By William J. Kole - The Associated Press
WARWICK, Rhode Island - A handful of coins that were unearthed in a fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and elsewhere in New England could help solve one of the oldest mysteries on the planet.
The villain in this story: a murderous English-born pirate who became
the world's most wanted criminal after looting a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims
from Mecca to India, then eluding capture by posing as a slave trader .
"It's a near-perfect crime story," says Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal prospector who found the first intact 17th-century Arab coin in a meadow in Middletown, a town in Newport County, Rhode Island.
The old coin, one of the oldest ever found in North America, could explain how pirate captain Henry Every vanished without a trace.
On September 7, 1695, the pirate ship Fancy, commanded by Every, ambushed and seized the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal ship owned by the Indian emperor Aurangzeb, then one of the most powerful men in the world.
On board were not only the faithful returning from their pilgrimage, but also tens of millions of dollars in gold and silver.
Amateur historian Jim Bailey uses a metal detector to search for colonial-era artifacts in a field on March 11, 2021, in Warwick, Rhode Island.
What followed was one of the most lucrative and heinous robberies of all time.
According to the history books,
his gang tortured and killed the men aboard the Indian ship and raped the women
before escaping to the Bahamas, which at the time was a haven for pirates.
But word of their crimes quickly spread, and the English King William III, under enormous pressure from a scandalized India and the trading giant East India Company, offered them a huge bounty on their heads.
[A deer suddenly ends up inside a school bus after colliding with the vehicle]
"If you Google the 'world's first chase,' Every comes up," says Bailey.
"Everybody was looking for these guys."
Until now, historians only knew that Every finally sailed to Ireland in 1696, where his track went cold.
But Bailey says the coins he and others have found are evidence that the famous pirate first made his way to the American colonies, where he and his crew used the loot for their daily expenses, while on the run.
The first intact coin appeared in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, a place that had piqued Bailey's curiosity two years earlier after he had found old colonial coins, an 18th-century shoe buckle and some musket balls.
Waving a metal detector over the ground, he received a signal, dug, and found dirty money, literally: a darkened silver coin the size of a dime.
Bailey says he initially assumed it was Spanish or money minted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Looking closer, the Arabic text engraved on the coin quickened her pulse.
"I thought, 'Oh my God,'" he says.
An investigation confirmed that the exotic coin was minted in 1693, in Yemen.
That immediately raised questions, Bailey says, as there is no evidence that
American settlers struggling to make a living in the New World traveled anywhere in the Middle East
to trade, until decades later.
A horror surprise: what this New York woman found behind her bathroom mirror
March 6, 202100: 42
Since then, other metal detectorists have unearthed 15 additional Arab coins from the same era: 10 in Massachusetts, three in Rhode Island, and two in Connecticut.
Another was found in North Carolina, where records show that some of Every's men made landfall for the first time.
"It seems that part of his crew was able to settle in New England and integrate," says Sarah Sportman, a Connecticut state archaeologist, where one of the coins was found in 2018 in excavation on a 17th-century farm, still ongoing.
"It was almost money laundering," he says.
Although it sounds unthinkable now, Every was able to hide in plain sight by posing as a slave trader, an emerging profession in 1690 New England. On his way to the Bahamas, he even stopped on the French island of Reunion to get some black slaves to disguise. says Bailey.
Old records show that a ship called the Sea Flower, used by pirates after they left the Fancy, sailed along the east coast.
He arrived with nearly four dozen slaves in 1696 in Newport, Rhode Island, which had become a major center for the slave trade in North America in the 18th century.
"There is extensive documentation from primary sources that shows that the American colonies were bases of operations for pirates," ice Bailey, 53, who has a degree in anthropology from the University of Rhode Island and worked as an archaeological assistant on the explorations from the pirate ship Wydah Gally, which sank off Cape Cod in the late 1980s.
Bailey, whose daily job is to analyze security at the state's prison complex, has published his findings in a research journal of the American Numismatic Society, an organization dedicated to the study of coins and medals.
Archaeologists and historians familiar with, but not involved in, Bailey's work say they
are intrigued and believe that he is shedding new light on one of the world's most enduring criminal mysteries.
Surprising find of possible twin elephants in Sri Lanka
July 9, 202000: 31
"Jim's research is flawless," says Kevin McBride, a professor of archeology at the University of Connecticut.
"It's kind of cool. It's really quite an interesting story."
Mark Hanna, an associate professor of history at the University of California-San Diego and an expert on piracy in America's early years, said that when he first saw the photos of the Bailey coin, he lost "his mind."
[Millions of valuable coins circulate in the United States again]
"Finding those coins, for me, was a huge thing," says Hanna, author of the book
Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire
(2015).
“Captain Every's story is of global significance.
This material object, this little thing, can help me explain that. "
Every's cruelties have inspired
Steven Johnson's
book
Enemy of All Mankind
(2020);
the popular
PlayStation
video game series
Uncharted
;
and a Sony Pictures film version of
Uncharted
, starring Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas, due for release in early 2022.
Bailey, who keeps her most valuable finds not at home but in a safe deposit box, says she will continue to investigate.
"For me, it's always been about the thrill of what I'll find, not the money," he confesses.
"The only thing better than finding these objects is the lost stories behind them."