The Gunsway

Content note: this room describes sexual violence, torture and forced suicide, in the words of the two documents that record them.

Two documents record what was done aboard Aurangzeb's ship. One is a Persian court chronicle, written to condemn the pirates and the ship's captain alike. The other is an English commercial letter, written to distance the East India Company from them. They are independent in transmission, though both draw on the same Surat information environment, and they agree on mass rape.

they brought the royal ship to shore near one of their settlements, and busied themselves for a week searching for plunder, stripping the men, and dishonouring the women, both old and young. They then left the ship, carrying off the men. Several honourable women, when they found an opportunity, threw themselves into the sea, to preserve their chastity, and some others killed themselves with knives and daggers.

there happened to be a great Umbraws Wife (as Wee hear) related to the King, returning from her Pilgrimage to Mecha, in her old age. She they abused very much, and forced severall other Women, which Caused one person of Quality, his Wife and Nurse, to kill themselves.

The people in those two passages are these. An elderly noblewoman returning from her pilgrimage, whom the Bombay letter says they "abused very much". Women who threw themselves into the sea. Women who killed themselves with knives and daggers. And the three the Bombay letter names as "one person of Quality, his Wife and Nurse". Neither document gives a number. Very likely

Khafi Khan also records the defence: the ship's captain, whom he names as Ibrahim Khan, ran into the hold, put turbans and swords on the Turki girls he had bought at Mocha, and incited them to fight. He gives the ship eighty guns and four hundred muskets, and describes a gun bursting on the royal ship and a shot damaging her mainmast.

The capture

In September 1695, near Surat, the company took a Mughal merchantman with small resistance and stripped her of gold and silver. No source that records her gives her name. Then they took the emperor's own ship, homeward bound from the pilgrimage to Mecca with pilgrims and their goods aboard, called the Ganj-i-Sawai and rendered in the English record as the Gunsway.

John Dann and Philip Middleton, both aboard, put about forty guns mounted in her and, as they said, eight hundred men. Dann swore that "Shee stood a fight of 3 houres and then yeilded".

What she carried cannot be reduced to one figure. The indictment pleads a hundred thousand pieces of eight and a hundred thousand chequins. Khafi Khan gives fifty two lakh of rupees aboard. Modern syntheses run across a wide range, each figure taking its size from the party that produced it. The one number that recurs across independent sources is the share, about a thousand pounds a man, which appears in the sworn evidence and again in the second English proclamation of 10 August 1696.

Of this ship the English printed trial says only that several men were killed aboard. The case the Crown chose to bring was a case about property.

What was printed afterwards

The English had the Bombay account by October 1695. The story that grew over it arrived later.

In 1709 Adrian van Broeck's prose life answered the record with what it called "a marriage after the custom of the country", while conceding in the same account that the crew drew lots for her servants. In 1712 a Drury Lane play gave the captive a name, Zaida, and billed her as "Aurengzebe's Grandaughter", printed the following year for Bernard Lintott. In 1720 The King of Pirates advertised that "all the Sham Accounts formerly publish'd of him, are detected", and in the same breath insisted there was "no Ravishing or Violence to her, or any of her Attendance". In 1724 Charles Johnson dismissed the whole story as a false rumour.