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Elegant and excellent was the pirates answer to the great Macedonian Alexander, who had taken him: the king asking him how he dare molest the seas so, he replied with a free spirit, How dare thou molest the whole world? But because I do with a little ship only, I am called a thief: thou doing it with a great navy, art called an emperor.

S T . A UGUSTINE , The City of God

Suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease.

H ENRY N EWTON

The Indian Ocean, west of Surat

September 11, 1695

On a clear day, the lookout perched atop the forty-foot mainmast of the Mughal treasure ship can see almost ten miles before hitting the visual limits of the horizon line. But it is late summer, in the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean; the humidity lingering in the air draws a hazy curtain across the spyglass lens. And so by the time the English vessel comes into focus, she is only five miles away.

The existence of an English ship in these waters is hardly noteworthy. They are only a few days sail from Surat, one of Indias most prosperous port cities, and the original headquarters of the East India Company. At first sight, the lookout doesnt even think it necessary to sound an alarm. Yet as the seconds pass, as the blurred shape of the boat looms in the spyglass, something catches his attention in the approaching vessel: not her colors, but her speed in the water. The ship is in full sail, he can see now, running before the wind. And she is moving fast, at least ten knots, maybe moreeasily twice the top speed of the treasure ship. The lookout has never seen a ship sail with such velocity across the open water.

By the time the lookout alerts the crew below him, the English ship is already visible to the naked eye.

From his vantage point on the quarterdeck, the captain of the Indian ship still has little reason to fear the approaching vessel, however fast she might be. He has eighty cannons lining his gun decks, supported by four hundred muskets and nearly a thousand men. From what he can make out, the English ship cannot have more than fifty cannons and a fraction of his crew. Even if she is under the command of pirates on the attack, the captain has been at sea for months without incident; he has sailed unchallenged through the notorious pirates nest at the mouth of the Red Sea. Now he is practically in sight of his home port in Surat. What pirate would dare to challenge him in these waters, with so little firepower?

But the captain does not know the long history that has brought these two ships together. He does not know that the men aboard the English vessel have traveled thousands of miles to get this close to a ship returning to harbor with unimaginable riches in its hold, that they have waited more than a year for this precise opportunity. He does not know what these men are capable of, the crimes they have already committed.

And he does not know the near future, the two improbable events that are about to unfold within seconds of each other, radically undermining his advantage.

The sequence begins with the smallest of mistakes. An inexperienced gunner packs an extra ounce or two of gunpowder into the chamber of a cannon. Or perhaps, days or weeks earlier, the gun crew fails to clean the cannon properly, and a residue of gunpowder remains in the chamber, unnoticed. Or perhaps the chain of events starts much further back, in a blast furnace somewhere in India, where a minuscule flaw is formed in the cast-iron reinforce that houses the ignition chamber, a flaw that goes undetected for years, slowly weakening with each blast, until one day it fails.