ENEMY OF ALL MANKIND
A TRUE STORY OF PIRACY, POWER, AND HISTORY’S FIRST GLOBAL MANHUNT
STEVEN JOHNSON
Riverhead, 304pp, £23.99, ebook £11.99
Devonshire pirate Henry Every pulled off ‘the heist of the 17th century’, wrote John Gapper in the Financial Times, when in 1694 he captured a 15,000-ton ship, the Ganj-i-sawai (Persian for ‘exceeding treasure’), which belonged to India’s Mughal emperor and was carrying a cargo of gold, silver, jewels, ivory and saffron worth £20 million in today’s money. Also on board were women making their pilgrimage to Mecca, who became the victims of ‘brutal mass rape’, one of whom was the emperor’s granddaughter. Threatened with expulsion from India ‘amid outrage’, the East India Company ‘turned its crisis into an opportunity by pledging to guard the seas against pirates’, and thereby ‘an English pirate’s violent robbery led the way to his country’s seizure of a continent’. Although several of the pirates were eventually hanged, Every was never caught.
As Adam Higginbotham noted in the New York Times, Johnson is ‘less interested in the story of Henry Every than in its implications, and its part in a wider meta-narrative. As a result, we are treated to often fascinating digressions on the origins of terrorism, celebrity and the tabloid media; the tricky physics of cannon manufacture; and the miserable living conditions of the average 17th-century seaman. At times, this approach proves a hindrance to being swept away by the tale of the world’s “most wanted man”, and is complicated by the thinness of the historical record and disagreement about what really happened and to whom: much of the book is given over to debate and conjecture about what did occur.’