Trevor Collins

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.

This fleet was going to be ferrying Muslim pilgrims that were returning from their journey to Mecca, as well as several, and I mean several, loot-filled vessels filled to the brim with treasure.

Now, the treasure that filled these ships was said to be owned by the Grand Mughal of India.

The Grand Mughal is considered the head of the Mughal Empire in India, and they reigned from, I believe, the early 1500s up through the mid, maybe early 1800s.

So very much in the timeframe that we're talking about now, and hence why they are there.

Now, of course, after hearing of this fleet, every set sail, he didn't waste any time.

He's like, we got to shoot up north now, essentially circumnavigating almost all of Africa, getting to them in time.

Now, this would be around August of 1695.

This is when he's sailing up there and he's preparing now to ambush the Mughal crew.

Now, in preparations for this attack, the Fancy partnered with several additional pirate ships in the area in order to carry out this mission.