WANTAGH, N.Y. — An amateur historian has stumbled upon a provocative clue to the enduring mystery of what became of a notorious pirate who raided a royal Indian treasure ship centuries ago, implicating a co-conspirator whose name is familiar to many New Yorkers.
James Bailey, who five years ago made headlines after unearthing ancient coins believed to be linked to English pirate Capt. Henry Every, now says that colonial-era documents suggest the “King of the Pirates” and his violent crew got an assist from Thomas Jones, the namesake of Jones Beach, New York’s most visited state park after Niagara Falls.
“You have millions of visitors and generations of New Yorkers going to this beach,” Bailey said. “Nobody knew that he was actually a major player in arguably the biggest heist in the history of piracy.”
Since his big find, Bailey has pored through documents to dig even deeper into the bloody 1695 raid of the Ganj-i-Sawai on the Red Sea and the mystery of what happened to Every.
The pirate crew is said to have tortured, killed and raped those aboard the royal ship, sparking global outrage and what is considered the first worldwide manhunt. Some were caught and executed, but many others, including Every, were never heard from again and are believed to have scattered to Europe and the American colonies.
Documents, including depositions from Every’s associates, suggest Jones was recruited to serve as a “wheelman,” helping the pirates evade authorities after they made off with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver, according to Bailey.
Other documents show that New York’s governor, charged by the British crown to crack down on piracy, investigated Jones years later after he’d remade himself as the wealthy proprietor of a whaling operation on the barrier beach on Long Island that now bears his name.
Ghost stories and tall tales after Jones’ death
Bailey’s research, which he hopes to have published, sheds light on a part of Jones’ checkered past long alluded to but never quite fleshed out in local history books, says John Hanc, author of “Jones Beach: An Illustrated History,” which includes a chapter on Jones.
Born around 1665 in the then-kingdom of Ireland, Jones was a major in the English military before moving to the American colonies. He initially settled in Rhode Island before eventually moving to New York, where he became a prominent businessman and landowner. Jones owned thousands of acres of land on early Long Island, then just a rural expanse east of the rapidly growing New York City.
But rumors of how he’d initially made his fortune persisted long after his death in 1713. Before it was demolished in the early 1800s, his crumbling mansion was said to be haunted by ghosts and strange occurrences. Jones’ grave was repeatedly desecrated by robbers searching for buried treasure before it was relocated to a family burial plot behind a nearby church.
A family history published in 1906 by one of Jones’ descendants dismissed the pirate tales as “slander” and “improbable fictions.”
“People were disposed to cast slurs upon his memory, either for mischievousness, or a spirit of malice,” Thomas Floyd-Jones wrote. “These myths were cherished for over a century after his death, which ignorance and superstition did not fail to magnify.”
Was Jones a privateer, a pirate or both?
Hanc and other experts say it wasn’t too far-fetched for Jones to have at least dabbled in piracy.
After serving in the British military, Jones made a career as a privateer, or a seafarer authorized by the English crown to raid the commercial ships of its rivals during wartime, said Meagan Schulman, a Fordham University doctoral candidate who specializes in 17th century piracy and wasn’t involved in Bailey’s research.
But when the conflict ended, privateers like Jones lost their special status, she said. Those that continued the high seas raids were branded pirates.
“The reality was that privateers were pirates, just sponsored by a certain government or patron,” explained Schulman, who grew up going to Jones Beach. “So maybe the short answer is, yes. Jones can be called a pirate, by some people, but he probably did not ever see himself as one.”
After helping Every and his crew evade capture, the documents cited by Bailey show Jones briefly returned to Rhode Island.
Then in 1696, Jones’ father-in-law, Thomas Townsend, a wealthy New Yorker, gifted him and his wife a significant tract of land on Long Island’s south shore, property records show.
Bailey, who recently retired from Rhode Island’s corrections department, posits that allowed Jones a fresh start, as authorities continued to scour pirate-friendly New England for Every and his accomplices.
On Long Island, Bailey says Jones built a homestead and raised a family, but his pirate past was never far behind.
Three years after the Ganj-i-Sawai heist, Richard Coote, New York’s colonial governor, described how one of his efforts to root out piracy had led him to Jones.
Citing witness depositions, the governor wrote in 1698 that a certain “barrel of money” traveled from the city to Long Island, where it ended up at Jones’ house. But Jones, who the governor described as “formerly a pirate,” testified that he knew nothing about the barrel.
Piracy built wealth in colonial America
Bailey’s findings are compelling but shouldn’t be considered conclusive, cautions Richard Blakemore, maritime history professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom who also wasn’t involved with Bailey’s work. After all, he said, Thomas Jones is a fairly common name.
If anything, Jones’ possible ties to Every underscore how piracy provided “foundational and multi-generational wealth” for many of the prominent families in the Northeast, says Kevin McDonald, a history professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who wrote a book about colonial-era piracy but wasn’t involved in Bailey’s research.
“Popular images of pirates show them as outcasts, but many historians have argued the opposite, based on evidence like this,” agreed Blakemore. “It may surprise readers to find just how much early British colonies were both socially and economically connected to piracy.”
Marcelo writes for the Associated Press.
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