They’ve been portrayed as toothless, wooden-legged cut-throats. But a new exhibition in Cornwall shows there were queer pirates, female pirates, pirates of colour – and they all got a vote (and an equal share of the grog)
In September 1695, the Plymouth-born “king of pirates”, Henry Avery, seized treasure worth £600,000 (in today’s terms, nearly £100m) from the Grand Mughal fleet in the Red Sea. What happened next is uncertain. The most boring legend has Avery – AKA Henry Every or Long Ben – buried in a pauper’s grave in Barnstaple, Devon. Another, recently endorsed in the book Pirate Enlightenment by the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, posits that Avery sailed for Madagascar where he established a pirate republic with his henchmen called Libertalia, a proto-communist utopia where all goods were held common.
The National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth offers another account in its fascinating new exhibition, Pirates. After paying off his like-minded hearties in Mughal bling, Avery sailed for home. But nearing Cornwall, he and his pirate booty were shipwrecked and lie deep in Davy Jones’s locker.
