The Pirate King: The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy
Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan
Pegasus Books, £22

SEAN KINGSLEY and Rex Cowan claim they have solved a great mystery and uncovered a greater tale underneath. 

This is the story of Henry Avery, born in the 1660s in or around Plymouth, who followed in his father’s footsteps as a seaman. In the 17th century this meant international trade, slavery and maritime warfare between imperialist powers. 

Hired as privateers, and aboard the Charles II in La Coruna, Spain, Avery’s crewmates were unable get going on a mission to attack French possessions in the Caribbean. 

After months without pay, the crew mutinied and elected the experienced Avery as their captain. Avery renamed the ship the Fancy and set course for the Cape of Good Hope. The crew and its captain were determined to plunder what they could. 

Avery robbed English merchants, Danish privateers and French pirates, on each occasion not only taking provisions, supplies, ivory and gold, but also persuading captured sailors to join the crew of the Fancy. 

Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, they stopped in Madagascar and the Cormoros for provisions, and Avery wrote a public letter stating that he would not attack English shipping. The East India Company had heavily armed ships and would have been an enemy he didn’t want to make. 

Nonetheless there was plenty of treasure floating in the ocean, and the route from Arabia to India took the Mughal emperor’s convoy of ships on return from pilgrimage to Mecca. It was here Avery made his fortune. Although heavily outnumbered, Avery’s team captured the Ganj-i-sawai, which held immense wealth, and some of the emperor’s family. It is estimated that the heist netted £600,000 in 1695 money, equivalent to well over £100 million today. 

The pirate crew had a lifetime’s worth of money and must have realised the heat would be on, so they went their separate ways with some disembarking at Reunion, some at Nassau in the Bahamas, and others heading for America. 

The plunder of the emperor’s ships provoked an international incident, with the Mughal emperor demanding that the English be held to account for allowing such an action to take place, and placing restrictions on the East India Company.

The world’s first worldwide manhunt ensued, with bounties on the heads of the entire crew, and the most on the head of Avery himself.

Many of the crew were caught and hanged. But Avery disappeared from the record in 1696 and was not heard from again. 

All this is part of the historical record, and is covered in the first few chapters of The Pirate King. The remainder of the book relies on the 1978 discovery by Zelide Cox, wife of the present author Rex, of a copy of a misfiled letter in a Scottish archive. Dated 1700, the letter is partially written in code, and is headed “Letter from Avery the Pirate.”

From this, Kingsley and Cox imagine something which is best described as a historial novel, but which seems to be pitching itself as a film script. 

In this seafaring bromance, Avery turns out to be a friend of Daniel Defoe and the two men bond over common interests and similar backstories. Avery hides in plain sight in Falmouth, keeping an eye on international shipping and becomes a spy, working with Defoe. 

He buys his anonymity and freedom by funding the cash-strapped King William. He is instrumental, along with Defoe, in defeating Catholic plots against England, and assists the Act of Union between Scotland and England. 

Avery’s identity was never rumbled, and his correspondent in the discovered letter turns out to be the spymaster Archbishop Tenison, another fierce opponent of French and Scottish Popery. 

The spies are masters at misdirection and Defoe’s fictional works are just that. There are intimate drinking sessions, and knowing nods between the two friends in crowds watching Avery’s shipmates being hanged.  

Kingsley and Cowan don’t explain why the letter which uncovered the mystery lay ignored between 1978 and the pandemic in 2020. Nor is it clear how someone knew, and then blew Avery’s cover on the header of the letter and nowhere else. 

But, if the authors are lucky, it’s coming to a cinema near you.