He was the terror of the seas, the man who committed the most lucrative act of piracy the world had ever seen, and he inspired more ballads than any other swashbuckler. Then Henry Avery, the “Pirate King”, vanished without a trace.
Research now seems to have solved the 300-year-old case. It appears that, far from disappearing with his ill-gotten gains, the Pirate King vanished into a world of state-sponsored espionage.
Sean Kingsley, a marine archaeologist and pirate expert, said a letter written by Avery showed that Avery had taken a royal pardon and gone into service as a spy. Kingsley has co-authored a book, The Pirate King: The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy, that revives and reconsiders the story of one of the most notorious and men in Britain.
“Pirates weren’t good guys, but Avery is misunderstood,” Kingsley said. “Not only did he strike it big, he escaped the authorities with his head intact. Throw in vanishing in a puff of smoke, and you have the perfect mystery.”
Avery began as a sailor working for the Spanish shipping expedition, and fighting the pirates of the Caribbean rather than being one of them. After their Spanish employers refused to pay them, however, he and 80 mutineers stole a ship in May 1694 and took to sea.
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The following year they pillaged a ship belonging to Aurangzeb, the Mughal Emperor in India, which contained treasures worth £600,000 — £90 million today. It was the biggest act of piracy ever known and England put a bounty on Avery’s head. Then, within a year, he had vanished.
The mystery went cold until 1978 when a misfiled letter was found in the Scottish Records Office by Zélide Cowan, a writer whose husband, Rex, is Kingsley’s co-author and a lawyer turned shipwreck hunter. They knew the coded letter was important but could not decipher it until Rex Cowan met Kingsley decades later.
Kingsley is convinced that it is a genuine copy of a letter by Avery written in Falmouth in 1700, detailing his espionage work. It appears he would have been working to prevent a “Catholic” invasion from France, and that one of his colleagues in that fight would have been Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe.
“There were fake pirate letters that people were pitching around in the 18th century to sell as a get rich quick scheme, but they are really dodgy and easy to identify — they say things like, ‘By this rock walk three steps and go left etc’,” Kingsley said. “In this, when he wants to conceal his meaning he uses letters and numbers in a code, and this is exactly what spies and ambassadors were using. It’s also really unlikely that anyone would have the intelligence and information to forge it.”
The letter details treasure Avery kept — and suggests some of it is still waiting to be found.