“Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.”
Carl von Clausewitz
Originally, I had an entirely fictional pirate captain in book 2 – Captain Crook. I thought I’d created a pretty cool character by giving him a back story that tied him to the Salem Witch Trials and the Earthquake that devastated Port Royal in 1692. But when I decided to make my books more historically accurate, it wasn’t hard to find more fascinating real pirates from the same time frame.
Henry Every
The first one I found was Henry Every. I’d never heard of him before I started researching pirates. I found a brief mention in a book, then started exploring. I couldn’t help but use him as my pirate. Some of the most interesting aspects of his piracy career are:
- His nickname was ‘The King of Pirates.’
- Estimates of his treasure haul vary, but some consider it the largest pirate heist ever, worth up to half a billion dollars!
- He was one of the few pirates who lived. No one knows what happened to him – he just faded away.
- He stole his ship, a large frigate, from a British privateer. It was one of the most heavily gunned pirate ships of the time. It was also one of the fastest as he took the top deck off to make it faster.
- He nearly bankrupted the British East India Trading Company by taking the Ganj-i-Sawai, the treasure ship of the Grand Mughal of India. Trying to appease the Grand Mughal, the East India Trading Company instigated the first worldwide manhunt for Every.
- But don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a person to look up to. He was a flawed, brutal man. In my book, The Pair Dadeni, he regrets his actions and tries to make up for what he’s done by helping Alex, but he doesn’t get a happily ever after ending.
Thomas Tew
It wasn’t until seven years after I started writing the series that I added Captain Thomas Tew to the book. Originally, I had a figure (William Stoughton) from the Salem Witch Trials as the primary antagonist in book 2. But I moved Stoughton up to book 1 and added Judge Hathorne from the Witch Trials. As I continued to move the story into the more historically accurate realm, I switched the antagonist to Henry Morgan, but he came after Every’s heyday. So, I went back to researching, looking for a pirate that might have had a grudge against Every. And that’s when I found Thomas Tew, who:
- Made The Pirate Round famous. I’d never heard of the term until I learned of Tew, but it makes sense that pirates operated worldwide.
- After being sent to the Caribbean for an unknown crime, he began work in the maritime industry, eventually working his way up to Captain before turning to privateering.
- His nickname was ‘The Rhode Island Pirate,’ although he’d never gone there until after his first pirate voyage to the Indian Ocean.
- His first pirate voyage was so financially successful that he found backers to support him on a second voyage – his last one. He met up with other pirates, including Henry Every, and waited for the annual treasure convoy to India. His crew aboard The Amity pursued the treasure ships, but Tew died in a battle. I made Tew the antagonist in book 2 because it appears that Every let Tew go in first, in a much smaller ship, to soften up their target. If I’m right, I could see Tew being furious with Every and, therefore, willing to pursue him, as he did in my book.
The picture of me below is at the entrance to Fort Charles, the fort at the entrance to Port Royal, Jamaica – the Richest and Wickedest City in the world during its heyday.
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