The Pirate Who Won

On 7 September 1695, off the Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, an English pirate named Henry Every did something no criminal had quite managed before: he got away with so much money that the two most powerful institutions of his age couldn't touch him, and then he simply walked off the page of history.

The target was the Ganj-i-Sawai, a Mughal treasure ship on its way home from the pilgrimage to Mecca. This was not a soft target. The Dowager Empress Mariam-uz-Zamani had ordered the ship built after pirates burned an earlier vessel of hers; the Ganj-i-Sawai carried 62 guns and 400 musketeers, and in its day was reckoned the most dangerous ship afloat. Its cargo was the year's pilgrimage trade converted into gold and silver, and its passengers reportedly included a relative of the emperor Aurangzeb himself.

Every, commanding the 46-gun Fancy, had teamed up with five other pirate captains — a floating consortium including Thomas Tew, who did not survive the fight. When it was over, the pirates had taken somewhere between £325,000 and £600,000 in precious metals and jewels. The lower figure alone works out to roughly £108 million today. One historian ranked it among the two or three richest hauls any criminal has ever taken.

The consequences arrived quickly. Aurangzeb, furious, threatened to expel the East India Company from India entirely, which for the Company was an existential problem — its whole business depended on Mughal goodwill. To calm him, the Company promised to pay reparations, and Parliament declared the pirates hostis humani generis, "the enemy of all mankind." A £500 bounty went out on Every's head, later doubled by the Company to £1,000. Informers were promised a free pardon. Every was specifically exempted, by name, from any future amnesty England might issue.

This became, by most accounts, the first global manhunt on record. Several of Every's crew were eventually caught and hanged. Every was not.

He seems to have made his way to England's North American colonies, where corrupt governors were happy to take a cut and ask no questions, and then he vanished. One story has him dying penniless in Devon, cheated of his fortune by merchants who bought his jewels. Another has him living quietly under a false name. Nobody knows, and no coin of the treasure has ever surfaced.

Which raises the obvious question, unanswered for three centuries: where did a fortune worth £108 million go, and why has no one ever found so much as a doubloon of it?