Captain Kidd, Part Three
He maintained a tissue of legality in his subsequent captures. The first ship he took, after the death of Moore, was Levantine, but she bore French papers, and Kidd carefully saved them, to prove that the prize was legal within the terms of his commission.
But on January 10th, 1698, he took the Quedagh Merchant. She was owned by a pair of Armenians, but skippered by an Englishman, and it would turn out eventually that her trading voyage was backed by English investors. The ship carried French passes, like the Levantine vessel, and Kidd saved them. But the attack, he knew, was well outside the limits of his agreement with Bellomont. The passes and flags were a flimsy excuse: Adventure Galley herself bore French, Dutch, and Spanish identification, in addition to her English registry and regalia.
Still, Kidd carefully locked away Quedagh Merchant’s French passes, with the French passes of his previous capture, which he renamed the November. It was a dull, even stupid alias, based merely on the month in which he took the ship. We must assume Kidd was at his wit’s end.
The reluctant pirate, with his little fleet, put into the notorious corsairs’ haven of St. May’s Island, off Madagascar. The first thing he saw as he sailed into the harbor was an unmistakable pirate ship, the Mocha Frigate. She was the flagship of a cutthroat named Robert Culliford, and her name and lines were known to seamen in all waters, so fearful was her captain’s reputation. Here, at last, was Kidd’s chance to clear his name and fulfill the letter of his commission, and he took it.
Instead of dropping anchor, he ran up the British ensign and ordered his gun crew to prepare for battle. It was a foolhardy gesture at best: Mocha Frigate was at least as well armed as Adventure Galley, and the little harbor was stiff with the masts of other pirate ships, whose masters would hardly have stood by to watch a lone British Navy vessel attacking one of their own.
But Kidd did have the advantage of surprise. Mocha Frigate and the other pirate ships were at anchor, topmasts down and sailed furled, with the brunt of their crews ashore. If this were an Errol Flynn movie (or a Patrick O’Brian novel), Kidd would have raked Mocha Frigate with a salvo, severing her lines and bringing down her remaining rigging, and boarded her. Cutting down her skeleton crew in his one-sided assault, he’d have rifled her hold for treasure, and, saving her stern-plate and papers as proof of his bold feat, he would have set her on fire. Then he would have eased safely between the two gun-forts on the hooks of St. Mary’s harbor, crowded on more sail, and scudded for England.
Unfortunately, when Kidd proposed attacking the Mocha Frigate, most of his crew mutinied. Culliford was a sea-wolf more to their liking, and they deserted to him en masse. We may imagine Culliford himself, in the full barbaric regalia of a pirate king, summoned from his shoreside villa to preside, as Kidd’s erstwhile shipmates looted and burned the November and the Adventure Galley. Only thirteen of Kidd’s crew remained loyal to the hapless captain, and the normal course would have been for the deserters to butcher him and the loyal men.
Instead, the mutineers, with Culliford’s easy permission, not only spared Kidd, but awarded him the Quedagh Merchant herself, the biggest and richest of his prizes, and his full 40% of her treasure. We can only speculate about the mutineers’ reasons: perhaps they, and their new master Culliford, feared massive relaliation by the British Navy if they killed a man under official Admiralty commission. Maybe they retained a measure of respect for Kidd, who, after all, had taken three prizes and shared out scrupulously with them (honor among thieves?) while they were still at sea. And certainly Quedagh Merchant, a clumsy, gunless 500-tonner, was no asset to Culliford’s fleet.
Yet why award the humiliated Kidd his share of the treasure? The best answer may be sheer whim. Pirates, like all criminals before and after them, believed only in immediate gratification. “Live hard, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” as the hoodlum in the Humphrey Bogart movie “Knock On Any Door” would put it two hundred and fifty years later. To the mutineers, the frustrating cruise with Kidd had finally ended successfully. They had a nice bit of loot, they’d signed on with a far more enterprising pirate, and they were in safe harbor. Get drunk, rock and roll with the Madagascar whores, and what the hell, toss poor old Kidd a bone. He wasn’t a bad captain. The Adventure Galley hadn’t been a “home,” as seamen called particularly comfortable ships. But at least she hadn’t been a “hell.” Let him scuttle on back to England safe and sound. We got ours, for the moment, and it’s only the moment that counts.
“Rock and roll me over, boys! (HAUL ‘EM DOWN!)
Get this damn job over, boys! (HAUL ‘EM DOWN!)
That may have been what they sang, a short-haul chantey to set the rhythm for raising spars and sheeting home canvas, the mate giving the haul-and-go, the crew responding in a great heaving voice somewhere between a wail and a grunt, as the lumbering Quedagh Merchant, undermanned and doomed, weighed anchor and set off. Kidd’s last sight of St. Mary’s harbor might have been the pirate market on the beach, where African and Indian music played as the agents of Turkish Khalifs, Indian Rajahs, Arab Sheikhs, and the legal and illegal consortia of all the European empire-builders bid on precious spices, fabrics, jewels, and gold and silver coins and ingots. All dazzle and degradation: a dozen languages competing, stalls laden with the booty of the seven seas, pigs rooting next to intricately-worked Persian carpets laid out on the sand for buyers, a bewigged man in the ruffles, lace, and silver-buckled Spanish leather shoes of some European court bidding against a Mandingo chieftain, naked except for his feather headdress, leopard-skin cloak, tribal scars, and ornate penis-sheath, for a consignment of slaves offered by a Bedouin wrapped to his sharp eyes in a black keffiya.
But in England, rumors about Kidd’s activities had reached his noble backers, and they theselves were in trouble. The Whigs, staunch Protestants, Parliamentarians, men who represented the new merchant-banker class and opposed the traditional aristocracy, had mounted a strident campaign against the Tories. Lord Bellomont and his cronies were pillaried in the press when the Whigs discovered that their pirate-catcher had turned pirate. Bellomont, scrambling to safeguard his governorship of New York and his political future, denounced Kidd. Before the captain made landfall in the Caribbean’s Windward Islands, he was as good as hanged, served up by the Tories as a scapegoat.
By the time Kidd reached the coast of British America, he’d heard the worst from passing vessels: he was being tarred as a pirate by his own backers. He made anchor in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, and began to offload some of Quedagh Merchant’s cargo, sending part of it to a warehouse owned by old friends in the town of Stamford, in Connecticut Colony, who remembered him as a bluff, upright, bourgeois seacaptain. But the brunt of Kidd’s booty, the glittering prize which has attracted so many treasure-hunters in the centuries since his death, was taken to Gardiner’s Island, off the eastern tip of Long Island.
John Gardiner, who owned the island, was a man of his rough times: possibly a wrecker who set false signal fires on foggy nights to lure ships onto the rocks, certainly a receiver of stolen goods, usually for a percentage of their value. But in his transaction with Kidd, he was entirely above-board. One must conclude that he and Kidd were friends – old privateer shipmates, maybe. In any case, he gave Kidd a detailed receipt for all the goods left with him on his island. Quedagh Merchant’s treasure wasn’t buried. It was delivered to Gardiner and meticulously itemized in Gardiner’s own hand.
By the terms of Kidd’s commission, he was entirely outlaw by this point. He was supposed to have retained all the spoils from his cruises for examination by Admiralty assessors. But the caches of the Quedagh Merchant’s cargo which he left at Stamford and Gardiner’s island, duly witnessed and signed for, certainly suggest that Kidd still thought of himself as a lawful privateer, prepared to present the Admiralty with a full accounting of his voyage, but stashing the loot as a bargaining point in case things went sour. Gardiner even provided him with a sloop, the Antonio, so that he could return to New York City.
As a preliminary gesture of good faith, he sent the precious French passes of the November and the Quedah Merchant to Lord Bellomont in New York, thereby throwing himself on his Lordship’s mercy. He then took the Antonio to Boston, still wary of attack by British men of war, and in Boston, the poor man tried to appease Bellomont by sending a thousand pounds in gold specie to Bellomont’s wife.
The act was foolhardy, unless there was something of an intimate connection between Kidd and Lady Bellomont. She was the reigning beauty of what passed for New York society, but her husband despised his colony and stayed away from it most of the time. William Kidd was a gallant privateer, and a man of parts. Sarah Oort Kidd was a wife of convenience without much conversation; when she spoke at all, it was in Dutch. The pair had no children.
Kidd’s gift to Lady Bellomont backfired. Lord Bellomont was gleefully able to regard it as an attempted bribe from a blackguard.
His Tories were sore pressed by the majority Whigs in England. His own fat office as Governor or New York was threatened. And Kidd was a damned embarrassment. So he reported the bribe to the Admiralty Counsel, which ordered Kidd’s arrest.
In Boston, Kidd paid off the Antonio’s crew as best he could. It wasn’t enough for them, and they turned against him, as we shall see. Meanwhile, the Admiralty had tracked down the sale of the Quedagh Merchant, and had found the Antonio at anchor in Boston Harbor. Kidd, deep in drink and despair, took a room in a common seamen’s lodging-house. It didn’t take long for the Admiralty’s agents to find him.
The constables who arrested Kidd and ransacked his shabby room found enough damning evidence to widen the search to Gardiner’s Island, Stamford, and every other location at which Kidd was said to have off-loaded cargo. The Admiralty’s inventory is on record, and it matches Kidd’s own, submitted under oath when he was arraigned in Boston. Kidd’s booty consisted of 1,111 ounces of gold in various configurations, from ingots to jewelry; 2,535 ounces of silver, also broken down between jewelry and specie; one pound of precious stones (the report doesn’t differentiate between garnets and pearls); 57 bags of refined sugar; and 41 bags of finished cloth, chiefly silks.
Kidd was detained without a trial in the Boston gaol, kept in solitary confinement on the barest of rations, unvisited, from 1699 through 1700. In the wider world, Dutch William, who was to die less than a year later, no longer had hold of his wits, let alone his government. In 1701, Kidd was hauled in chains out of his Boston cell, stuffed aboard a British warship, and taken to London to stand trial. William III died, and with Queen Anne, second daughter of James II, put on a Tory throne, Kidd’s backers no longer needed him. The Whig reforms were forgotten; all England was glad that Dutch William’s foreign notions of democracy had died with him. Queen Anne proved so passive a monarch that we know her today only by a style of furniture created during her reign, and a pretty little weed that resembles the lace which trimmed her collars.
Kidd finally got his day in court – the first of two days, and two courts, to be precise. The first was a hearing before the House of Commons, whose members hoped he would defend himself by implicating Bellomont and his cabal, all of whom were members of the House of Lords. But the nearest Kidd got to accusing his backers was to say that he had been given contrary orders. The House of Commons concluded that he had turned pirate on his own initiative, and delivered him to the Admiralty.
He was quickly condemned. The Admiralty’s investigators had managed to track down many of Kidd’s former shipmates, and almost all of them turned Queen’s Evidence to avoid hanging. But the Whigs failed in their effort to prove that their Tory rivals had sponsored a pirate. The evidence supporting a charge of piracy was too cloudy: Kidd’s French passes finally did surface in the Admiralty court. We may speculate that Lady Bellomont, at the last, showed some compassion.
But Kidd had to die, one way or another. The deserters, to a man, asserted that Kidd had murdered William Moore in cold blood. They further deposed that there had been no mutiny, or even the rumor of it, aboard Adventure Galley on that unlucky October day four years before. Six sailors who had remained loyal to Kidd testified to the contrary, but they were rough, ignorant men brought to court in manacles and shackles, already broken by months in gaol, and their testimony was disregarded. The Admiralty officers cobbled up an absurd charge of premeditated murder. If the Kidd verdict had been anything more than a political convenience, the precedant it would set in Admiralty law might well have stripped future British Navy captains of their life-and-death authority on the high seas. But of course Kidd was not a Navy captain. The Admiralty couldn’t prove him a pirate, so they condemned him as a murderer. The six loyal sailors were condemned with him.
Kidd was not allowed to speak in his own defense during the trial, but after sentence was pronounced, he got his moment. We must see him as old and frail by now, physically and mentally devastated by the privations of his imprisonment. He was unable to say anything profound or edifying. He only mumbled, “I am the most innocentest person of all.”
Some kind soul managed to smuggle strong drink to Kidd on the morning of his execution, and by the time he was lifted out of the tumbrel to stand on the scaffold at Tyburn, he was shambling drunk. The crowd was disappointed when he made no defiant gallows-speech, so the balladeers stepped in for him (see above, page one of Part One). Kidd’s loyal seamen had already been hanged, one after another, and the thrifty hangman put the same noose around Kidd’s neck. The trap opened, and the rope broke, to the delight of the crowd. Kidd pitched into the low-tide muck of the Thames. He might already have been dead, but to make sure, the hangman rigged a fresh rope. The raddled old man was hauled back onto the scaffold and hanged again.
After his death, his treasure, what remained of it, was sold at auction by the Crown. It brought exactly 6,472 British pounds, a substantial sum, but nowhere near the wishful estimates of latter-day seekers after Captain Kidd’s glittering hoard. The money was used to build a seamen’s hospital at Greenwich. The building still exists: it now houses the Royal Maritime Museum, an irony Kidd might have appreciated.
Kidd’s body was stripped of shirt and underhose, eviscerated, and coated with tar. It was secured in a cage of iron hoops, and suspended from a gibbet at Tyburn Point, where every ship that entered or left the Pool of London had to pass it. The hoops kept the skeleton from falling apart as the flesh decayed, and Kidd’s bones swung in the breeze for years.
The grisly spectacle was intended as a “warning to seamen,” but most pirates knew exactly what had happened to Kidd. His end only reinforced their determination to die in combat with the Royal Navy, rather than endure a more painful, prolonged death at the hands of the Admiralty.
The new century brought more sophisticated piracy, climaxed by the career of Bartholomew Roberts. Compared to Roberts, whose short, incredibly violent run as a corsair involved whole squadrons of ships and raiding cruises which routinely awarded crewmen seven hundred pounds apiece (and in the early 18th century, seven hundred pounds could buy a ship or a substantial farm), Kidd wasn’t a pirate worth the name.
But the public could not accept the notion that a man so luridly painted by the broadsheets could have been so hapless as to have been caught with only 6,472 pounds as his captain’s share, after a three-year cruise into the treasure-rich eastern seas. Kidd’s attempts to secure his booty with John Gardiner and with his Connecticut friends were quickly forgotten as a legend grew up about buried riches at sites ranging from North Carolina to Newfoundland. More money has been spent trying to find Kidd’s treasure than the combined values of the cargoes of Quedagh Merchant, November, and Antonio.
William Kidd died because he hit his gunner with a four-penny shot-bucket, but the ballad-mongers’s bloody pirate entered folklore, and eventually was credited with having hid more gold than the entire wealth of British America. The real man’s bones bleached in the sun at Tilbury Point, while Sarah Oort Kidd lapsed into reclusive and impoverished widowhood in New York. The entire controversy which sent Kidd on his last voyage became irrelevant when Anne took the throne, and by the end of the 18th century, Kidd was remembered, if at all, as a rather second-rate monster. All attempts to find his trove have failed, because there wasn’t one. But people keep trying. There’s a ninety-year-old excavation attempt, still revived from time to time, on Oak Island, off Nova Scotia, which has turned up a cleverly-engineered treasure pit attributed to Kidd, during the time he sailed off the northern coast of what is now Canada. There are rumors of Kidd’s hidden booty at sites along the entire northeastern coast of the United States. The man’s legend has long survived his deeds. Kidd was a good seaman, a half-hearted pirate, and a perfect political fool. We should care about his cautionary tale exactly as much as we care about politics, civil or corporate.