It might be a bit unusual for someone to be remembered for centuries for events in just a brief period of their life. In the case of Henry Every, who was (probably) born August 20, 1656, (probably) in an English village a bit north of Devon. He may have been related to the Every family that was part of the aristocracy of the day, although nobody knows for sure.
Every joined the Royal Navy, probably in his teens, and worked his way up to the rank of midshipman by about 1689. What records survive suggest that he was pretty thrifty, and sent as much of his pay to his family as he could. The way navies worked in those days (or at least the Royal Navy), his ship the HMS Rupert captured a French convoy during one of the seemingly incessant wars between the two countries, and Every got immediately promoted to Master’s Mate. The next year he joined a new ship, the HMS Albemarle, and participated in at least two battles. Then later that year, he left the Navy.
Every stayed at sea, though, and joined the Atlantic slave trade. He worked for the governor of Bermuda, not yet as a private agent. The British economy at the time wasn’t thriving, and a group of London investors decided to try to reinvigorate it by commissioning Spanish Expedition Shipping — which sounds innocuous, but was really a piracy scheme. They obtained four warships and sent them to the West Indies to capture French ships, salvage treasure from wrecked Spanish galleons, and loot French settlements in the Caribbean. Their first port of call was in Spain, to arrange the legalities of the whole thing (they were in some way operating as a Spanish proxy, or something like that). Anyway the whole thing went awry immediately and the four ships became stranded in a Spanish port. The crews weren’t paid for months, and Every led a mutiny, stole one of the ships, and escaped to sea. And thus began the two year period he’s still known for. He was elected captain, and he and his crew embarked on a campaign of piracy. But not in the Caribbean — they sailed for the Indian Ocean.
Every turned out to be fantastically successful as a pirate captain, quickly became known as the “King of the Pirates,” amassed a huge fortune, and escaped with it two years later. Nobody knows what happened to him — it’s known that he claimed to be “Benjamin Bridgeman,” at least once, but the stories about him ranged from dying in poverty in various locales to living as a virtual king in several tropical ports, including in Madagascar. Despite the first worldwide manhunt, which went on for a decade, neither Every nor any of his treasure ever turned up. Most of his crew got away too; some of them ended up in North America ( including identifiable coins from their share of the treasure proved it), but only 7 were ever taken to court, and all of them were acquitted. Every became a folk hero, of a sort, and as a very early (and very successful) pirate, probably influenced the career choices of emulators like Blackbeard. Every was the leading character in Daniel DeFoe’s King of Pirates, was portrayed on stage, and even featured in popular music of the day. More recently, he’s been seen in Doctor Who, the TV series Black Sails, and several books, both fiction and factual. And who knows, all that treasure might still be out there somewhere.
