The Myth of Henry Avery and Golden Age Performances of Pirate Violence (1695-1726)

In 1694, a man named Henry Avery led a mutiny aboard the English warship Charles II. A year after, he commanded his newly pirate crew to pillage a ship belonging to the Indian Mughal, won a fortune, and disappeared – never to be seen again. Short-lived as it was, Avery’s piratical career captured the public’s imagination immediately after his disappearance. It was portrayed in ballads, newspaper accounts, plays, short prose fictions and novels in the following two decades, and quickly evolved away from the known facts of his life towards largely fictionalised tropes about his motivations, actions, and transformations. While Avery’s story fell within a rubric of similar pirate narratives, it was exceptional in its depiction of piracy not as a simple economic-driven crime, but as an identity and community supported by violence against the civilised world.

An investigation into the performances of violence by the next generation of Golden Age pirates (1695-1726) reveals that this new understanding of piracy was also adopted by sea robbers operating in the Caribbean during the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Drawing on contemporary depictions of the myth of Captain Avery, as well as letters, depositions and other court documents related to early eighteenth-century piracy, this paper explores contemporary understandings of piratical violence to argue that the mixture of mythology and fact is more complex than typically assumed. Golden Age piracy, so heavily mythologised in popular culture today, was already subject to romanticisation by its contemporaries and indeed those who performed it.