In order to remember past lives I don’t need to catch a ferry to the Isle of Ancestors or climb the Holy Mountain and gain access to the secret records that lie within. I just have to ask my fans to draw a card from a deck of any cards and fragments, snapshot style memories come flooding back. It is surprisingly effective! Even old postcards or photographs do the job.
A fan, who shall remain nameless, drew this Ten of Pentacles from a deck he found lying in a street in Berlin. “What a find” I said enviously.
As I looked at the pile of gold, all so neatly stacked a memory flashed before me.
I was the first mate onboard with the infamous Henry Every, King of Pirates, when he made his most famous raid, on 7 September 1695. We successfully raided a 23-convoy of Grand Mughal vessels making their annual pilgrimage to Mecca. This fleet included the treasure-laden Ganj-i-Sawai, and its escort, Fateh Muhammed.
Our elite squadron was able to capture substantial loot The loot totalled between £325,000 and £600,000, including some 500,000 gold and silver pieces, plus numerous jewelled baubles and miscellaneous silver cups, trinkets, and so on.
Do a Google search and read about our fame all these years later. We made Mr Biggs and his great train robbery look like amateur hour. I cannot say that I am proud of how events unfolded on board. We were a murderous lot! Suffice to say that our audacious act didn’t go down well and led to the first worldwide manhunt. Many of the crew were rounded up quite quickly.
However, Every, I and some others evaded capture and disappeared from all records. As many stories as treasure maps tell fanciful tales of Every’s whereabouts after this extraordinary haul. One story has it that he died a pauper in Barnstaple while another more fantastical, saltier tale suggests that he, together with his new Mughal Princess bride and a host of henchmen, set up a pirate kingdom in Madagascar.
In actual fact we buried our treasure on a remote tropical island and agreed to return to collect it after a couple of years. Alas none of us made managed to make it back. Either there were cursed items amongst the loot or there was a karmic price to our murderous, savage behaviour. Whatever! Every suffered a similar fate to Captain Cook of discover Australia fame, while I stayed in hiding on board various ships. Deemed to be “a threat to all mankind”, there were warrants and a bounty on all our heads.
Alas none of us get off this planet alive. Having endured storms, battles, fevers and the deprivation of spending years at sea I finally succumbed to something that had nothing to do with pirates or war or weather. It was all about food. I succumbed to scurvy and so I never did get back to rescue our treasure.
For all I know it is still there or in the hands of some lucky sod who stumbled upon it. Of course, as is evidenced by the fact that Viking treasure troves and Egyptian tombs have been emptied, you cannot take gold with you so good luck to them. Unlike mere mortals treasure endures, invariably ending up in museums or the Vatican.
Wild Mother Calling 