SYMHC Classics: Henry Every

This 2018 episode covers Henry Every, who carried out what's been described as the most profitable and brutal pirate raid in history. It became a massive international incident.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We talked about the Mughal Empire and the
British East India Company in our recent episodes on Dean Mohammad,
and that reminded me of our previous episode on pirate
Henry every who carried out a raid on a Mughal
Empire convoy in sixteen ninety five. At the time, the
Mughal emperor was Arnzeb, who also came up in our

(00:23):
episodes on Dean Mohammad. So that is today's Saturday classic.
This originally came out May ninth, twenty eighteen, so enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

(00:47):
Wilson and I'm Holly Pryne. Well. I don't think we've
talked about pirates on the podcast in a while. It's
been a little bit, you know, We've they've had passing
mentions in maybe unearthed episodes or other random stuff, but
we have not had an actual whole episode about pirates
in more than a year and a half, which is
a long time. I mean, I feel like if you
look hard enough, any show could become about a pirate. Sure,

(01:11):
So today we're going to talk about Henry Every. He
was also known as Henry Avery, and as Benjamin Bridgeman
and as long ben Avery. And he's been on my
short list for a while. And it just said Henry
Every and then in parentheses pirate. And I did not
write any other indication of what prompted me to put
it on there. So it's a mystery why why it

(01:32):
caught my attention in the first place. It was not
Uncharted four because I have not played that game, but
I do know that he figures into that game. And
in case folks are thinking of writing us to say
he was in Uncharted four, that was not where He did, though,
carry out what's been described as the most profitable pirate
raid in history. And it was also, to be clear,

(01:53):
a particularly brutal and horrifying raid in its treatment of
the women and the men aboard the rated ship. But
I did not know until I got into the research
for this that it also became a massive international incident,
with Britain later trying to repair its relationship with the
Mughal Empire. It's the target of this raid in a

(02:14):
highly publicized kind of weird series of trials. So we
know very little about Henry Every's early life, except that
he was probably English. He was born sometime in the
sixteen fifties. He might have spent some time in the
Royal Navy, but sources conflict on whether or not that's
actually the case. But he did start working in the

(02:34):
slave trade in the early sixteen nineties under a commission
from the British Royal Governor of Bermuda. After at least
a couple of years as a slave trader, Every was
hired as first mate aboard the English vessel Charles the
Second in sixteen ninety three. The Charles the Second was
a privateering vessel, and it had been commissioned to attack
French ships and colonies in the Caribbean. If you need

(02:56):
a refresher on privateering, these were basically pirates, but pirate
it's operating with government authority to do this piradical work.
By May of sixteen ninety four, though the Charles the
Second still had not left the coast of Europe and
the crew had not been paid for any of their
work so far. Naturally, the crew wasn't happy about this situation,

(03:19):
and when the ship stopped for supplies at the Spanish
port of La Carugna, every let a mutiny. Afterward, the
remaining crew elected him their captain. Every renamed the Charles
the second as the Fancy, which is often spelled with
a pH and sometimes with an ie, and documents from
the time they set a course for Madagascar, following a

(03:40):
sailing route that was known as the Pirate Round, which
was popular among English pirates starting in the sixteen nineties.
Most pirates came into the Pirate Round from the Caribbean
and headed southeast, so they were kind of joining in
with it from the coast of Europe instead. Once it
approached Africa, the route shifted south to pass the Cape
of Good Hope, and then it took north again toward

(04:01):
Madagascar before turning east to cross the Indian Ocean. The
Fancy's first paradical encounter was with three English ships, which
they caught near the Cape Verde Islands off the coast
of West Africa. The Fancy continued down the African coast
from there, capturing and plundering ships from France and Denmark.
It was sixteen ninety five by the time Every and

(04:22):
the Fancy reached Madagascar, and by then the Fancy had
a crew of about one hundred and fifty men. A
whole other collection of other mostly English pirates, were in
the area. When they got there, they were looking for
a fleet that was reported to be nearby. This fleet
belonged to the Mughal Empire. Now the Mughal Empire ruled
parts of the Indian subcontinent from the early sixteenth century

(04:44):
into the mid eighteenth century. Sometimes the endpoint is marked
a little later than that. By sixteen ninety five, its
territory covered most of what's now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan,
and Nepal. The Mughal dynasty was wealthy, and its emperor
in sixteen ninety five was arag Zeb, also known as
Muhi al Din Muhammad or as Emperor Alamgir. It was

(05:07):
during arg Zeb's reign that the Mughal Empire reached its
peak in terms of size and power. Rang Zeb's rule
of the empire and the role he played in its
history is its own complicated story that we're not going
to get into here, but in short, he had a
reputation for ruthlessness and for religious persecution of non Muslims
in the later part of his reign. The fleet that

(05:29):
the pirates were looking for was a large one and
included twenty five ships, and among them were merchant vessels
and escort vessels. Several of the ships were carrying Muslim
pilgrims who were returning from the haj and some of
the ships in the fleet belonged to the Emperor himself.
The fleet was far too large and powerful for any
one pirate ship to take on the loan, which is

(05:51):
why this collection of mostly English pirates was working together.
One of the other parties involved was Thomas Two, who
was from a prominent Newport, Rhode Island family. Two is
often described as a pioneer of the pirate round, and
like Henry every he had turned pirate after some time
as a privateer. He had legitimately bought a share of

(06:11):
a ship called the Amity in sixteen ninety one, and
when it was tasked with taking a French factory in
West Africa, he proposed to the crew that it would
be a lot more profitable to turn to piracy than
to attack a factory that had no booty to plunder.
It was really that simple. He was like, you know what,
this whole thing or we're supposed to be attacking this factory,
it's not going to be it's not going to make
so much money. We can make a lot more money.

(06:33):
We attacked other ships instead. Let's stop working for the
man was very much like and this hole, let's stop
working for the man. Where this is going to come
up later. It was one of the reasons that people
had a lot of sympathy for pirates, not necessarily people
being attacked by them, but other people had a lot
of sympathy for pirates. So Two's turn to piracy did
not stop officials from working with him, though when this

(06:56):
raid on the Mughle fleet took place, he was sailing
under a letter of mark from the governor of Bermuda.
When the pirates finally spotted a ship from the Mughal fleet,
they learned that the rest of the fleet was farther
away than they had thought. The first ship they took
turned out to be part of the rear guard, so
the fastest pirate ships, which included every and the Fancy,

(07:16):
raced ahead. Every encountered the Fath Mamamadi, which was part
of the fleet's escort, and this ship surrendered after a
brief firefight, and the Fancy came away with about fifty
thousand British pounds worth of gold and silver. This didn't
seem like that great of a haul once it was
divided up among the fancy's entire crew, so every decided

(07:37):
to keep going and to try to find a bigger
prize among the rest of the fleet. He and two
other pirate ships spotted the Ganji Sawai on September seventh.
So you'll sometimes see the Ganja Zawi anglicized as the
guns Way in documents from the time and also in
uncharted four that historical I don't expect uncharted forur to

(07:59):
be historically accurate, by the way, so when I make
that joke, I'm not criticizing. No, it was the largest
ship in the fleet. It was possibly the largest ship
in the entire Mughal Empire, and it was owned by
the emperor himself. The emperor also had at least one
relative aboard. All those sources disagree about whether it was
his daughter or his granddaughter. These were all relatives who

(08:21):
were traveling back from Mecca. And we're going to talk
about every's encounter with this ship. After we first paused
for a little sponsor break. The Ganji Sawai was well
crewed and well armed, with about four hundred riflemen and

(08:42):
several cannons. It had more soldiers and armaments than the
three pirate ships that were after it, possibly even more
than the entire pirate fleet did before. Every and the
fastest ships out distanced the rest of them, but every
got lucky. The Fancy fired on the Ganji Sawai and
at the very start of the destroyed its main mast.
When the Ganji Sai tried to return fire, one of

(09:05):
its artillery pieces exploded. The resulting fire and chaos gave
the Fancy time to move in and board the Ganji Sawai,
which was captured after some intense hand to hand combat.
So just this would have been enough to draw the
ire of Emperor arn Zeb and the rest of the
Mughal Empire. But after taking the ship, the crew of

(09:26):
the Fancy also brutalized the people on board. I cannot
exaggerate this is horrifying. They stayed with the ship for
about a week as they searched for as much plunder
as they could possibly holloway. During that week, the pirates
tortured the men aboard to try to get information about
where their valuables were. They also assaulted and raped many

(09:46):
of the women aboard. A British colonial agent for the
Mughal Emperor reported that several women aboard the ship took
their own lives rather than be raped. Once the crew
of the Fancy finally left the Ganji Sai, they had
taken on an immense hall of gold, silver and jewels.
It had an estimated worth of three hundred twenty five
thousand to six hundred thousand British pounds at the time,

(10:09):
which would be well into the millions today. And then
they followed the pirate round back to the Caribbean, where
they headed for New Providence Island in the Bahamas, which
is home to the Bahamian capital of Nassau. They'd heard
from other pirates that its governor, Cadwalader Jones would be sympathetic.
When they got to New Providence Island in March of
sixteen ninety six, though Jones was no longer the governor.

(10:32):
The new governor was Nicholas Trot, and like its predecessor,
fortunately for these pirates, he was very willing to look
the other way if the price was right. So every
bribed Trot to make them welcome on the island, and
otherwise they didn't really advertise who they were, or what
they had done. They masqueraded as slave traders, and they
traded the fancy for a load of ivory. Trot might

(10:55):
have been a little less willing to deal with every
if he had known what the pirates had done, or
if he had any idea that he was now caught
up in an international incident, but he almost certainly didn't.
Word reached the Mughal Empire long before it reached Britain
or any of its colonies. What had happened. The Ganji
Sawai struggled into harbor at Surret without most of its

(11:15):
cargo and several of its former passengers about a week
after the pirate attack. So people in the empire were
outraged when they learned Whatevery and the other pirates had done.
Riots spread throughout the city of Surret. Many of these
riots targeted the offices of the East India Company. There.
A mob tried to break in and kill the forty

(11:37):
or so EICE agents who were working inside, but the governor,
It's Himad Khan, intervened and stopped them. Although the East
India Company employees' lives were spared, Khan had them all arrested.
He also arrested at least three captains from East India
Company ships and all the other British subjects that he
could find in Surret. It's possible that he thought that

(12:00):
the attack on the Ganji Sawai was a conspiracy and
that the EIC was somehow behind it. He would not
be the only person to think this, which we will
talk about him a little bit more in a bit so.
From prison, the British captives wrote to Sir John Gehar.
Gayor was a representative of the East India Company and
the governor of Bombay, which is now known as Bumbai.

(12:20):
Bombay was south of Surret and had been captured by
Portugal in fifteen thirty four. It came under British control
in sixteen sixty two when Charles the Second of England
married Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza. The East India Company
was renting it from the monarch and had built its
Indian headquarters there. That came up in our tea episode

(12:40):
as well it did. He could do a little Venn
diagram of the overlapping stuff of this episode. In that one,
Geyor wrote to the Lords of Trade saying that British
subjects had been clapped in irons and were being imprisoned
in rooms with boarded up windows. He also reported that
one english Man had died of injuries he sustained in
the initial melee. So it took a long time for

(13:03):
messages to get anywhere at this point in history, and
it would be months before Heyer's communication actually got to London.
In the meantime, Emperor Auringzeb shut down four East India
Company factories. He ordered an attack on Bombay. Now, if
he had done this, an attack probably would have been
disastrous for Bombay and for the East India Company as

(13:24):
a whole. The IC and the Mughal Empire had been
at war just a few years before, in a conflict
known as Child's War, and during that time Bombay had
been under siege and partly destroyed. Fortunately for the EIC,
an official named Samuel Annesley was able to negotiate a ceasefire.
But it was obvious that the Emperor would be more

(13:45):
than happy to force the British completely out of India,
which would have been catastrophic for British colonies and trading
relationships in Asia and the Pacific. So Annesley made the
Emperor several promises. He promised that Britain would compensate the
Emperor for all his lost property, and that the East
India Company would begin providing escorts for all Indian ships

(14:07):
headed toward Mecca for the Hajj, and most importantly, he
promised that Henry Every would be brought to justice. So
this is enough for the Emperor to agree not to
attack Bombay, but he also said that he would not
allow trade with Britain by the Mughal Empire to resume
until Every was captured, which is a serious economic situation.

(14:28):
Extremely Sir John Gayer's letter detailing Henry Every's attack on
the Mughal fleets, the riots, and the arrests of British
subjects in surret finally reached London in December of sixteen
ninety five. Other letters from Gayer, Annesley and others arrived
even later in January and May of sixteen ninety six.

(14:49):
By the time those last letters arrived, Every had already
gotten to New Providence Island and unloaded the fancy. The
Lords of Trade had also been succeeded by the Lord's
Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, also known as the Board
of Trade. They were faced with what to do about
every in the situation with the Mughal Empire at their
very first meeting in May of sixteen ninety six. So

(15:10):
as Holly just said, this was a serious problem. It
was more than just the fact that Henry every had
attacked a ship belonging to the Mughal Emperor, or that
he and his men had plundered the ship and brutalized
its passengers and the crew. It was also that Emperor
Aurangzeb was well convinced that England was a nation of pirates,
and histories from the time reflect that belief. In the

(15:32):
early eighteenth century, Persian historian Kafi Khan wrote that the
East India Company's holdings in Bombay were insignificant and that
quote the source of the remaining unstable income of the
English is the plunder and capture of the ships going
to the House of God at intervals of one to
two years. They attacked these ships, not at the time

(15:53):
when loaded with grains they proceed to Mecca and Jetta,
but when they return bringing gold, silver, ibraheim and rials.
And there was some truth to the Emperor's belief that
England was a nation of pirates. Although the British Empire
wasn't plundering the Mughal Empire's ships in an official capacity.
A lot of the pirates that were plundering in the

(16:14):
Caribbean and along the Pirate round were English and for
the most part, those pirates left English ships alone. On
top of that, multiple British colonial governors had made a
habit of either tolerating pirates or actively working with them.
So authorities in Britain needed to figure out not only
how to repair their relationship with the Mughal Empire, but

(16:34):
also how to send a signal to the rest of
the world that the nation would not tolerate piracy. So
and then all of this was tied together in the
dire economic consequence of the Emperor not allowing the East
India Company to operate in his territory anymore. So Britain
couldn't do anything as dramatic as, for example, summarily executing

(16:57):
people suspected of piracy. That probably would have satisfied some
of the criticism, but that would also violate British law.
So they started with a proclamation issued by the Lord
Justices of England on July seventeenth, sixteen ninety six. This
proclamation stated that they had received information that Henry every Quote,

(17:18):
under English colors, acted as a common pirate and robber
upon the high seas, and hath presumed under such colors
to commit several acts of piracy upon the seas of
India or Persia, which may occasion great damage to the
merchants of England trading into these parts. That's the end
of the quote. This proclamation went on to say that

(17:39):
every had stolen the ship known as the Charles from
the port in Spain, and the proclamation commanded admirals, captain's
governors and the like to capture him, offering a reward
of five hundred pounds. Another proclamation followed on August tenth,
which included a lot of the same information and also
said that every may now be going under the name

(18:01):
Henry Bridgeman. The second proclamation named a number of other
alleged pirates as well, and it said that the men
may have left the Caribbean and come to Ireland. Yet
another proclamation followed on August eighteenth, sixteen ninety six, this
one from the monarch William the Third, also known as
William of Orange. It was a proclamation quote for apprehending

(18:23):
Henry every alias Bridgeman and sundry other pirates. It called
Every and those sundry other pirates quote open and villainous transgressors,
and it ordered essentially every sort of law enforcement and
military in existence to seek out and apprehend them. The
bounty offered for Every was still five hundred pounds sterling,

(18:45):
and for the other pirates named it was fifty pounds.
This proclamation also indemnified all royal subjects from any quote
hazard of slaughter, mutilation, or other acts of violence that
they might commit against Avery and his accomplices, and it
advised to anyone sheltering or assisting any of the pirates
was doing so upon their highest peril. These proclamations made

(19:08):
it a point of naming colonial governors among the people
compelled to seek out and capture Every, because although it
was well known among pirates that a number of colonial
governors could be bribed or would otherwise work with them,
authorities in London were only starting to become fully aware
of how extensive this problem was. The proclamations did, not, however,
name Thomas tu As one of the wanted pirates. Apart

(19:31):
from the amity being too slow to keep up with
the ships, that assaulted the Ganji Sawai, meaning he was
not involved with that. He had been shot and killed
while trying to take a different ship in that same
Mughal convoy. A handful of men from Every's crew were
captured in Ireland, and even though every wasn't among them,
this at least gave the Crown someone to put on trial.

(19:52):
We're going to talk about that trial after we pause
for a sponsor break. Henry Every's captured crew members were
tried at the Central Criminal Court aka the Old Bailey
in October of sixteen ninety six, and this trial was
weird Number one. Even though it was being tried at

(20:15):
the Old Bailey, which is the place that has come
up before when we've been talking about criminal activity and
written during this point, it wasn't being tried under English
common law. It was being tried under the jurisdiction of
the Admiralty and this is because common law didn't really
cover nautical piracy. Number two. The reason they decided to
hold a trial under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty at

(20:37):
the Old Bailey rather than through the Admiralty Court was
so that the British citizenry would have the same access
to the proceedings as they would for any other criminal matter.
Since part of the purpose was to send a message
that the British Empire would not tolerate piracy, they needed
public proceedings and public interest, not a closed door session
of the Admiralty Court. They also needed the Mughal Emperor

(21:00):
to hear all of the details of the conviction and
execution of the pirates. Even with the Admiralty's involvement, though,
everything was operating a lot like any other trial at
the Old Bailey. The prosecutors were all legal professionals, but
the defendants were all on their own in terms of representation.
The trial opened on October nineteenth, and Henry Every was

(21:22):
named in the indictment, even though he was still at large.
Two witnesses, who were former members of Every's crew, provided
extensive detail about the incident, but the questioning also went
well beyond just what had happened with the Mughal fleet.
This trial was an opportunity for authorities to learn more
about the practice of piracy, and a lot of the

(21:42):
testimony was more about that than about the Ganji Sawai.
It was basically like they said, Okay, you know what
would be great is if we could get a better
handle on what all's going on with these pirates. So
let's try to establish a whole narrative of the pirate
situation rather than just investigating this one thing. So this
testimony demonstrated unequivocally that the men on trial had all

(22:06):
committed piracy. But when the jury returned a verdict they
acquitted all of them. That didn't go how they were hoping. Nope,
not at all. This was a problem and it was
a complete shock to the various authorities involved. On top
of failing to deliver a guilty verdict to try to
satisfy the Mughal Emperor, the proceedings also publicly aired a

(22:27):
lot of evidence that multiple British colonial governors were actively
working with and harboring pirates. So this whole, carefully choreographed
trial at the Old Bailey just something of a pr move.
Had done the opposite of what it was supposed to do.
It did not send the message that Britain wouldn't tolerate pirates.
It created a public record that in fact they did.

(22:49):
It was also a good example of how the people
were responsible for this proceeding were pretty out of touch
with the ordinary British citizenry. Basically, people really liked pirates.
Some of this was because of privateers like Sir Francis
Drake and Sir Henry Morgan, who had official and unofficial
support of the Crown and their harassment and plundering of
Spanish ships and colonies. Spain considered both of these men

(23:11):
to be pirates, but in Britain both of them had
been knighted, Drake by Queen Elizabeth the First and Morgan
by King Charles the Second. In the public eye, they
had set an example of pirates as noble patriots who
only targeted Britain's enemies. But it wasn't just about people
like Drake and Morgan. Henry Every himself had also become

(23:31):
a folk hero. Not long after he commandeered the Charles
the Second, someone had written a broadside ballad about it,
first published by Theophilis Lewis in sixteen ninety four. The
ballad was framed as something that every had written himself
and then sent back to shore with one of the mutineers.
That is certainly a fanciful fabrication, but the details in

(23:52):
the ballad are close enough to the historical record that
it's likely that whoever wrote the ballad heard about the
mutiny from someone who was actually therease ballad was not obscure.
Some of the wives of sailors aboard the Charles A
Second had filed a complaint against James Holblin, the merchant
who owned the ship. This was way back before it
was turned into a pirate ship. They claimed that he

(24:14):
was traitorously enslaving their husbands, and in the case that
came up before the Privy Council on August sixteenth of
sixteen ninety four, Hobland submitted a copy of this broadside
ballad as part of the documents in his defense. Like
this was not a thing nobody had ever heard of,
people were singing the song a lot. It was also

(24:35):
a pretty clear sign of how popular opinion viewed Henry Every.
In a sixteen ninety four printing, it's titled a copy
of Verses composed by Captain Henry Every Lately gone to
sea to seek his fortune, And it starts, Come, all
you brave boys whose courage is bold? Will you venture
with me? I'll glut you with gold. Make haste unto Corona.

(24:57):
A ship you will find that's called the Fancy Pleasure.
Your mind Captain Evrey is in her and calls her
his own. He will box her about boys before he
is done. French, Spaniard and Portuguese. The heathen likewise, he
has made a war with them until that he dies
after ten more, versus of very high spirited promises of

(25:17):
all the far off places that every plans to see
and plunder if necessary. It ends quote, Now this is
the course I intend for to steer my false hearted
nation to you. I declare I have done thee no wrong.
Thou must meet forgive. The sword shall maintain me as
long as I live. So with all that in mind,

(25:38):
in hindsight, it is not really all that surprising that
the jury acquitted Every's crew members. They were pirates, and
in the public eye, pirates were somewhere on a spectrum
between folk hero and noble patriot. There's also some romanticism
in the whole thing I have. The jury also was
not particularly sympathetic to the Mughal Emperor, who was a

(25:58):
Muslim foreigner on the other side of the world. So
the Admiralty, the British East India Company, and the British
government were all terrified that the Emperor was going to
learn about the pirate's acquittal and that it would just
confirm his suspicion that England was a nation of pirates.
So they turned to Sir Charles Hedges, chief Justice of
the High Court of the Admiralty, to arrange another trial

(26:22):
on a second set of charges, this time relating to
the mutiny aboard the Charles the Second rather than the
attack on the Mughal fleet. This was great because he
would allow them to try the men again, but it
was not ideal because the Emperor definitely wasn't going to
be satisfied with a conviction for mere mutiny, of which
he was not the victim. So in this second trial,

(26:44):
the prosecution, again in a very carefully choreographed proceeding, tried
to establish the legal idea that mutiny was theft, and
that theft on the high seas was piracy, so therefore
mutiny was piracy, but that the men were being tried
for me utiny, not piracy, so this was not an
issue of double jeopardy. This was some mental gymnastics, and

(27:06):
it's even reflected in the official court record from this
second trial, which ends the summation of the previous trial
with quote the jury, contrary to the expectation of the
court brought in all prisoners not guilty, whereupon the session
was adjourned to Saturday, the thirty first of October, and
the prisoners were committed upon a new warrant for several

(27:27):
other piracies. In the second trial, the prosecution talked to
the jury a lot about how bad piracy was and
how Britain looked to the rest of the world. In
that moment. Chief Justice Hedges also described what would happen
if the pirates were acquitted once again. Quote, the barbarous
nations will reproach us as being a harbor, receptacle and

(27:49):
a nest of pirates, and our friends will wonder to
hear that the enemies of merchants and of mankind should
find a sanctuary in this ancient place of trade. Nay,
we ourselves cannot but confess that all kingdoms and countries
who have suffered by English pirates, may, for want of redress,
in the ordinary course, have the pretense of justice and

(28:11):
the color of the laws of nations to justify their
making reprisals upon our merchants wheresoever they shall meet them
upon the seas. In case you missed it, the Chief
Justice just called the Mughal Empire a barbarous nation in court,
And even after this whole speech that was clearly designed
to sway the jury, he went on to say that

(28:33):
he was in fact not trying to sway the jury.
So this time the jury convicted all of the men
and they were all hanged on November fifteen, sixteen ninety six.
And with that done, and with a lot of reparations paid,
the Emperor of the Mughal Empire reluctantly allowed the East
India Company to resume its activities in its territory. The

(28:56):
proceedings of the trials were collected and printed at seven
Stars of Luodgar, which was owned by one of London's
largest printers and booksellers, the Everinghams. There are still copies
of it in more than forty libraries. Although it was
very widely distributed and widely read, it did not really
shift public opinion on Henry every or in fact of
pirates in general. Having this thing printed and widely distributed

(29:19):
was part of the plan from the beginning. They were like, Okay,
we're gonna have this trial. It's gonna be very public trial.
They're going to totally condemn all of these pirates, and
then we're going to print all of the stuff from
the trial so that everyone can read it whenever they want.
It didn't really go quite as planned. Instead of everybody
deciding that Henry every was a terrible, notorious pirate that
had brutalized a whole lot of people on a ship

(29:41):
that he had rated, he continued to be the hero
in a number of works of fiction. There was The
Life and Adventures of Captain John Avery by a pseudonymous
Captain Adrian von Brooke in seventeen oh nine. Seventeen thirteen
saw the play The Successful Pirate, written by Charles Johnson
and performed in London for several years. The King of Pirates,

(30:03):
being an account of famous enterprises of Captain Avery, the
mock King of Madagascar with his Rambles and Piracies, wherein
all the sham accounts formerly published of him are Detected,
was written in seventeen nineteen. It's often attributed to Daniel Dafoe.
Snappy title. Avery is also unsurprisingly a prominent feature in

(30:24):
a General History of Pirates, which came out in seventeen
twenty four under the name Captain Charles Johnson, but is
also often attributed to either Daniel Dafoe or Nathaniel Misst.
This colossally popular book on pirates is cited in many
biographies and histories, but it is definitely not an authoritative
work of nonfiction. We talk a little bit more about

(30:45):
it in our past episode on Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid.
Henry Avery is the first pirate that's discussed in it,
and that ballad that we talked about and read parts
of earlier survived through oral folks singing for more than
two hundred years. I mean there were print copies of
it still. You can still find very old copies of
that original broadside. But the way that people were passing

(31:07):
it was by singing for two hundred years. In spite
of an international manhunt, Henry Every was never seen again.
No one knows exactly what happened to him. Most of
these works of fiction contend that he married the Mughal
emperor's daughter and established his own kingdom in Madagascar. It's
more likely that he made his way back to England

(31:28):
to try to hide himself from that international manhunt and
died there in poverty. And Britain's very public announcements of
a crackdown on piracy didn't have that much of an
effect on piracy either. The Golden age of piracy, which
this incident happened kind of in the middle of, continued
on for more than thirty years, and this was also

(31:49):
a temporary blip in the East India Company's activities in
what's now India. The EIC went on to seize huge
amounts of territory on the Indian sub continent, and it
operated until eighteen seventy four. A bunch of those later
events have come up in other podcasts on the show,
most recently and are one about the East India Company
stealing tea secrets from China to then grow the tea

(32:12):
in India. Oh, East India Company. Yeah, in the middle
of a lot of problems, a lot a lot of problems.
When I started this whole thing with the idea of
litt we'll do a pirate. We haven't talked about a
pirate in a while. I was not expecting a weird,
convoluted legal pr move to be in the third act

(32:35):
of the show. Yeah, that's kind of the best part
of the story. I mean, the whole It's tragic because
I want to acknowledge that horrible things were done, but
I love the idea that they cooked up this whole thing,
not thinking for a minute that people would behave counter
to how they anticipated. Right, Like, there was no plan
be there. They were totally away. We're going to believe
we're going to convict these pirates, and the cherry was

(32:56):
going to be like you guys, thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of
the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email

(33:17):
address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us all over social media at missed Indistory, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
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Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(33:39):
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