Abstract
Henry Avery (alternately spelled Every) was one of the most notorious pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and scholars have written much about Avery in an effort to establish the historical details of his mutiny and acts of piracy. Other scholars have focused on the substantial literary production that his life occasioned; the early literary history of Avery’s exploits evolves quickly away from the known facts of his life, offering instead a literary trajectory of accumulated tropes about Avery’s motivations, actions, and transformations. This literary invention of Avery is a compelling subject in itself, particularly as writers used his story to explore pressing philosophical and political concerns of the period. In this essay, I consider how early fictions about Avery look well beyond the history of a particular pirate to ruminate on topical ideas about the state of nature, the origins of civil society, and human tendencies toward self-interest and corruption that seem—inevitably—to accompany power and threaten civil order, however newly formed or ostensibly principled.
Highlights
Henry Avery was one of the most notorious pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
Avery himself disappeared in the West Indies and was never apprehended; some have speculated that he eventually returned to Britain, his fate is unknown. (See Appendix A for an eighteenth-century engraving of Avery)
Some years after his voyage and the trial of some of his crew, Avery’s exploits became the subject of numerous literary works, and his later life was variously invented in colorful fictions; he is arguably the most written about English pirate in an era when pirate narratives proliferated, making appearances in ballads, newspaper accounts, plays, short prose fictions, and novels over a period of about two decades
Summary
Henry Avery (alternately spelled Every) was one of the most notorious pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Avery fictions examine the possibilities and challenges of managing civil order over time, considering in particular how a government ostensibly founded upon principles of equity may succumb to self-interest, corruption, and fraud. In this way, the story of Avery gives satirists matter for critiquing the human failures that repeatedly lead to political exploitations within mainstream and rogue communities.[1]
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