In September 1695, a pirate captain named Henry Every intercepted the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai in the Arabian Sea and walked away with a fortune contemporaries valued at somewhere between £325,000 and £600,000 in gold, silver, and jewels. It was the richest single pirate haul in recorded history, and it was not a lucky accident. Every was following a route that a small circle of English and American pirates had been quietly working for two years: a long haul from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean that historians now call the Pirate Round.
A Different Kind of Voyage
The Round was less a fixed course than a strategy. Pirates set out from Atlantic ports and havens, including Bermuda, New York, Nassau, and occasionally the Spanish port of A Coruña, and sailed south along the African coast, often stopping at Madeira. From there they rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Mozambique Channel, and made for Madagascar, which served as a resupply base for the final push toward the mouth of the Red Sea or the coast of India. It was a voyage of many months each way, far longer and more dangerous than a Caribbean cruise, undertaken because the payoff at the far end could dwarf anything available closer to home.
Why the Indian Ocean
The prize was the annual traffic between India and the Red Sea: Mughal ships carrying pilgrims to Mecca and merchants trading between Surat and Mocha, laden with the accumulated wealth of the pilgrimage and trade season and comparatively lightly armed. Rhode Island captain Thomas Tew is generally credited with opening the route in 1693; his cruise returned such a spectacular profit that a wave of other captains followed his course over the next several years, Every among them.
The Ganj-i-Sawai Affair
Every’s capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai, one of the largest ships in the Mughal fleet, did more than make him rich. Emperor Aurangzeb, furious at an attack on pilgrims bound for Mecca, shut down four English East India Company trading posts in India and briefly threatened to expel the English from the subcontinent entirely. The East India Company and the English crown responded by declaring Every and his crew enemies of humanity and posting a combined bounty of £1,000, launching what is often described as the first worldwide manhunt in recorded history. Every himself was never caught.
Madagascar’s Role
None of this was possible without a reliable base along the way, and for years that base was Madagascar, where a trader named Adam Baldridge ran a settlement at St. Mary’s Island that supplied passing pirate crews with provisions, repairs, and a market for goods no one asked too many questions about. When Baldridge fled the island in 1697 after a local uprising, the Round’s support network began to fray, though pirates continued operating out of Madagascar in smaller, less organized ways for years afterward.
The Round’s Last Great Prize, and Its End
The largest single haul of the entire era did not come until 1721, when John Taylor and Olivier Levasseur captured the Portuguese East Indiaman Nossa Senhora do Cabo off Réunion, seizing diamonds and treasure worth an estimated £800,000, by some measures even richer than Every’s prize a generation earlier. But the Round was already in decline by then. Naval escorts for Indian and Mughal shipping grew stronger, the loss of secure Madagascar bases made resupply harder, and many of the most successful Caribbean-era pirates who followed, including Edward Low, George Lowther, and Bartholomew Roberts, never bothered with the Indian Ocean route at all, finding the Atlantic profitable enough without the months-long voyage each way.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “Pirate Round” and “Henry Every”; goldenageofpiracy.org, “The Pirate Round.” Contemporary estimates of the Ganj-i-Sawai’s value varied considerably at the time and still do; this piece cites the range rather than a single figure.
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