Enemy of All Mankind

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Origin Stories

 

Newton Ferrers, Devonshire

August 20, 1659

 

Sometime around the year 1670, a young man from Devon in the West Country of England joined the Royal Navy. Given that he would spent the rest of his adult life on the water, it is possible that he willingly volunteered for service. There were economic advantages to volunteering: the navy offered two months' salary in advance, though it was expected that the new recruit would spend some of those funds purchasing equipment (including the hammock they would sleep in on board). New volunteers were also protected from creditors if they owed less than £20. But roughly half the sailors in the Royal Navy had been forced into service thanks to one of the most notorious institutions of the period: the impress service.

 

To be a young man in England in the seventeenth century-particularly a young man of limited means-was to live with a constant background fear of the impress service, roving bands of informal agents for the Royal Navy known colloquially as "press-gangs." Impressment was a kind of hybrid of the modern military draft and state-sponsored kidnapping. A seventeen-year-old could be standing on a street corner, minding his own business, and out of nowhere a press-gang could swoop in and make him a Godfather-style offer he couldn't refuse: he could voluntarily join the navy, or he could be forced into service under worse terms. The choice was his to make-as long as it ended up with him on a Royal Navy ship.

 

Newly impressed sailors confronted a grim reality once they had been loaded onto the guard ships where the men were held until they could be assigned to a specific ship. An eighteenth-century tract called The Sailors Advocate described the scene: "They found seldom less aboard the Guard-ship, than six, seven, or eight hundred at a time in the same condition that they were in,

Steven Johnson

A kaleidoscopic rumination on the ways in which a single event, and the actions of a handful of men with no obvious access to the levers of state power, can change the course of history. . . . Steven Johnson treats us to fascinating digressions on the origins of terrorism, celebrity and the tabloid media; the tricky physics of cannon manufacture; and the miserable living conditions of the average seventeenth-century seaman.   The New York Times Book Review

Steven Johnson argues with verve and conviction in his thoroughly engrossing Enemy of All Mankind ... Because Enemy of All Mankind offers, among its many pleasures, a solid mystery story, it would be wrong to reveal the outcome. But it s surprising. So, too, are the many larger themes that Mr. Johnson persuasively draws from his seaborne marauders...All the author s more surprising suppositions are not merely stapled onto the narrative but seem to have grown there effortlessly during the course of a spirited, suspenseful, economically told tale whose significance is manifest and whose pace never flags. The Wall Street Journal
 
... [a] page-turner of a book ... we can thank Johnson for combing the archives, describing in vivid detail the life of pirates that we thought we knew most likely through motion pictures when in truth we didn t ... Enemy of all Mankind covers lots of territory, including the beginnings of the British Empire, and it s a good read, made all the better by Johnson s clever storytelling and an unforgettable pirate named Henry Every. The Washington Post
 
It is the perfect book to cozy up to during a pandemic. . . . In addition to providing captivating yo ho ho and a bottle of rum action, the author examines the geopolitical and cultural implications of Every s spasm of violence. His subject changed the very nature and geography of piracy in the eighteenth century.   USA Today

Enough adventures to fill a Netflix series . . . [Johnson] skillfully