1 Origin Stories Newton Ferrers, Devonshire August 20, 1659 Sometime around the year 1670, a young man from Devon in the West Country of England joined the Royal Navy. Given that he would spent the rest of his adult life on the water, it is possible that he willingly volunteered for service. There were economic advantages to volunteering: the navy offered two months'' salary in advance, though it was expected that the new recruit would spend some of those funds purchasing equipment (including the hammock they would sleep in on board). New volunteers were also protected from creditors if they owed less than £20. But roughly half the sailors in the Royal Navy had been forced into service thanks to one of the most notorious institutions of the period: the impress service. To be a young man in England in the seventeenth century-particularly a young man of limited means-was to live with a constant background fear of the impress service, roving bands of informal agents for the Royal Navy known colloquially as "press-gangs." Impressment was a kind of hybrid of the modern military draft and state-sponsored kidnapping. A seventeen-year-old could be standing on a street corner, minding his own business, and out of nowhere a press-gang could swoop in and make him a Godfather-style offer he couldn''t refuse: he could voluntarily join the navy, or he could be forced into service under worse terms.

The choice was his to make-as long as it ended up with him on a Royal Navy ship. Newly impressed sailors confronted a grim reality once they had been loaded onto the guard ships where the men were held until they could be assigned to a specific ship. An eighteenth-century tract called The Sailors Advocate described the scene: "They found seldom less aboard the Guard-ship, than six, seven, or eight hundred at a time in the same condition that they were in, without common conveniences, being all forced to lie between decks, confined as before, and to eat what they could get, having seldom victuals enough dressed, which occasioned distempers, that sometimes six, eight, and ten, died a day; and some were drowned in attempting their escape, by swimming from the Guard-ship; many of whose bodies were seen floating upon the River." Impressment arose in part because the age of exploration created a demand for labor at sea that could not be met through normal financial incentives. But it also arose because of changes on land. The shift from late feudalism to early agrarian capitalism, the great disruption that would fuel the growth of the metropolitan centers in the coming centuries, had disgorged a whole class of society-small, commons-based cottage laborers-and turned them into itinerant free agents. By the late 1500s, the explosion of vagabonds made them public enemy number one, triggering one of the first true moral panics of the post-Gutenberg era. Everywhere there were wanderers, whole families lost in the changing economic landscape.

Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism. To everyone sitting on the banks above that stream, the change must have seemed something like the modern fantasies of zombie invasions: you wake up one day and realize that the streets are filled with people who not only lack homes, but also suffer from some other, more existential form of homelessness-not even knowing what kind of home they should be seeking. In 1597 Parliament passed a vagrancy act that attempted to combat the scourge of homelessness. The language of the act includes an almost comical catalog of the various species of vagabonds currently at large on the public roads and in the town squares of England: Wandering scholars seeking alms; shipwrecked seamen, idle persons using subtle craft in games or in fortune telling; pretended proctors, procurers, or gatherers of alms for institutions; fencers, bear wards, common players, or minstrels; jugglers, tinkers, peddlers and petty chapmen; able-bodied wandering persons and laborers refusing to work for current rate of wages; discharged pensioners; wanderers pretending losses by fire; Egyptians or gypsies. The Vagabond Act had a clear message to local authorities: any of these characters were to be "stripped naked from the middle upwards and openly whipped until his or her body be bloody, and then passed to his or her birthplace or last residence." But the act also empowered the press-gangs. If the wandering scholars and jugglers didn''t want to be stripped naked and openly whipped, they could always join the Royal Navy. What better way to clear the streets of the refugees from a fallen feudal order than to send them off to sea? Whether he joined the Royal Navy on his own accord or was forced into service by the press-gangs, the Devonshire sailor would have grown up in a culture that was heavily shaped by stories of seafaring life.

No region of Britain is more closely associated with maritime adventure than the West Country, the rugged moorlands that jut out into the Atlantic, wedged between the English and Bristol Channels. Almost all the legendary sea dogs of the Elizabethan age hailed from the region. Both Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake were born in Devon. While the West Country mariners led many naval battles on behalf of the Crown-including the sinking of the Spanish Armada in 1588-many of them also crossed over into piracy. (The two most notorious pirates of the 1700s-"Black Sam" Bellamy and Blackbeard-were also West Country natives.) The prominence of the swashbuckling lifestyle had geological roots: the West Country''s position at the mouth of the English Channel gave its captains unrivaled access to the shipping networks of Europe, and the many coves and inlets carved into the coastline made the landscape ideal for smugglers. The link between piracy and Devonshire lives on in our speech patterns more than three hundred years after that Devonshire boy first joined the navy. When we adopt a stereotypical pirate accent today-"Arr, shiver me timbers"-we are, unconsciously, mimicking the lilt and idiosyncratic grammar of West Country-vernacular English.

The mystery that surrounds the life of the Devonshire sailor begins with his name. The first biographical account of his exploits, published in 1709, referred to him as Captain John Avery. As a young man, he seems to have briefly adopted the alias of Benjamin Bridgeman, though his nickname, "Long Ben," has led some historians to speculate that Bridgeman was his original name and Avery the alias. Most scholars agree that he was born near Plymouth, in Devonshire, on the southwest coast of England. An acquaintance would testify under oath in 1696 that the sailor was a man of about forty years of age, dating his birth back to the late 1650s. Parish records in Newton Ferrers, a village on the River Yealm southeast of Plymouth, note the birth of a child to John and Anne Avery on August 20, 1659. Perhaps that child grew up to be the notorious Henry Avery, the most wanted criminal on earth. Or perhaps the real Avery was born in another West Country village in that same period.

In part because a family by the name of Every had been prominent landowners in Devonshire for centuries before his birth, many accounts of his life refer to him as Henry Every. Almost every legal document written in English that would eventually mention his name spelled it "Every," and the one piece of his correspondence that survives was signed "Henry Every." Every was the name most often invoked by the public after he became one of the most notorious men in the world. For that reason alone, it seems appropriate to call him Henry Every. Almost nothing is known about Henry Every''s childhood. A memoir published in 1720 keeps his early years heavily veiled: "In the present Account, I have taken no Notice of my Birth, Infancy, Youth, or any of that Part; which, as it was the most useless Part of my Years to myself so ''tis the most useless to any one that shall read this Work to know, being altogether barren of any Thing remarkable in it self, or instructing to others." Given that this memoir was almost certainly a sham-some believe it was, in fact, the work of Daniel Defoe-the omission of childhood details most likely reflects how barren the historical record was, and not the uselessness of Every''s actual upbringing. No doubt young Henry Every (or Avery or Bridgeman) grew up hearing folk tales about the globetrotting exploits of Drake and Raleigh, both of whom skirted the line that separated pirate from privateer in their careers at sea.

(As we will see, the legal conventions of the period kept that line deliberately blurry.) The faux memoirs claim that his father had served in the Royal Navy as a trading captain; the Devonshire Every clan included at least a few captains in their family tree. Whatever the details, Every seems to have been, as he puts it in the fictional memoirs, "bred to the Sea from a Youth." Appropriately enough, the first real biographical detail we have of Every''s life-beyond those parish records in Newton Ferrers-is that he joined the Royal Navy, likely as a teenager. The fog around the birth of that Devonshire sailor is almost as thick as the one that surrounds his death. The truth is we don''t really know when or where he was born, or even what his name actually was. It is fitting that there should be a certain blurriness to Henry Every''s roots. All the great legends have palimpsest narratives of their origins, different plots layered and threaded together through rumor and hearsay and the subtle transformations that befall any story passed down from generation.