Enemy of All Mankind Read online

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  Copyright © 2020 by Steven Johnson

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Johnson, Steven, 1968– author.

  Title: Enemy of all mankind: a true story of piracy, power, and history’s first global manhunt / Steven Johnson.

  Description: New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022493 (print) | LCCN 2019022494 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735211605 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735211629 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Avery, John, active 1695. | Pirates—Great Britain—Biography. | Piracy—Economic aspects—Great Britain—History. | Piracy—Economic aspects—Mogul Empire—History. | International economic relations—History. | Great Britain—Economic conditions—17th century. | Mogul Empire—Economic conditions—17th century. | Mogul Empire—Foreign economic relations—Great Britain. | Great Britain—Foreign economic relations—Mogul Empire.

  Classification: LCC G537.A9 J64 2020 (print) | LCC G537.A9 (ebook) | DDC 910.4/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022493

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022494

  Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Cover design: Gregg Kulick

  Cover images: (flag, crossbones, hourglass) Culture Club / Hulton Archive / Getty Images; (depiction of Henry Every’s pirate flag) Unknown author via Wikimedia Commons

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  For Alexa

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I. THE EXPEDITION

  1. Origin Stories

  2. The Uses of Terror

  3. The Rise of the Mughals

  4. Hostis humani generis

  5. Two Kinds of Treasure

  6. Spanish Expedition Shipping

  7. The Universe Conqueror

  8. Holding Patterns

  II. THE MUTINY

  9. The Drunken Boatswain

  10. The Fancy

  11. The Pirate Verses

  12. Does Sir Josiah Sell or Buy?

  13. West Wind Drift

  14. The Ganj-i-Sawai

  15. The Amity Returns

  16. She Fears Not Who Follows Her

  17. The Princess

  III. THE HEIST

  18. The Fath Mahmamadi

  19. Exceeding Treasure

  20. The Counternarrative

  21. Vengeance

  22. A Company at War

  IV. THE CHASE

  23. The Getaway

  24. Manifest Rebellion

  25. Supposition Is Not Proof

  26. The Saltwater Faujdar

  27. Homecomings

  V. THE TRIAL

  28. A Nation of Pirates

  29. The Ghost Trial

  30. What Is Consent?

  31. Execution Dock

  Epilogue: Libertalia

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Elegant and excellent was the pirate’s answer to the great Macedonian Alexander, who had taken him: the king asking him how he dare molest the seas so, he replied with a free spirit, “How dare thou molest the whole world? But because I do with a little ship only, I am called a thief: thou doing it with a great navy, art called an emperor.”

  —ST. AUGUSTINE, The City of God

  Suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease.

  —HENRY NEWTON

  The Indian Ocean, west of Surat

  September 11, 1695

  On a clear day, the lookout perched atop the forty-foot mainmast of the Mughal treasure ship can see almost ten miles before hitting the visual limits of the horizon line. But it is late summer, in the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean; the humidity lingering in the air draws a hazy curtain across the spyglass lens. And so by the time the English vessel comes into focus, she is only five miles away.

  The existence of an English ship in these waters is hardly noteworthy. They are only a few days’ sail from Surat, one of India’s most prosperous port cities, and the original headquarters of the East India Company. At first sight, the lookout doesn’t even think it necessary to sound an alarm. Yet as the seconds pass, as the blurred shape of the boat looms in the spyglass, something catches his attention in the approaching vessel: not her colors, but her speed in the water. The ship is in full sail, he can see now, running before the wind. And she is moving fast, at least ten knots, maybe more—easily twice the top speed of the treasure ship. The lookout has never seen a ship sail with such velocity across the open water.

  By the time the lookout alerts the crew below him, the English ship is already visible to the naked eye.

  From his vantage point on the quarterdeck, the captain of the Indian ship still has little reason to fear the approaching vessel, however fast she might be. He has eighty cannons lining his gun decks, supported by four hundred muskets and nearly a thousand men. From what he can make out, the English ship cannot have more than fifty cannons and a fraction of his crew. Even if she is under the command of pirates on the attack, the captain has been at sea for months without incident; he has sailed unchallenged through the notorious pirate’s nest at the mouth of the Red Sea. Now he is practically in sight of his home port in Surat. What pirate would dare to challenge him in these waters, with so little firepower?

  But the captain does not know the long history that has brought these two ships together. He does not know that the men aboard the English vessel have traveled thousands of miles to get this close to a ship returning to harbor with unimaginable riches in its hold, that they have waited more than a year for this precise opportunity. He does not know what these men are capable of, the crimes they have already committed.

  And he does not know the near future, the two improbable events that are about to unfold within seconds of each other, radically undermining his advantage.

  The sequence begins with the smallest of mistakes. An inexperienced gunner packs an extra ounce or t
wo of gunpowder into the chamber of a cannon. Or perhaps, days or weeks earlier, the gun crew fails to clean the cannon properly, and a residue of gunpowder remains in the chamber, unnoticed. Or perhaps the chain of events starts much further back, in a blast furnace somewhere in India, where a minuscule flaw is formed in the cast-iron “reinforce” that houses the ignition chamber, a flaw that goes undetected for years, slowly weakening with each blast, until one day it fails.

  A cannon is a simple piece of technology. It is a device that takes the multidirectional energy of an explosion and channels it down a single pathway, defined by the cannon’s bore, the long cylinder down which the cannonball travels on the way to its intended target. The physics of the device are so intuitive that cannons were almost immediately invented once human beings first hit upon the chemical cocktail of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate—what we now call gunpowder—roughly a thousand years ago. Other uses of explosions—internal combustion engines, hand grenades, hydrogen bombs—would take centuries to emerge. But the cannon seems to have been a logical corollary to the discovery of gunpowder’s propulsive force. Almost as soon as we had figured out how to make an explosion, we figured out how to harness that energy to shoot a heavy projectile through the air at high speeds.

  The cannon was simple and effective enough that its basic design and operation went unchanged for hundreds of years. Gunpowder is funneled down the bore to the ignition chamber in a process called muzzle-loading, and then packed by a wadding conventionally made of paper. A cannonball is then inserted and wedged up against the wadding. Above the chamber, a small tube leads up to the top of the cannon, ending in a tiny opening called the touch hole. A fuse trails down from the touch hole into the chamber. In normal operations, a gunner lights the fuse, and a moment later, the gunpowder ignites, triggering a devastating blast of energy contained on all but one side by the sturdy bonds of iron and carbon in the cast-iron reinforce. Almost all the energy of the explosion rushes out the bore, propelling the cannonball with it.

  Yet for all its strength, the crystalline structure of cast iron can sometimes be marred by invisible impurities, particularly when the ratio of carbon to iron is not properly regulated, making it prone to catastrophic failure. And when the cast-iron reinforce that houses the ignition chamber fails, a cannon ceases to be a cannon. It becomes a bomb.

  The four members of the gun crew standing next to that cannon, as its reinforce shatters into hundreds of fragments, are dead before the sound of the explosion reaches their ears. And they are the lucky ones. The gunpowder ignition creates a sudden increase in air pressure inside the chamber; air that is normally fifteen pounds per square inch in a matter of milliseconds is pressurized to more than a thousand pounds per square inch. A blast wave surges out in all directions, traveling at more than twenty thousand feet per second, ten times the speed of sound. The wave severs arms and legs from the torsos of the nearby gunners, ruptures their organs; the combination of heat and pressure liquefies their eyeballs. By the time the second wave of energy—called the shock wave—rolls in, carrying the cast-iron fragments of the cannon at supersonic speeds, the gun crew has ceased to exist. The shock waves and the cannon fragments simulate the effects of a modern-day nail bomb, burrowing into the flesh and bones of other gun crews standing farther away. Hands and ears and legs are blown off; vital organs are punctured. Within a matter of seconds, the gun deck of the ship is coated with blood and tissue. And then, as the blast wind rushes back to fill the vacuum caused by the explosion, the wooden planks of the ship catch fire.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW HUNDRED FEET AWAY, on the gun deck of the English ship, powder boys shuttle ordnance to the crews gathered around their cannons. There is a mechanical, rhythmic order beneath the surface chaos of the scene. An officer surveys a collection of gun crews, barking commands at regular intervals. “Cast loose your gun,” he shouts, and the crews free the cannons from the tackles that hold them lashed to the ports. “Level your gun . . . Out tompion . . . Run out your gun . . .” With each order, the crews heave and thrust and balance in synchronized patterns, the deadly ballet of a ship engaged in battle. The midshipman commands, “Prime!” and a thin line of powder is poured down each touch hole. The crews do not notice the explosion that has unleashed such devastation on the gun deck of the Indian ship; they are intent on the most challenging of the midshipman’s commands, the final one before the firing: “Point your gun.”

  Aiming a cannon on a seventeenth-century vessel is not even an art, much less a science. Calculating the proper trajectories for a projectile hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour is hard enough on land. In fact, few practical tasks have a longer history of inspiring mathematical ingenuity than figuring out the trajectory of a projectile. Some of the first differential equations were developed to predict the flight of a cannonball shot. Many of the original computers built during World War II were explicitly designed to calculate rocket trajectories. But standing there in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 1695, heaving a five hundred pound cannon toward a small opening as the ship rolls with the waves, the idea of taking true aim is almost laughable. There is no time for math. You point the gun in the general direction of the opposing vessel; you listen for the officer’s command; you hope for the best.

  Despite the inexact nature of these weapons, every now and then the physics comes together to produce the perfect strike. Just minutes after the explosion on the Indian ship, one of the cannonballs released in the broadside hurtles across the gap that separates the ships and collides directly with the base of the mainmast of the Indian vessel: the single most devastating blow you can deliver with one cannonball. The mast collapses, and a tangled heap of rope and canvas crashes onto the deck. Without the square rig sails, the Indian ship cannot harness the energy of the wind with anywhere near the efficiency that it possessed seconds before. Still ablaze and bloodied from the cannon explosion, the treasure ship is suddenly defenseless. Within minutes, the British have boarded her.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT ARE THE ODDS of these two events happening in the same instant? Explosions had plagued cannon design from the very origins of the technology, and they remained an issue well into the modern age. (An 1844 explosion during a cannon demonstration killed the US Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of State, and very nearly killed President John Tyler.) But the likelihood of a cannon exploding on any given firing was very small, probably less than one in five hundred. The odds of hitting the lower half of the mainmast with a single shot were not much better: The beam of the mast is two feet wide on a ship that is more than two hundred feet long. Aim too low, and the broadside lands in the water or barrels into the gun decks. It is at least a one-in-a-hundred shot. Thanks to the laws of probability being devised by Blaise Pascal right around the same period, we know that the odds of two unrelated events happening simultaneously can be calculated by multiplying the individual odds of each event. If you could somehow replay those seconds five thousand times, the combination of the cannon explosion and the mainmast strike might never happen again.

  You can measure the difference between these two events happening and not happening in inches and ounces. Remove that tiny impurity from the cast-iron reinforce, or shift the cannon an inch to the left as it fires, and the Indian vessel easily shakes off its underpowered attacker. But like the cannon explosion itself, an almost imperceptible difference—a few ounces of extra gunpowder—can trigger nonlinear results. In the case of these two ships confronting each other in the Indian Ocean, those nearly microscopic causes will trigger a wave of effects that resonate around the world. Most confrontations like this one, viewed from the wide angle of history, are minor disputes, sparks that quickly die out. But every now and then, someone strikes a match that lights up the whole planet. This is the story of one of those strikes.

  You can think of the narrative that follows as a kind of hourglass. At th
e waist of the hourglass—its center point—are those few seconds on the Indian Ocean in 1695: the exploding cannon, the destroyed mainmast. Before the waist is the layered history of events that made those extraordinary seconds possible. After the waist is the sweeping—truly global—chain of events those seconds unleashed.

  To do justice to that story—particularly on the pre-history side of the hourglass—the chains of cause and effect have to run at different scales. Some events have short-term causes, like that exploding cannon or the direct hit on the mainmast. But other causes roll in more slowly, like those that ultimately brought so much treasure aboard the Mughal ship, or the ones that ultimately incentivized a small band of human beings to deliberately become pirates. A full account of the events demands that you break out of the boundaries of period histories and traditional biographies. You have to jump around in time to get the facts right. Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn’t always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are proximate, in the moment. Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred—or a thousand—years later.

  * * *

  —

  AT ITS SIMPLEST, this is the story of a rogue pirate and his sensational crime. While piracy is an ancient profession, the most famous pirates of history would not take the stage until two decades or so after the events chronicled in this book. But that “golden age” generation—Blackbeard, Samuel Bellamy, Calico Jack—was very much inspired by the notorious acts described here, and the legends that spun up around them. While the pirate at the center of this story is not as famous today as those iconic figures from the golden age, he had a more significant impact on the course of world events than Blackbeard and his peers. This book is an attempt to measure that impact, to chart its boundaries. It tells the story of the individual lives caught up in the crisis that erupted after the events of September 1695, but also the stories of a different kind of character, one step up the chain: forms of social organization, institutions, new media platforms. One of those institutions was as ancient as piracy itself: the autocratic theocracy of the Mughal dynasty. The others were just coming into being: the multinational corporation, the popular press, the administrative empire that would come to dominate India starting in the middle of the next century. In part, this is a book about a deeply flawed man who became a pirate for a very short, but very eventful period of his life, a life that is more intriguing and more mysterious the further you dig into it. But it also describes a different kind of life span, the story of how some of the most powerful institutions of modern history went from a fledgling idea, promising but not inevitable, to world conquest.