Ancient coins may solve mystery of notorious 17th-century English pirate

A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and other random corners of New England in the US may help solve one of the planet’s oldest cold cases.

The villain in the tale is a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader.

“It’s a new history of a nearly perfect crime,” said Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detectorist who found the first intact 17th-century Arabian coin in a meadow in Middletown.

That ancient pocket change – among the oldest ever found in North America – could explain how pirate Captain Henry Every vanished into the wind.

Aboard were not only the worshippers returning from their pilgrimage, but tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver.

What followed was one of the most lucrative and heinous robberies of all time.

Historical accounts say his band tortured and killed the men aboard the Indian ship and raped the women before escaping to the Bahamas, a haven for pirates.

But word quickly spread of their crimes, and English King William III – under enormous pressure from a scandalised India and the East India Company trading giant – put a large bounty on their heads.

“If you google ‘first worldwide manhunt’, it comes up as Every,” Mr Bailey said.

“Everybody was looking for these guys.”

Until now, historians only knew that Every eventually sailed to Ireland in 1696, where the trail went cold.

The first complete coin surfaced in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, a spot that had piqued Mr Bailey’s curiosity two years earlier after he found old colonial coins, an 18th-century shoe buckle and some musket balls.

Waving a metal detector over the soil, he got a signal, dug down and hit literal paydirt: a darkened silver coin he initially assumed was either Spanish or money minted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Peering closer, the Arabic text on the coin got his pulse racing.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God’,” he said.

Research confirmed the exotic coin was minted in 1693 in Yemen.

That immediately raised questions, Mr Bailey said, since there is no evidence that American colonists struggling to eke out a living in the New World travelled to anywhere in the Middle East to trade until decades later.

Since then, other detectorists have unearthed 15 additional Arabian coins from the same era – 10 in Massachusetts, three in Rhode Island and two in Connecticut.

“It seems like some of his crew were able to settle in New England and integrate,” said Sarah Sportman, state archaeologist for Connecticut, where one of the coins was found in 2018 at the ongoing excavation of a 17th-century farm site.

“It was almost like a money laundering scheme,” she said.

Although it sounds unthinkable now, Every was able to hide in plain sight by posing as a slave trader – an emerging profession in 1690s New England.

On his way to the Bahamas, he even stopped at the French island of Reunion to get some black captives so he would look the part, Mr Bailey said.

Obscure records show that a ship called the Sea Flower, used by the pirates after they ditched the Fancy, sailed along the Eastern seaboard.

It arrived with nearly four dozen slaves in 1696 in Newport, Rhode Island, which became a major hub of the North American slave trade in the 18th century.

“There’s extensive primary source documentation to show the American colonies were bases of operation for pirates,” said Mr Bailey, 53, who holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Rhode Island and worked as an archaeological assistant on explorations of the Whydah Gally pirate ship wreck off Cape Cod in the late 1980s.

Archaeologists and historians familiar with but not involved in Mr Bailey’s work say they are intrigued, and believe it is shedding new light on one of the world’s most enduring criminal mysteries.

“Jim’s research is impeccable,” said Kevin McBride, a professor of archaeology at the University of Connecticut.

“It’s cool stuff. It’s really a pretty interesting story.”

Mark Hanna, an associate professor of history at the University of California-San Diego and an expert in piracy in early America, said that when he first saw photos of Mr Bailey’s coin, “I lost my mind”.

“Finding those coins, for me, was a huge thing,” said Mr Hanna, author of the 2015 book Pirate Nests And The Rise Of The British Empire.”

“The story of Captain Every is one of global significance. This material object – this little thing – can help me explain that.”

Every’s exploits have inspired a 2020 book by Steven Johnson, Enemy Of All Mankind; PlayStation’s popular Uncharted series of video games; and a Sony Pictures film version of Uncharted starring Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas that is slated for release early in 2022.

“For me, it’s always been about the thrill of the hunt, not about the money,” he said.

“The only thing better than finding these objects is the long-lost stories behind them.”