He Picked the Wrong Ship

In 1694, the East India Company was just a corporation, not the rulers of India. Their operations in India were subject to the permission of the Mughals. Keep that in mind while you read what follows.

 

In that year, a man named Henry Every joined a privately sponsored British expedition to the Americas, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind. But the ship got blocked in Spain indefinitely. With no end to the stoppage, their salaries no longer being paid, and rumours swirling that the men might be sold into slavery, Every and some of the crew took over the ship. It had now become a pirate ship.

 

Instead of going to the Caribbean though, Every made the fateful decision to round the Cape of Good Hope and find his prey among the trading ships between Arab lands and India. He ended up picking a much larger and wealthy ship called the Ganj-i-Sawai. Returning from the hajj, and laden with enormous wealth, it also had many women on board. Every’s ship shouldn’t have stood a chance against the larger and well-armed ship, but luck smiled on him and he won. The usual acts of piracy – looting, torturing victims to find all the hidden wealth on board, raping the women – followed. Eventually, the Ganj-i-Sawai and her survivors limped back to Surat.

 

Why did the specifics of this particular act of piracy even survive? Wasn’t it just just another act of piracy, nothing abnormal for that age? And didn’t other, far great acts of atrocity by whites against natives of various parts of the world never get published or talked about?

 

Two reasons. One, this ship belonged to Aurungzeb and the women on board were from his royal court. And two, one of Aurungzeb’s eventual court historians, Khafi Khan, happened to be in Surat at that time:

“(Khan was) a master storyteller landing in Surat just in time to intercept a ship bearing news of the crime of the century.”

 

Every had picked the wrong ship. As I said at the beginning, all British trade with India was via the East India Company, who operated at the pleasure of the Great Mughal. A furious Aurungzeb might kill the officials of the East India Company (After all, they were all the same to him – all Britishers. And it wasn’t unheard of for trading companies to indulge in piracy in those days). Even more problematically, what if Aurungzeb cut off all further trade to Britain in retaliation – that was simply unacceptable to the British government.

“It was hard to imagine a crime better engineered to infuriate Aurungzeb.”

But the East India Company had one thing to offer him:

“The company was too much a profit center for the Mughal regime to expel.”

 

And so it came to be that Every and his crew were declared as “enemies of all mankind” (see my earlier blog for more on that phrase) by the British government. A huge bounty was put on their heads, and the largest global manhunt in history (until that time) was started.