Tea at Trianon: A 300-Year-Old Pirate Mystery

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

A 300-Year-Old Pirate Mystery

From Smithsonian:

On September 7, 1695, Every led his ship, the Fancy, to the Red Sea, so he could rob the Ganj-i-Sawai, which was the Indian emperor Aurangzeb’s ship. At the time, the vessel was carrying Muslim pilgrims back to India from Mecca, and it was also loaded with millions of dollars of gold and silver, writes the Independent’s Graeme Massie. When Every and his team invaded the ship, they attacked many of the men and raped the women, “[forcing] several [of them], which caused one person of quality, his Wife and Nurse, to kill themselves to prevent the Husbands seeing them (and their being) ravished," as quoted by Douglas R. Burgess Jr. in a 2009 Cambridge University Press article.

Afterwards, Every escaped to the Bahamas, where his ship was either sold or destroyed.

The Mughal government didn’t take the theft lightly, so they retaliated and closed many of the English East India Company’s trading posts in India. In response, William III provided sizable bounties to anyone who captured Every and his accomplices, and eventually many of Every’s crewmen were caught, hanged or banished.

Every, on the other hand, evaded capture, and his fate still remains unknown. Historians only had proof that officials had arrested six of Every’s crewmen in near the Irish coast in 1696, but the captain himself was nowhere to be found, according to the Cambridge University Press. (Read more.)