In 1695, Henry Avery led his 160-strong crew to pull off the most lucrative heist in pirate history on the high seas, amassing gold, silver, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds worth more than £85m in today’s money.

It is dated December 1700, four years after his disappearance following the looting of the ship belonging to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, then the world’s richest man.

Kingsley and Cowan discovered that the letter links Avery with one of the first great spy rings, believed to have included Daniel Defoe, the Robinson Crusoe author, and Thomas Tenison, the archbishop of Canterbury.

The letter was found by Cowan’s late wife, Zélide, when the pair were tracking down sunken Dutch East India Company traders.

Kingsley and Cowan say that at that time Defoe was in Cornwall, posing as a shipwreck treasure diver named Claude Guilot.

One of the king’s aides saw Tenison illegally opening letters from Catholics that had been intercepted from the post office, describing him as a master forger – “so dangerous an art that, unless his Majesty commands him, I perceive he is desirous it should be discovered to nobody”.

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