ORIGINAL UNBELIEVABLE. 4/4: The Pirate King: The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy Hardcover – April 2, 2024 by Sean Kingsley (Author), Rex Cowan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-King-Strange-Adventures-Golden/dp/1639365958/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Henry Avery of Devon pillaged a fortune from a Mughal ship off the coast of India and then vanished into thin air—and into legend. More ballads, plays, biographies and books were written about Avery’s adventures than any other pirate. His contemporaries crowned him "the pirate king" for pulling off the richest heist in pirate history and escaping with his head intact (unlike Blackbeard and his infamous Flying Gang). Avery was now the most wanted criminal on earth. To the authorities, Avery was the enemy of all mankind. To the people he was a hero. Rumors swirled about his disappearance. The only certainty is that Henry Avery became a ghost.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Building a coffee business? |
| 0:02.0 | Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the SumUp point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best-selling blends. Visit sumup.co.. To learn more. It was Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan. |
| 0:21.6 | Sean Kingsley, the marine historian. |
| 0:24.6 | Rex Cowan, the archaeologist and shipwreck hunter, and both of them have come across the |
| 0:29.6 | pirate king, the strange adventures of Henry Avery and the birth of the golden age of piracy. |
| 0:35.6 | There's a scene that they wonderfully present of Tennyson, |
| 0:40.5 | the man, the churchman, who's at the end of the dead drop for the letter that we saw Avery |
| 0:46.3 | writing in Falman. Tennyson and Defoe and Avery, all in, Avery in disguise, coming out of a play in London in 1719, I believe, or maybe it was 1712, yes. |
| 1:02.7 | And a play about Avery the Pirate, although it's vaguely described as by Charles Johnson, |
| 1:09.8 | and the man has a pseudonym that's meant to be Avery. |
| 1:12.6 | Everybody gets a joke, because everybody's looking for Avery. |
| 1:15.4 | He's got a bounty on his head, but most importantly, he has a treasure that he's hidden somewhere. |
| 1:20.4 | They all want to know where he is. |
| 1:22.3 | They come laughing out of the play, and Rex had come to you. |
| 1:29.8 | Defoe wrote that play, didn't he? Did you discover, |
| 1:35.1 | did you know that DeFoe was making all this up and they were laughing all the time? Not at all. |
| 1:43.7 | In fact, I knew very little by the time that I'd looked at that. I hadn't been really interested either. I mean, what has interested me is just how much |
| 1:48.5 | I didn't know and how much I didn't imagine would come out of this, this find and discovery. |
| 1:57.0 | Otherwise, I might have wasted a lot more of my life pursuing things which I wasn't capable of pursuing, and which Sean has done in a remarkable fashion to entertain me as well as I think other people are going to read the book. |
| 2:13.0 | I think this is what is really, what we've found is another aspect of the product of |
| 2:24.3 | piracy, the people who go into it, they're too often rather simplistically described as either villains or rapist. |
| 2:36.0 | I think actually Avery was taught, described that as a gentleman pirate in some accounts, |
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