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A handful of ancient coins found in a fruit orchard in Rhode Island and other “corners” of New England in the US may help unravel one of the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
The villain of this story: a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most wanted criminal after looting a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims to India from Mecca, and who later managed to escape arrest by appearing as a slave trader .
“It’s a new, near-perfect crime story,” said Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detector who found the first intact 17th-century Arab coin in a meadow in Middletown.
These “ancient trifles”, among the oldest ever found in North America, could explain how the pirate Henry Every disappeared from the face of the earth.
On September 7, 1695, the pirate ship “Fancy”, led by Every, ambushed and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal ship owned by the Indian emperor Aurangzeb, one of the most powerful men in the world. The ship carried not only pilgrims, but also tens of millions of dollars in gold and silver.
What followed was one of the most lucrative and horrible robberies of all time.
Historical accounts say that Every’s gang tortured and killed all the men on the ship and raped the women before escaping to the Bahamas, an area where it was a pirate haven. But news of their heinous crime spread quickly and King William III of England, under enormous pressure, proclaimed them a huge sum for the time.
“If you Google the world’s first manhunt, they all show up,” Bailey said. “Everybody was looking for these guys.”
Until now, historians only knew that Every finally went to Ireland in 1696, where his tracks disappeared. But Bailey says that these coins, like those found by others, are proof that the infamous pirate first made it to the American colonies.
The first complete coin appeared in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, a place that had piqued Bailey’s curiosity two years earlier after he found old colonial coins, an 18th-century shoe buckle and some musket balls.
Shaking the metal detector over the ground, he caught a signal, dug, and literally hit the joker: a dark silver coin the size of a coin that he initially assumed was Spanish or money minted from the colony of Bay Massachusetts.
Looking closer, the Arabic text on the coin made his heart pound like crazy.
Research confirmed that this exotic coin was minted in 1693 in Yemen. That immediately raised questions, Bailey said, as there is no evidence that American settlers struggling to make a living in the New World traveled anywhere in the Middle East to trade until several decades later.
Since then, other explorers have discovered 15 additional Arab coins from the same period: 10 in Massachusetts, three in Rhode Island, and two in Connecticut. Another was found in North Carolina, revealing that some of Every’s men had made landfall.
“It looks like some of the crew members were able to settle in New England and integrate,” said Sarah Sportman, a Connecticut archaeologist who found one of the coins in 2018 while excavating a 17th-century farm.
“It was almost like a money laundering program,” he said.
Though unthinkable now, they were all able to hide, posing as a slave trader, an emerging profession in New England in 1690. On his way to the Bahamas, he even stopped on the French island of Reunion to take some black prisoners. This is what it would look like in his story, Bailey said.
“There is ample evidence that the American colonies were bases for pirates,” said Bailey, who has a degree in anthropology from the University of Rhode Island.
Bailey, whose daily job is to analyze security at the local prison complex, published his findings in a research journal of the American Monetary Society, an organization dedicated to the study of coins and medals.
Archaeologists and historians who are familiar with but not involved in Bailey’s work say they are excited and believe it sheds new light on one of the world’s most “persistent” crimes.
“Jim’s research is perfect,” said Kevin McBride, a professor of archeology at the University of Connecticut.
Mark Hanna, an associate professor of history at the University of California-San Diego and a hacking expert for US authorities, said that when he first saw photos of Bailey’s coin, he lost his mind.
At the same time, Bailey, 53, who keeps his most valuable finds in a safe, says he will continue to dig. “For me, it was always about the thrill of hunting, not the money,” he said. “The only good thing about finding these items is discovering stories that have been lost for a long time.”
Source: AP
