The Venture and the Mutiny

The Spanish Expedition Shipping venture lay at Coruna through the winter, waiting on a Spanish authorisation that was slow in coming. Eight months' pay was owing to the company aboard the Charles the Second.

the Shipps Company mutinied at Corunna for want of their pay, there being 8 months due to them; some of the men proposed to Captain Every … to carry away the Shipp, which was agreed on and sworne too.

On 7 May 1694 the men took her and sailed. Every was her master, the officer who navigated her. Some of the men put the proposal to him, it was agreed on and sworn to, and the company elected him their commander. No source names the rank he held before that.

Some of the men aboard were held there by force. John Gravet, the second mate, told the court there was "violent hands laid on me … a Pistol clapt to my Breast, and carried away". David Creagh, who dated his own arrival at the Groyne to "the 7th of May, 1694", gave the court Every's answer to the sick Captain Gibson: "I am a Man of Fortune, and must seek my Fortune."

The second indictment pleaded the taking as 30 May 1694. The two dates measure the distance between what happened in a Spanish harbour and what a clerk pleaded in an English court two years later.

She became the Fancy under her new company. Later, on the African coast, her upper works came down to make her faster, at the place Dann calls Philandepo, between the Guinea coast and Principe, in 1694. Very likely Its identification with Fernando Po is a later editor's gloss, not Dann's own.

Those who wanted the shore were told they might go. One man was kept aboard against his will, the surgeon.

Her particulars stay open. The indictment gives her forty guns and later report gives forty six; her tonnage appears nowhere in the record; and the crew figures are spread across seven counts.

The election of a captain by the whole company has its own gallery at crew voting and councils, and the officer the company elected to check him at the quartermaster. What the Every case adds is an early instance of both, documented under oath within weeks of the events.