Trevor Collins

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So they're now heading down to Southern Africa, and their first raid is actually not too long after, as they ransacked three English merchant ships in the Cape Verde Islands.

This is an archipelago of about 10 islands off the west coast of Africa.

So very near the equator, just off the west coast.

So you can kind of see through their acts, you can see where they've been and where they're going.

Over the next few months, the crew made their way south along the west coast of Africa, and then they captured French and Danish ships in the process of kind of making new recruits.

People probably died of scurvy, not eating enough apples or what have you, and you need to just stack up your crew a little bit.

And so you coerce some locals or other trade merchants who, well, they don't want to die, and so you coerce them into the life of piracy.

I don't feel like you got a lot of honest men to support you in that world, but hey, it works for them, I guess.

Now, by the time they reached Madagascar, which would be going around the Cape of Good Hope and then coming up north again because Madagascar, if you don't know, sits off the southern eastern coast of Africa.

By this point, it was the middle of 1695 and their crew had grown to about 150 men.

So now they're not too shabby.

Like all on that boat?

All on that boat.

Damn.

And it was around this time that Evry actually set his sights on a new mission.

Somehow, whether it be through capturing some of these ships and recruiting new people, he heard tell of a fleet from the Mughal Empire that was planned to set sail from the Red Sea in the port of Mocha that would then go all the way back to Surat in India.