Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt - Softcover

Johnson, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735211612 ISBN 13: 9780735211612

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“Thoroughly engrossing . . . a spirited, suspenseful, economically told tale whose significance is manifest and whose pace never flags.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
From The New York Times–bestselling author of The Ghost Map and Extra Life, the story of a pirate who changed the world

Henry Every was the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular—and wildly inaccurate—reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event—the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew—and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It’s the gripping tale of one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.

Johnson uses the extraordinary story of Henry Every and his crimes to explore the emergence of the East India Company, the British Empire, and the modern global marketplace: a densely interconnected planet ruled by nations and corporations. How did this unlikely pirate and his notorious crime end up playing a key role in the birth of multinational capitalism? In the same mode as Johnson’s classic nonfiction historical thriller The Ghost Map, Enemy of All Mankind deftly traces the path from a single struck match to a global conflagration.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of thirteen books, including Where Good Ideas Come From, How We Got to Now, The Ghost Map, and Extra Life. He’s the host and cocreator of the Emmy-winning PBS/BBC series How We Got to Now, the host of the podcast The TED Interview, and the author of the newsletter Adjacent Possible. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.

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Origin Stories

 

Newton Ferrers, Devonshire

August 20, 1659

 

Sometime around the year 1670, a young man from Devon in the West Country of England joined the Royal Navy. Given that he would spent the rest of his adult life on the water, it is possible that he willingly volunteered for service. There were economic advantages to volunteering: the navy offered two months' salary in advance, though it was expected that the new recruit would spend some of those funds purchasing equipment (including the hammock they would sleep in on board). New volunteers were also protected from creditors if they owed less than £20. But roughly half the sailors in the Royal Navy had been forced into service thanks to one of the most notorious institutions of the period: the impress service.

 

To be a young man in England in the seventeenth century-particularly a young man of limited means-was to live with a constant background fear of the impress service, roving bands of informal agents for the Royal Navy known colloquially as "press-gangs." Impressment was a kind of hybrid of the modern military draft and state-sponsored kidnapping. A seventeen-year-old could be standing on a street corner, minding his own business, and out of nowhere a press-gang could swoop in and make him a Godfather-style offer he couldn't refuse: he could voluntarily join the navy, or he could be forced into service under worse terms. The choice was his to make-as long as it ended up with him on a Royal Navy ship.

 

Newly impressed sailors confronted a grim reality once they had been loaded onto the guard ships where the men were held until they could be assigned to a specific ship. An eighteenth-century tract called The Sailors Advocate described the scene: "They found seldom less aboard the Guard-ship, than six, seven, or eight hundred at a time in the same condition that they were in, without common conveniences, being all forced to lie between decks, confined as before, and to eat what they could get, having seldom victuals enough dressed, which occasioned distempers, that sometimes six, eight, and ten, died a day; and some were drowned in attempting their escape, by swimming from the Guard-ship; many of whose bodies were seen floating upon the River. . . ."

 

Impressment arose in part because the age of exploration created a demand for labor at sea that could not be met through normal financial incentives. But it also arose because of changes on land. The shift from late feudalism to early agrarian capitalism, the great disruption that would fuel the growth of the metropolitan centers in the coming centuries, had disgorged a whole class of society-small, commons-based cottage laborers-and turned them into itinerant free agents. By the late 1500s, the explosion of vagabonds made them public enemy number one, triggering one of the first true moral panics of the post-Gutenberg era. Everywhere there were wanderers, whole families lost in the changing economic landscape. Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism. To everyone sitting on the banks above that stream, the change must have seemed something like the modern fantasies of zombie invasions: you wake up one day and realize that the streets are filled with people who not only lack homes, but also suffer from some other, more existential form of homelessness-not even knowing what kind of home they should be seeking.

 

In 1597 Parliament passed a vagrancy act that attempted to combat the scourge of homelessness. The language of the act includes an almost comical catalog of the various species of vagabonds currently at large on the public roads and in the town squares of England:

 

Wandering scholars seeking alms; shipwrecked seamen, idle persons using subtle craft in games or in fortune telling; pretended proctors, procurers, or gatherers of alms for institutions; fencers, bear wards, common players, or minstrels; jugglers, tinkers, peddlers and petty chapmen; able-bodied wandering persons and laborers refusing to work for current rate of wages; discharged pensioners; wanderers pretending losses by fire; Egyptians or gypsies.

 

The Vagabond Act had a clear message to local authorities: any of these characters were to be "stripped naked from the middle upwards and openly whipped until his or her body be bloody, and then passed to his or her birthplace or last residence." But the act also empowered the press-gangs. If the wandering scholars and jugglers didn't want to be stripped naked and openly whipped, they could always join the Royal Navy. What better way to clear the streets of the refugees from a fallen feudal order than to send them off to sea?

 

Whether he joined the Royal Navy on his own accord or was forced into service by the press-gangs, the Devonshire sailor would have grown up in a culture that was heavily shaped by stories of seafaring life. No region of Britain is more closely associated with maritime adventure than the West Country, the rugged moorlands that jut out into the Atlantic, wedged between the English and Bristol Channels. Almost all the legendary sea dogs of the Elizabethan age hailed from the region. Both Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake were born in Devon. While the West Country mariners led many naval battles on behalf of the Crown-including the sinking of the Spanish Armada in 1588-many of them also crossed over into piracy. (The two most notorious pirates of the 1700s-"Black Sam" Bellamy and Blackbeard-were also West Country natives.) The prominence of the swashbuckling lifestyle had geological roots: the West Country's position at the mouth of the English Channel gave its captains unrivaled access to the shipping networks of Europe, and the many coves and inlets carved into the coastline made the landscape ideal for smugglers. The link between piracy and Devonshire lives on in our speech patterns more than three hundred years after that Devonshire boy first joined the navy. When we adopt a stereotypical pirate accent today-"Arr, shiver me timbers"-we are, unconsciously, mimicking the lilt and idiosyncratic grammar of West Country-vernacular English.

 

The mystery that surrounds the life of the Devonshire sailor begins with his name. The first biographical account of his exploits, published in 1709, referred to him as Captain John Avery. As a young man, he seems to have briefly adopted the alias of Benjamin Bridgeman, though his nickname, "Long Ben," has led some historians to speculate that Bridgeman was his original name and Avery the alias. Most scholars agree that he was born near Plymouth, in Devonshire, on the southwest coast of England. An acquaintance would testify under oath in 1696 that the sailor was a man of about forty years of age, dating his birth back to the late 1650s. Parish records in Newton Ferrers, a village on the River Yealm southeast of Plymouth, note the birth of a child to John and Anne Avery on August 20, 1659. Perhaps that child grew up to be the notorious Henry Avery, the most wanted criminal on earth. Or perhaps the real Avery was born in another West Country village in that same period. In part because a family by the name of Every had been prominent landowners in Devonshire for centuries before his birth, many accounts of his life refer to him as Henry Every. Almost every legal document written in English that would eventually mention his name spelled it "Every," and the one piece of his correspondence that survives was signed "Henry Every." Every was the name most often invoked by the public after he became one of the most notorious men in the world. For that reason alone, it seems appropriate to call him Henry Every.

 

Almost nothing is known about Henry Every's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0735211612
• ISBN 13: 9780735211612
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House Ireland; https://eu-contact.penguin.ie; ; Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street; Dublin; D02 YH68; Irland