In 1694 London’s streets echoed with a call to the piratical life:
Come all you brave boys, whose courage is bold, Will you venture with me, I’ll glut you with gold?Make haste unto Corona, a ship you will findThat’s called the Fancy, will pleasure your mind.
In a week-long orgy of savagery, women flung themselves overboard to escape gang rape
The ballad was supposedly written by the ‘pirate king’ Henry Every, who was about to pull off an astonishingly daring raid. In one fell swoop he’d landed the equivalent of $20 million by today’s reckoning, and — some said — married an Indian princess to boot. He’d also vanished off the face of the earth. His crime not only sent shock waves round the globe; it insulted the world’s richest man and gravely jeopardised the fledgling East India Company.
In the summer of 1695 the Ganj-i-Sawai (or Gunsway, as it was anglicised), a vast, armed dhow belonging the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb of India, was returning from the Hajj filled with treasure and pilgrims when it was intercepted between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
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