. Then, he signed on as first mate for an ill-fated business proposition called Spanish Expedition Shipping. Spanish Expedition Shipping was an English venture but due to inter-empire trade shenanigans got stuck at port in Spain awaiting some sort of licensing issue to be solved for like, weeks, when it was supposed to have taken only a few days. A bunch of the guys trapped on this fleet of ships going nowhere fast decided to mutiny, and stole the fastest of the ships, sailing out of Spain the dead of night to go “on the account.” Every was the head of these mutineers. Their plan was to become “Red Sea Men,” a term for pirates who skulked around at the mouth of the Red Sea and enacted piracy upon ships of pilgrims going from the Mughal Empire in India to Mecca in Arabia. The ships that transported the pilgrims were also full of trade goods, and many of the pilgrims that could make this pilgrimage in style were quite wealthy. In addition, European pirates had basically no respect for people of any other religion, so they figured that robbing “infidels” didn’t really count as bad behavior.
The Mughals, of course, disagreed, which put groups like the East India Company in an awkward position. At this point in the 1690s, the British East India Company was more like a normal actual trade partner, doing business with the Mughal Empire at the discretion of the Mughal Emperor. It would not take over the subcontinent for another several decades. As such, having other Englishmen pissing off their incredibly wealthy client was bad for business, as the devout Emperor Aurangzeb was too busy being the richest man in the world to draw distinctions between different groups of Englishmen. Bad behavior by Englishmen who were, in their own estimation, following in the grand patriotic tradition of sea dogs like Sir Walter Raleigh, were bad for business. This is where all the fun political dimensions come in.
I had just gotten out of reading a shorter version of this sea change (pun intended) in England’s economic and political relationship to piracy two days earlier when reading Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. So it was fun to dig into the details, as well as to contrast the two authors’ reads on the political sophistication of pirates (Johnson is a little more bullish on the “radical democratic political theory” element; Dolin just chalks it up to a very basic and practical “not instantly recreating the exact same thing they were trying to escape” impulse). Johnson also ties in the story of the manhunt following Every’s capture and sack of the Ganj-i-sawai–a ship that, unfortunately for Every, belonged to the Grand Mughal personally–with the technological and political advancements of the day, including mass media, the speed of news (or the lack of it), the ambiguous delineations between state and corporate power, and the class splits within English views on pirates, “infidels,” and the importance of trade.
The last third or so of the book is also a frankly hilarious tale of misadventures in English jurisprudence. While Every was never captured, several of his crewmen were, and put on trial–twice, first for piracy, and second for mutiny. The second trial was necessary because the first trial did not go at all the way the English state had choreographed it to go. As a reader I found it very funny to see the East India Company and the English state get embarrassed in the first trial even though it was for such bad reasons that I think the prosecution was actually in the right. This is not really a story with a lot of good guys per se, just people that were victimized in specific instances. It’s especially interesting to see the way the working-class folk hero version of Every’s story glosses over most of what Every and co. actually did.
Anyway, the book packs a lot of food for thought into something that is both reasonably short and also definitely constitutes A Rollicking Adventures On The High Seas, so well done, even if I think the political intention Johnson credits the pirates with is a little overstated.
Several years ago I read Johnson’s book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was about a cholera outbreak in London and the scientist who tracked down where it happened, thus proving that cholera was a waterborne disease. I recall it was very fun and informative, although given that I read it 15 years ago I don’t recall as much else as I wish I did.
In this one, we aren’t chasing a disease, we are chasing a man–pirate captain Henry Every (or Avery, in some books), plus his crew.
The short version of Every’s career as a pirate is this: First, he had some sort of regular maritime career, which we don’t know very much about. Then, he signed on as first mate for an ill-fated business proposition called Spanish Expedition Shipping. Spanish Expedition Shipping was an English venture but due to inter-empire trade shenanigans got stuck at port in Spain awaiting some sort of licensing issue to be solved for like, weeks, when it was supposed to have taken only a few days. A bunch of the guys trapped on this fleet of ships going nowhere fast decided to mutiny, and stole the fastest of the ships, sailing out of Spain the dead of night to go “on the account.” Every was the head of these mutineers. Their plan was to become “Red Sea Men,” a term for pirates who skulked around at the mouth of the Red Sea and enacted piracy upon ships of pilgrims going from the Mughal Empire in India to Mecca in Arabia. The ships that transported the pilgrims were also full of trade goods, and many of the pilgrims that could make this pilgrimage in style were quite wealthy. In addition, European pirates had basically no respect for people of any other religion, so they figured that robbing “infidels” didn’t really count as bad behavior.
The Mughals, of course, disagreed, which put groups like the East India Company in an awkward position. At this point in the 1690s, the British East India Company was more like a normal actual trade partner, doing business with the Mughal Empire at the discretion of the Mughal Emperor. It would not take over the subcontinent for another several decades. As such, having other Englishmen pissing off their incredibly wealthy client was bad for business, as the devout Emperor Aurangzeb was too busy being the richest man in the world to draw distinctions between different groups of Englishmen. Bad behavior by Englishmen who were, in their own estimation, following in the grand patriotic tradition of sea dogs like Sir Walter Raleigh, were bad for business. This is where all the fun political dimensions come in.
I had just gotten out of reading a shorter version of this sea change (pun intended) in England’s economic and political relationship to piracy two days earlier when reading Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. So it was fun to dig into the details, as well as to contrast the two authors’ reads on the political sophistication of pirates (Johnson is a little more bullish on the “radical democratic political theory” element; Dolin just chalks it up to a very basic and practical “not instantly recreating the exact same thing they were trying to escape” impulse). Johnson also ties in the story of the manhunt following Every’s capture and sack of the Ganj-i-sawai–a ship that, unfortunately for Every, belonged to the Grand Mughal personally–with the technological and political advancements of the day, including mass media, the speed of news (or the lack of it), the ambiguous delineations between state and corporate power, and the class splits within English views on pirates, “infidels,” and the importance of trade.
The last third or so of the book is also a frankly hilarious tale of misadventures in English jurisprudence. While Every was never captured, several of his crewmen were, and put on trial–twice, first for piracy, and second for mutiny. The second trial was necessary because the first trial did not go at all the way the English state had choreographed it to go. As a reader I found it very funny to see the East India Company and the English state get embarrassed in the first trial even though it was for such bad reasons that I think the prosecution was actually in the right. This is not really a story with a lot of good guys per se, just people that were victimized in specific instances. It’s especially interesting to see the way the working-class folk hero version of Every’s story glosses over most of what Every and co. actually did.
Anyway, the book packs a lot of food for thought into something that is both reasonably short and also definitely constitutes A Rollicking Adventures On The High Seas, so well done, even if I think the political intention Johnson credits the pirates with is a little overstated.