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A handful of coins to understand where a 17th century pirate vanished

2021-04-10T04:19:37.716Z


Disappeared after the looting in 1695 of a royal vessel of Mughal India, the pirate Henry Every could have been reconverted as a slave trader in New England.


The criminal career of the English pirate Henry Every was as brief as it was resounding.

His most famous blow was the capture on September 7, 1695 of

Ganj-i-Sawai

, the royal ship of the Great Mughal Aurangzeb.

Loaded with pilgrims returning from Mecca to India, the vessel contained an invaluable cargo of gold and silver, a colossal sum estimated at a few tens of millions of dollars today.

Pursued across the seven seas after his coup, the pirate, his crew and his treasure pass through the emails of all their pursuers and seem to evaporate traces of history.

Have they sunk somewhere?

Or had the hacker simply - and quietly - gone out of business?

From the elusive Henry Every, no one knows what happened… until some distant and ancient coins resurfaced along the eastern coasts of North America.

What to solve the riddle of the phantom pirate?

Read also: Six pirate bodies discovered in the wreckage of a ship sunk in 1717 near Cape Cod

The answer to Henry Every’s mysterious fate began to emerge in New England.

In 2014, Jim Bailey, a local detectorist with a diploma in anthropology, found a first exotic-looking piece on a farm in Middentown (Connecticut), whose appearance contrasted particularly with the coins of the time of the British colonies that he had already had the opportunity to find on the site in the past.

As he cleaned the coin, he soon realized that it was not a Spanish coin, as he began to suspect, but an Arab coin from the other side of the world, perfectly preserved.

The object, a silver dirham, was made in present-day Yemen in 1693. It is the first in a series of 16 other Arabic coins that will be found in the following years in New England, under the tools of aspiring detectorists.

From the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean

Historians until then assumed that the crew had disappeared somewhere in the Caribbean or the British Isles, the last traces of the pirate having been attested in Ireland in 1696, where he had stopped after a passage in the Bahamas.

The looting of

Ganj-i-Sawai

having embarrassed King William III and the British East India Company, which had good commercial relations with the Mughal Empire, Henry Every is sought after in the four corners of the globe, in which some call it “

the world's first manhunt

”.

Between Europe and the West Indies, he could therefore have chosen a third path: the British colonies of New England.

For Jim Bailey, there is no doubt: the fifteen ancient coins discovered in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and North Carolina precisely attest to the dispersal of the

Ganj-i-Sawai

treasure

by Henry Every and the rest of his men. .

Read also: United States: two schools no longer want the name of French explorer Jean Ribault

"

There are a lot of first-hand historical documents which show that the American colonies were bases of operations for the pirates

", recalled the happy detectorist.

Abandoning his historic ship, the

Fancy

, chased by the British Crown who had put a price on his head, Henry Every would have sailed along the American coast in a new vessel, the

Sea Flower

, posing as a slave trader, an activity flourishing in the emerging New World.

Landed in Newport (Rhode Island), he would have sold about forty slaves, acquired in part in Reunion, on his return from his expedition to the Indian Ocean.

At least some of the sailors, including perhaps Henry Every, would then have remained in the region.

"

It seems that some of his crew were able to settle in New England and integrate there

," commented archaeologist Sarah Sportman for The Associated Press.

It's almost like a money laundering scheme.

"

While it is to be supported by new research and other field discoveries, the hypothesis of a golden, American and slavery retreat of Captain Henry Every intrigued historians specializing in the subject. Published in the

Journal of the American Numismatic Society

, Jim Bailey's research has been found credible by several American academics. Admiring the documentation work done, University of Connecticut archeology professor Kevin McBride said it was a “

really interesting story

”. “

The story of Captain Every is global in scope,

” said Mark Hanna, associate professor of history at the University of California at San Diego, about the pirate's journey. Between looting and slavery, it is true that the story of Henry Every casts a harsh light on the realities of the triangular trade from which he profited both as a pirate and as a slave trader. The historical image he reflects remains far removed from the fictionalized illustrations of his adventures, long maintained by literature and, more recently, by video games and cinema.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-04-10

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