Summary
The Capture of Blackbeard
Painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, painted in 1718.
European pirates in the Indian Ocean were a menace for European East India trading companies as much as Indian rulers, the Mughals and the Marathas, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this episode, we discuss the life of pirates in the Indian Ocean and the companies that chased them, thinking of piracy as more than just thievery in the seas.
Script
"Yes, I do heartily repent. I repent I had not done more mischief; and that we did not cut the throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you aren't hanged as well as we." -- This is a quote from an Anonymous pirate right before he was hanged, from Captain Charles Johnsons, A General History of the Pyrates, first published in 1724.
Piracy is probably as old as the idea of oceanic trade itself. But exactly who is a pirate? The pirate is not always the swashbuckling man with an eye-patch, a parrot on his shoulder, using colorful language as popular literature tells us, although I am somewhat sure that on the high seas, one could not do without colorful language.
A pirate is someone who robs or commits illegal acts of violence on the seas or within towns close to the sea. They are thieves and marauders, often resorting to violence to claim wealth carried by merchant vessels without the consent of a state or statelike authority. They can act in groups and often had a flotilla of sailing armies with them. Simply put, a pirate is someone who lives above the law. But, as you will see in this episode and the next, rather than defining the pirate as a lawless sea robber, it is useful to examine piracy as a political tool--that is, if someone is designated as a pirate, then who calls him one and whose law it is that a so-called pirate is resisting.
This is the Masala History podcast and my name is Deepthi Murali. And it is my pleasure to welcome you to our first episode back after a long sabbatical. This episode is part 1 of our two-part series on the piratic adventures of the Indian Coast. In this episode, we will encounter some of the early European pirates who plied the waters off of the Indian coast and why Indian waters were such an attractive space for these pirates.
I want to start by saying that at least some of the early European raiders in the Indian Ocean certainly did not start out as pirates. For example, the Captain of the vessel Seahorse, was sent to the Red Sea under royal command to capture Spanish ships when England was battling Spain for supremacy of the Americas. In this case, he was instructed to attack and pillage the opposing nation’s vessels. The two ships Samaritan and Roebuck cruising the Red Sea in 1635 and attacking not just Spanish but even Mughal ships were sent under the patronage of two London merchants and their silent partner, Endymion Porter, who was a Gentleman of the King’s bedchamber! The captain of Roebuck decided to attack any ship in his path including Indian ships even though Britain was not at war with the Mughals or any other Indian powers and no one had given the captain permission to attack these ships. It seems like the Indian Ocean had a talent to make ordinary sailors into pirates.
The Red Sea and the Arabian Sea were attractive to looters because all trade to the Red Sea from India was paid with gold and silver so ships returning to India were treasure chests waiting to be raided. A lot of Europeans--British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and others were only too keen to try their luck in the Indian Ocean because of the temptation offered by these riches. But it was not only Europeans who were engaged in piracy. European records from the 17th and 18th centuries are rife with descriptions of Indian and Arab pirates, also called “rovers”, who made the waters of western Indian Ocean especially close to the coasts dangerous places.
But let’s make something clear at the onset - the so-called Indian pirates, which will discuss in the next episode, were somewhat different from the European pirates. Because, in many cases, if you look through historical records of events, you would notice that most groups that the Europeans termed as Indian pirates were not really pirates at all in the conventional sense of the word. Here, the most important point is that the pirate is someone who lives outside the law. But, whose law? In an era before the United Nations and international waters laws, who decided the rules of trade and combat, especially on the seas? The answer is--everyone and no one. Each nation state, empire, or kingdom worked within their own set of laws that often were in direct opposition to each other.
In the seventeenth century, when the British were yet to colonize and reign supreme in South Asia, there were many different actors making and enacting laws in the Indian Seas. For example, the Portuguese in the sixteenth century came up with the Cartaz, a trade license or pass issued by them to ships plying in the Indian Ocean. The Cartaz system and the violence inflicted by the Portuguese on those who did not adhere to the system brought an end to the traditional cross-Asiatic trade prevalent in the Indian seas for centuries up until then. When the Portuguese power weakened in the Indian Ocean subsequently, the Dutch and then the British issued their own passes to merchant ships that allowed these ships to pass unmolested through the Indian Ocean and neighboring seas. But which of these passes were valid at any given time depended on a number of factors, from the ability of a trading company to exhibit their naval force to what wars were being fought in Europe. To complicate this system further, in the late-seventeenth century, the new Maratha empire following its inception under the great warrior-king Shivaji in 1679, also began to heavily invest in coastal trade, and if the British are to be believed, the Marathas invested greatly in piratic trade as well.
However, the so-called piracy of the Marathas or of any other Indian actors in the Arabian Sea such as the Siddis of Janjira or the Kolis of Sultanpur(?) must be properly situated within the politics of the western coast of India at this time. Because the Europeans in India, including the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguses classified Indian men of sea as pirates when it suited them. So for example, the Siddis of Janjira who are constantly referred to as a piratic nuisance in the mid-to-late-seventeeth century by the British and the Portuguese were not in fact marauders but a small dynastic seafaring family unit authorized in the late-seventeenth-century to ply the seas and tax ships by the Mughal emperor. In her book, Shanti Sadiq Ali informs us that in 1677, Emperor Aurangazeb provided the Siddis with men, provisions and four ships include two men of war, commandeered by Siddi Kasim and Siddi Sambal. Before Mughal patronage, Siddis may have migrated to the region of Murud in present-day western Maharashtra as army generals sent in the fifteenth-century from Ahmadnagar Sultanate to the Konkan Coast. In this history, it appears that the Siddis where not pirates at all but distinguished generals with a political lineage on the subcontinent. So the question of who is a pirate is really a question of which kingdom’s power was greatest at sea, and who had the means to exert their nation’s will often far away from home.
The so-called Indian pirates are our topic of interest in the next episode, particularly, the fierce Maharashtrian Angres, but in order to understand the impact and significance of Indian “piracy”, it is first important to contextualize piracy at large in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century that was more famously carried out by those I call global pirates--men, largely European, who sailed the seas of the world from the Americas to the Indonesian Islands looking for merchant ships to pillage.
The first European pirate in the Indian Ocean is thought to be Vincente Sodre, a Portuguese sailor accompanying Vasco da Gama in his second voyage to India in 1502. Just like many future pirates, Sodre likely deserted his crew sometime after the Portuguese fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope in mid-June of that year. Most European pirates started out with legitimate papers as part of Company trade or as crew commissioned by private merchants. Often, they ended up in the Indian Ocean even when their papers were cleared for other parts of the world. John Hand, for example, was given papers to take his vessel from Bristol to Lisbon and from thereon to Brazil. He set sail for Madeira but then he gathered his crew and announced that there had been a change of plans and that they were heading to India. Hand was happy to just trade in the Indian Ocean but would turn into a pirate if other merchants refused to sell him their wares at the price he demanded. Somewhat living up to the popular representation of pirates, Hand was quick to temper and his end came rather swiftly when he went ashore in Sumatra to teach the Sumatrans who refused to trade with him. He set sail to the shore muttering that he was going to teach the “black dogs” a lesson. Unfortunately for him, the pistol in his pocket went off and killed him.
The British East India Company struggling to get its foothold on the Indian subcontinent was troubled in more ways than one by European, particularly, British and British-American pirates. On the one hand, the EIC ships were raided with no mercy by many of these European pirates, and on the other hand, when British pirates captured an Indian ship, the merchants of the EIC were the ones that were left on the mainland to face the wrath of the Indian potentates, especially of the powerful Mughals.
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India had a longstanding trade with the Arabian peninsula. In the winter ships from the western coast would head to the Red Sea with traders and pilgrims to Mecca. When monsoon arrived a few months later they would gather their profits from Mocha and Jeddah and return to their home ports. This was a great time for pirates to attack and seize as much treasure as they could. In 1686, two ships flying under the English flag captured vessels worth 600,000 rupees in the Red Sea. These captured ships were from Surat, the main trading port under the Mughals in the region of Gujarat and it landed EIC officials there in a great deal of trouble. In August 1691, English pirates seized the vessel of Abdul Gaffur, one of the most wealthy merchants of Surat and a very powerful man. Gaffur’s ship was taken at the mouth of the Surat river and contained nine lakhs in rupees on board. This was a particularly offensive undertaking which led the Governor of Surat to place guards outside the British factory there and an embargo was placed on English traders. The European pirates went after ships of other European nations as well. In the same year, the British EIC’s ship Caesar bound for Bombay was chased on the Coast of Gambia in East Africa by five French pirate ships. By 1689, the factory officials at Fort St. George in Madras were writing that the seas were “pestered with pirates”.
Piracy was attractive simply because it was more lucrative than any other careers on the seas. Many times, the British East India Company saw their employees turn sympathizers which made it even harder for them to crack down on piracy. Some company men even joined the pirates and cruised the seas looking for plunder, many of whom eventually would be arrested. The most famous of these English pirates in the Indian Ocean was perhaps Henry Every (Henry Bridgman), more popularly known as John Avery. Avery started out in the Royal Navy before before he joined the merchant marine working on ships that sailed to the West Indies. By 1695, Avery had gone full pirate and had rounded the Cape and was plying in the waters of the western Indian Ocean. Every was very particular not to attack English or Dutch ships, even warning English and Dutch captains of other pirates waiting around to attack. “There is 160 od french Armed men now att Mohilla who waits for Opportunity of getting aney ship, take Care your Selves.” Avery wrote in February 1695 as a warning to those merchant captains on their way to Bombay.
An imaginative rendering of Henry Ever in front of his ship Fancy engaged in a sea battle, from Charles Johnson’s ‘A History of Pyrates’ published 1724.
European pirates by and large settled in the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. In the seventeenth century so many pirate settlements popped up on this island that only those who traded with pirates could approach this region. A few pirates fashioned themselves as minor kings within their settlements building forts and setting up church and parliament. Tew, an English pirate, who teamed up with a French pirate founded a settlement called Libertatia in Madagascar where slavery was prohibited and a Conservator appointed to make laws. When Libertatia was destroyed by local tribes, Tew took off for the Americas and lived in Rhode Island for a while before returning to piracy in the Red Sea. Madagascar was an ideal location for pirates as they could easily sail as far as the Sumatran Islands, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman (Persian Gulf), and the western coast of India.
But back to Every’s exploits in the Indian Ocean. In a single year, Every captured three English ships of American origin, he burned down a town on the Somali coast, and he captured one of Abdul Gaffur’s ships names Fateh Mahmood. But his single biggest capture was the Mughal emperor’s Ganj-i Sawai, a ship that was armed to the teeth carrying 80 guns and 400 matchlocks. It also contained profits from its Red Sea trade worth 53 lakh rupees (534000 pounds of the day). To give you some idea of how much that is, 53 lakh rupees could get you a 100,000 horses or pay for the labor of a skilled tradesman for almost 6 million days in England. It was a LOT of money!
The Ganj-i Sawai was so well-armed that it did not have a convoy accompanying it. Every bombarded it from the broadside which damaged the Mughal ships’s mast badly. The Captain Ibrahim Khan capitulated without much resistance and Every’s crew easily boarded the ship and plundered it for a week. They may have molested the crew including women on board but once all the loot that could be taken was taken, they left the ship to limp back to Surat.
Henry Every may have been active in the Indian Ocean only for six months. In 1695 he is said to have sailed to the Bahamas where he presented the Governor of Providence with gold for his and his crew’s safety. According to Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates, Every returned to England where a prize on his head was advertised. In 1696 some of his crew were found and sentenced to death. Johnson writes that Every then fled to Ireland where he died in poverty, having been cheated by a merchant of all his wealth. This may not have been accurate since he was never found and the price on his head never claimed, so it is likely that Every lived out his life comfortably in an assumed name, somewhere in Ireland or in the Americas leaving the English in India to face the consequences of his actions.
Following Every’s plunder of the ship ganj-i sawai, almost every official of the EIC in Surat and Bombay were imprisoned by the Mughals for eleven months. They were let go only after British, Dutch, and French agreed to send out their ships to patrol the seas and capture pirates while the British were also asked to pay very hefty fines.
The trouble was Every became a folk hero and word of his bounty spread leading many more privateers and pirates to flock to the Indian Ocean. John Biddulph in his book remarks that “every restless spirit was intent on seeking his fortune in this new Eldorado..” (Biddulph, 32) William Kidd, for example, a seaman deputed to privateer on the coast of Americas sailed instead to the Indian Ocean where he captured Quedah Merchant, a ship belonging to Armenian merchants sailing in from Bengal to Surat. He then abandoned his galley the Adventure for the Quedah Merchant which he then sailed to Boston. Captain Kidd became famous for his attempted piracy and fateful end when in 1701 he was hanged along with six of his crew mostly to set an example for other pirates. Kidd was perhaps not quite a pirate for his commission was initially sanctioned with the seal of the Crown. He was also not particularly successful, considering that he plundered only a few vessels compared to someone like Every or Tew, and most of what he had in his possession ended up being merchandize. Nonetheless, after his hanging, the Act of Partialiament in 1705 authorized the Crown to dispose his wealth in a prudent manner and 6472 pounds of Kidd’s gains were donated to the expenses of Greenwich Hospital still standing in England.
But piracy did not end in the Indian Ocean even after these measures. At the turn of the 18th century, trade was nearly impossible on India’s west coast due to these pirates. In the Gulf of Cambay, close to Surat, not one but three pirate ships from New York roamed about capturing ships worth 4 lakh rupees. Adding to these troubles for the East India Company was the constant desertion of the company sailors, some of whom mutineed or stole company ships to carry on piratic adventures.
It was not only the Mughals and the Surat merchants who were angered by European pirates. In 1697, Arabs from the Muscat region in the Persian Gulf captured London, a ship belonging to a private British merchant. They then forced the crew of London to fight on their behalf with the Portuguese. For Arab and Indian merchants, it was difficult to distinguish between private European merchants and pirates because all these ships sailed under European flags and it was not immediately clear who was a privateer and who was a pirate. The problem of rampant piracy was one that could not be resolved without active policing in the Indian Ocean. The task obviously fell upon the European trading companies, who since the advent of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, had taken over large portions of oceanic trade including protection under their passports. They had for more than a century raided ships that did not carry such passes. But in the 17th century companies themselves did not have the means required to police the vastness of the Indian Ocean, and their home governments also could not help for England and France, and most of Europe thereby, were at war with one another.
A large scale crackdown of pirates, however, was on the cards. When the Nine Years’ War, often thought of as the first global war, ended in Europe and in the Atlantic and Indian seas in 1697, the British Royal Navy began sending out warships that were called men of war to the Indian Ocean to help the East India Company save face in Asia and carry on their trading enterprise. Along with this, in 1701, King William the Third passed a new act that allowed British agents in other parts of the world to undertake trials by forming a court of seven persons. Under this act, which was carried out till 1719, pirates could now be tried in faraway places such as in India or the Carribean without having to get them back physically to England to stand trial. These interventions in the early-18th century did much to check European piracy in the Indian Ocean.
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The Europeans were not the only pirates in the Indian seas. 200 years before Vasco da Gama, Marco Polo had written home to Europe about the famous “Malabar'' pirates. He wrote: “And you must know that from this Kingdom in Melibar, and from another near it called Gozurat, there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruize. These pirates take with them their wives and children, and stay out the whole summer. Their method is to join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and then they form what they call a sea cordon, that is, they drop off till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so that they cover something like a hundred miles of sea, and no merchant ship can escape them. For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them. After thay have plundered they let them go, saying, ‘Go along with you and get more gain, and that mayhap will fall to us also!’” This passage is taken from Henry Yule’s translation of The Book of Marco Polo.
But Indian pirates, as I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, were somewhat different from European pirates. For one they were sometimes not pirates at all, like the Siddis of Janjira, who were in the seventeenth century the de facto Mughal navy, taxing and penalising ships in the name of the Mughal state. There were also other groups that operated in the Indian seas that fit the description of piratical adventurers such as the Kolis of Gujarat working from their stronghold in Sultanpur, at the mouth of the Kurla river. The Kolis used their little vessels to raid and ransack ships both Indian and European, especially in the Gulf of Cambay and the harbor of Bombay but they were likely aided and financed by wealthy merchants in Surat and other places and a portion of their raided wealth went to these merchants. There were also others with piratic tendencies - the Malabaris, the Sanganias of Beyt, Warrals of Diu in addition to Arab pirates from the Muscat region.
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Piracy is ultimately an issue of taxation and naval power in the Indian Ocean of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The study of the rise and fall of piracy in the Indian Ocean is a study also of the rise of British power in South Asia.
In the next episode, I will talk in detail about a family whom the British categorized as a pirate dynasty, namely the Maratha Angres. Of course, as it usually is with colonial British depictions of Indians, the Angre legacy is not a simple matter of piracy. The rise and fall of the Angre is tied to the history of the Maratha Empire itself. Were the Angres really pirates or were they admirals of the Maratha naval fleet? Were they as nationalist historians claim, some of India’s first freedom fighters or were they secretly plotting to bring down the Peshwa reign and the Maratha empire itself? In part 2 of this two part series on piratical adventurers of the Indian Coast, we will dive into the lives of Kanhoji Angre, the heroic naval commander, and his sons, who ruled the Arabian Sea for close to fifty years and bedeviled the British, the Dutch, and the Portuguese alike.
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European piracy did not completely end with King William’s Paliamentary Act of 1705. In 1720, for example, a master pirate named George Taylor roamed the Indian Seas plundering British, Portuguese and Indian ships alike. In 1721, his flotilla of 11 ships even seized the Viceroy of Goa! Piracy eventually died out in the nineteenth century as Britain strengthened its hold on South Asia and Africa. From the early nineteenth century, hardly any European pirate is heard of and the Indian groups engaged in naval warfare are almost completely exterminated. Historian Simon Layton remarks that the suppression of piracy in the Indian Ocean parallels the territorial expansion of the British East India Company on the subcontinent. The idea of piracy itself, he opines, “reveals a particular understanding of political and economical sovereignty that shaped the British imperial project, across Asia, in the early nineteenth century.” (Layton, 76) Ultimately, the pirates were a threat not only to potential profits gained from Indian Ocean trade and taxation of that trade but it was a political hurdle that had to be removed so that commerce and control of maritime space could become the backbone of the colonial-imperial system in South Asia. “The Imperialism of free trade” as John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson have called it, could not be possible if violators of this system were not subjugated.
further readings
To come soon!
This podcast episode is produced by Deepthi Murali (@drdeepthimurali on twitter) and Manamee Guha. Please let us know your thoughts here or connect with us @masalahistory on twitter.
Many thanks to John Bartmann and Pixelbay for the royalty-free music in this episode. Thanks also due to Ram Surendaran (@cheesecakephallusy) for lending his voice.