The Record That Stops

Set out what would survive for any other man in this case. An arrest, entered by the officer who made it. An arraignment, printed with the rest. A reward paid, charged to the Treasury on one of the three sheets that offered it. A death, entered somewhere by somebody.

The trial print, the three proclamations, John Dann's examination and Narcissus Luttrell's week by week record from 1696 to 1700 hold none of those things for Henry Every. The indictment stands open. The proclamation of 10 August 1696 is the latest official statement about his whereabouts, and it knows his false name and gives no place for him. Men of his company were still being taken off in 1700.

The general pardon of December 1698 excluded him by name, alongside William Kidd.

The print that filled the vacuum

Print got there first and stayed. The recruiting ballad that opens this Collection was on sale in London in Every's own imagined voice while he was still at sea. In 1696 a gallows sheet, Villany Rewarded, printed for Charles Barnet and surviving in the Pepys collection at Pepys Ballads 2.199, supplied figures given in no other source and the line "The Treasures took, we sunk the Ship, / with those that in it were". That sinking appears in no record of the case.

Then a prose life in 1709, a Drury Lane play in 1712, and a pamphlet in 1720. What they said about the woman taken from the Ganj-i-Sawai (the Gunsway) belongs to the room that owns it. The Madagascar kingdom, and the kingship it gave him, is print culture of 1709 and later. The 1720 pamphlet that demolished that kingdom denied the rape in the same breath, insisting there was "no Ravishing or Violence to her, or any of her Attendance".

The books usually blamed for the legend arrived thirty years after the Red Sea and were written against it. Charles Johnson in 1724 reported the rumours in order to knock them down, "while it was said, he was aspiring at a Crown, he wanted a Shilling", and then supplied an ending of his own at Bideford, "not being worth as much as would buy him a Coffin". It is the earliest and most durable of the death stories. Libertalia goes unattached to Every in the 1709 life, the 1712 play, the 1720 pamphlet and Johnson's General History alike; the earliest known telling that attaches it to him is a video game of 2016, and an earlier telling probably exists.

In 1885 the standard national reference entry headed him "AVERY, JOHN? (fl. 1695)" and said of the received story that "the authority for these statements is extremely doubtful". The 1653 birth date and the named parents come from that same doubtful 1709 life. The Cattedown estate in that account is the father's later purchase near Plymouth, a detail of his fortune.

Where the record stops

The last man known to have recorded seeing Henry Every is John Dann, in his examination of 3 August 1696: Dann and Every landed at Dunfanaghy in county Donegal towards the latter end of June 1696, and parted at Esquire Ray's within six miles of Dunfanaghy.

What Dann gives after that is hearsay inside a sworn document. He heard Every went over for Donaghadee. At Dublin he heard Every was there, and did not see him. He heard Every say he would go to Exeter when he came into England, being a Plymouth man. And the wife of Adams the quartermaster, who had been with Every at Donaghadee, told Dann at St Albans that she was going to Captain Bridgman's, and would not say where he was.

By his own word, as Dann had it, he was a Devon man. The birth year stays open, with 1659 at Newton Ferrers the strongest reading. Before Ireland, the Fancy had reached the Bahamas, where a collection was made for Governor Trott and the ship was handed over; she may then have been wrecked deliberately at Providence, which was denied at the time.

The pardon of 1698, and the second name excluded from it, is held by the William Kidd Collection. Where this Archive has got something wrong, it is listed and dated on the corrections page. The sheet that opened this walk, selling him to London before the crime, is at the entrance.