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By Root 1003 0

he took it. Emancipation from the Company meant signing on with the dead Chief Factor’s most hated competitor, the Marquis, and organizing the coast’s stateless firangis, cynics and rebels into a joint-stock association with a huge common fund for outfitting piracy against the Indiamen of all European-chartered trading companies and against the fancy fleet of the Grand Mughal. Rich men like Count Attila Csycsyry subscribed in shares; brawny men like YellowBeard Huyghen, Cutlass da Silva and ThroatCut de Azvedo contributed some dormant image of themselves, for they were not born to plunder, nor were they born with the names they adopted. Perhaps piracy on the Coromandel Coast—going to sea, raising a flag of one’s own, being the boss and dividing the loot, scuttling the sobersided sons of sea cooks who stood in the way—was the seed of the frontier dream, the circus dream, the immigrant dream of two centuries later. Gabriel invested all his hoarded capital, but was treasured more for his imagination, his genial leadership, his quick intelligence.

Soon the Marquis enlisted the embittered Pedda Timanna’s support to buy, in exchange for tin, musical automatons, French wines and cheeses, two Coromandel-built three-masted vessels. For reasons of sentimentality and superstition, the Esperance remained the flagship, but Gabriel took over as its captain from ThroatCut de Azvedo. Through Pedda Timanna’s influence with the Grand Mughal’s representative, Nawab Haider Beg, Gabriel was able to acquire for the new joint-stock company of privateers an imperial farman to raise revenue and administer justice in a square mile of rough coastal land within Fort St. Sebastian’s shadow.

This square mile he rechristened New Salem as a tribute to his wife.

GABRIEL CAPTAINED the Esperance on seventeen expeditions, each of them an adventure that put his earlier tall tales to shame. Legend credits Gabriel with having sacked the Humility, a Mughal pilgrim ship more richly laden than the Ganj-i-Sawai and the Queddah Merchant. He shipped his booty—the ingots, the pieces of eight, the Arab gold and Christian gold, the Moorish and the Burmese stones—to accomplices in New York, where, again, legend obscures its eventual disbursement. Some say the old friends could not resist the temptation; others say his loot lies just within the continental shelf where a corsair went down. He survived shipwrecks, cyclones, duels, whippings, at least one mutiny and two heartbreaks. There are handsome clans of Legges in Madagascar, Mauritius and Réunion. I’ve received a letter from a Vyankoji Legge of Bombay inquiring if his “sinister blood bondage to the aforesaid Gabrielji” qualified him for citizenry in the U.S. or the U.K., or a share of any recovered treasure.

Every now and then, a Legge Reclamation Project is announced. A parapsychologist and a credible-looking ex-SEAL in a wet suit and an Atlanta Braves cap come on CNN and announce the discovery of a Mughal pagoda off Marblehead or Truro.

I know who’s behind it.

“Bugs,” I say, “give it a rest.”

“It’s off Marblehead, I know it is,” he tells me, sipping his Evian. It, it it, the Emperor’s Tear. He’s in Aspen this time with the discard of an Asian dictator. Though our professional relationship has been over for years, I’m still the only person he can talk to about it. And he’s the only person who knows nearly as much as I do.

“Don’t confuse some crystal gazer with a diamond cutter, Bugs.”

9

EVERY NOW AND THEN we hear of a gentleman robber, a polite soft-spoken white-collar wannabe who enlists respect from his victims and sympathy from the public: Gabriel Legge, the Robin Hood of the Coromandel Coast, seems to have been that kind of pirate.

On one expedition in the Laccadive Islands, legend has him holding Captain William Kidd’s feet to a cookout fire to inflict on Kidd the same pleasures he had on the islanders, forcing them to dance on hot coals or to water wrestle with sharks in a shallow pool.

At St. Mary’s in Madagascar, where freebooting New England slave traders had their headquarters, Gabriel