His Tory backers provided Kidd with a new ship. The Adventure Galley was state-of-the-17th-century art, a three-masted frigate designed for speed and maneuverability. She carried thirty-four guns: sixteen 9-pounders starboard and larboard , on a single deck, and two 4-pound chasers, mounted on swivels, afore and abaft. Her fore- and mainmasts carried square-rigged courses, topsails, and topgallants, but she could sail closer to the wind by dropping her square yards and going with jibs, fore-and-aft-rigged staysails, and her lateen (triangular) course. In a dead calm she coud continue to maneuver with her sweeps, long oars, each pulled by two men, which were ported below her guns. In light air, she could use her sweeps to outstrip her prey, get to windward of her, and wear down for a broadside and a boarding, yard-arm to yard-arm.
Each of Adventure Galley’s broadsides could blast 192 pounds of shot at the enemy. Standard iron cannonballs were for smashing in the enemy’s hull and bringing down her masts. Bags of smaller grapeshot were for tearing her sails apart and wreaking havoc on her crew. Bar-shot, pairs of linked, two-foot-long iron rods, could clear a vessel’s deck of every man on it. With her flexible array of yards and sails, she was nimble enough, on a breezy day, to cross the enemy’s stern and rake her aft to fore with her great guns; and with her sweeps in a calm, she could range easily alongside her foe, porting the sweeps as her cannon bellowed and the sharpshooters in her fore- and maintops peppered the enemy’s quarter-deck with their muskets, before grappling on and sending her boarding crew swarming over with their pistols and cutlasses. Adventure Galley was a pure instrument of murder, and Captain Kidd intended to take no prisoners.
In London, Kidd picked his crew, drawing on seamen he knew personally from past voyages, whose honesty, experience, and skill he trusted. His mission was to proceed to the Indian Ocean and make war on pirates. Adventure Galley’s departure was the late 17th century’s version of a media event: balladeers and purveyors of broadsheets ballyhooed the Tory war on crime, as the sleek ship sent back the last of her bumboat provisioners with all the whores put off, mounted her topmasts, crossed her topmast spars, lowered canvas, hauled aloft and sheeted home, brought up her bower, and sailed down the Thames.
Less than a mile downstream from Tyburn Point, where his own bones would dangle in irons after his hanging, Kidd encountered a Royal Navy frigate laboriously heaving home after a long, rough cruise. Kidd was flying the royal ensign, believing that Bellomont’s connection with the Admiralty made Adventure Galley officially part of the naval fleet.
First disillusionment: the captain of the frigate expected Kidd to lower his topsails in salute, standard procedure for any large, armed civilian vessel encountering a British man of war. But Kidd sailed on, fore and main topsails still bent to catch the favoring northeasterly, trying to get down the river before the turning of the tide. He dipped his flag only, and sent up the signal pennants he’d been given by his backers, that identified him as a private ship hired into His Majesty’s service.
The warship backed her topsails, ranged broadside to the Adventure Galley, and raised her weather ports. Her guns rolled out, and she signaled Kidd to stand to. He was forced to come up, shiver his sails, and stop dead in the waters, while an officer and a crew of marines lowered a boat, rowed it over, and boarded the galley. In accordance with the high-handed practice of the day, and against Kidd’s wild objections, most of his hand-picked crew were pressed into the Navy frigate to replace men she had lost during her cruise.
Kidd had to return to port to replace them. Bellomont and his friends were already beginning to distance themselves from him, and he had no help from them. Eventually he rounded up a pack of scurvy dogs, recruited from every bankside tavern and leaping-house, composed mostly of Navy deserters. Kidd whipped this rabble down to the Channel, still intent on sailing round Africa to the Indian Ocean. But in the days of sail, given the shifting pattern of the so-called prevailing winds, it was not uncommon for a south-bearing vessel to be blown all the way to the New World before catching a favorable breeze to take it back to the Cape of Good Hope.
Kidd caught such an unlucky wind. He may have taken on more men in the Azores or Canaries, but eventually he wound up right back in New York, with a battered Adventure Galley already in need of refitting. Most of his crew promptly deserted.
To replace them, Kidd hired pirates, no question. But he was desperate: his commission and the letters-of-marque from Bellomont’s cabal demanded results, and he was in the wrong ocean, well behind schedule.
Kidd’s first criminal act was to sign his piratical recruits to ship’s articles which guaranteed the crew 60% of the voyage’s profits. 60% was the usual privateer’s share, but Kidd was still nominally operating as master of a Navy warship, despite the contretemps in the Thames, and the Admiralty alone determined prize-shares, after lengthy deliberation. Worse, his contract with Bellomont was technically illegal according to Admiralty regulations, for it set Kidd’s share in advance. And it was a mingy one: only 25% of Adventure Galley’s spoils of war. The contract further stipulated that there was to be no sharing-out of the takings during the cruise, the whole to be reserved for an official audit by Admiralty officers after Kidd had come back. But he had to sail, and so he violated the terms of his agreement with Bellomont. He was in trouble even before the Adventure Galley left New York.
The weather contributed to Kidd’s bad luck. Crowding on sail to pick up time, he met a howling storm off the Cape of Good Hope. He was seamanlike enough to steer the ship through the gale and the gigantic waves, but he lost his foretopmast and a great deal of canvas. Worse, the New York shipyard had used green wood to replace some of the galley’s planking. She was sprung throughout her hull, with the crew, laboring at the pumps, barely able to keep pace with the leaks. It took him three weeks, working close-hauled with his tattered jibs and staysails, to limp into Johanna Harbor on Madagascar, his fresh water nearly gone, and his crew scurvied, exhausted, and sullen.
In Johanna, Kidd found a fat East Indiaman taking on water and stores. Once again he ran up the signals that identified Adventure Galley as a vessel of war on His Majesty’s service, and demanded a refitting from the merchant ship’s spare spars, sails, and tackle. The East Indiaman took him for a pirate and trained her few guns on him. In no way wishing to engage in combat with a British ship, Kidd called in his boats without finishing his resupply. He left the harbor and made what sail he could for the sea-lanes between India and the Ottoman coast. His vessel was sea-weary, supplies were low, and his crew was mutinous.
Kidd’s commission had been large. Yes, he was required, first and foremost, to attack pirate ships. But Bellomont’s contract further authorized him to take any ships flying the flags of England’s enemies. The vagueness of that authorization, reflecting the double intentions of the Bellomont cabal, was typical of the period: privateers were lauded and rewarded when they were successful, easily forgotten when they were sunk, and branded as pirates when they exceeded their commissions – regardless of the reason – in disputed waters.
And Kidd arrived in very disputed waters indeed. For several weeks he and his crew sweltered on patrol off Perim Island, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Perim had long afforded pirates with an ambush point from which to attack ships coming down the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden; it was Kidd’s intention to ambush the ambushers. His crew – sick, sun-tormented, and outraged that a cruise, already a year old, had nothing to show for the cruel time – watched a steady stream of merchant vessels passing daily through the bottleneck between Africa and Arabia, with growing frustration. Kidd seems to have taken his commission seriously, but how do you tell a pirate ship from a merchantman, in waters where every ship flies flags of opportunity?
He began to lose control of the ship’s company, and finally, to quell a mutiny led by William Moore, who as Chief Gunner was the third most important officer aboard, after Kidd himself and his First Mate, he sent the Adventure Galley against a mixed convoy of English, Arab, and Dutch vessels. The armed British East Indiaman fell out of formation to engage Kidd, and once again he backed off, unable to commit himself to outright piracy, though his ship would have made short work of the fat, slow, undergunned vessel. Kidd was clinging to the tatters of legality, and needed a strictly legitimate prize. His crew thought him a coward.
His first half-hearted sea-action had landed him in a double bind. On the one hand, he had failed even to identify, let alone destroy, a single pirate ship. On the other, he hadn’t taken a single prize; no doubt many of the vessels that slid tantalizingly past as he ranged wearily to and fro off Perim were French or Spanish, but Kidd had no way of telling their origin or registry.
He decided, it seems, to abandon the war on pirates altogether, and to take the first prize his letters-of-marque justified. By then he must have known that Bellomont and his associates had gulled him, and that if he returned to England with nothing to show for his voyage, he might face an Admiralty trial and the possibility of being hanged.
So he left the Perim station and stood out into the Indian Ocean, determined to capture any ship that wasn’t English. Off India’s Malabar Coast, he spotted a large xebec flying Portuquese colors. Since Britain was at war with Spain, and Spain and Portugal were allies, on the principle of “the friend of my enemy is my enemy,” he attacked. There was a short, sharp fight: William Moore knew his trade, and his nine-pounders played havoc with her prey. The xebec struck her flag, indicating surrender, and Kidd boarded her. To his dismay, he discovered that she had an English captain, and that she was under contract to the British East India Company. Kidd seized her cargo anyway, and took the furious Englishman and his Portuguese interpreter aboard Adventure Galley. The xebec went down. We don’t know what happened to her mixed crew of Arabs and Portuguese, but Kidd was a privateer captain of his time, and there certainly wasn’t room aboard his ship for the entire crew of another vessel. In normal practice, Gunner Moore should have restricted his firing to the enemy’s masts and spars, crippling her, but leaving her intact enough for a prize-crew to repair her and bring her home. Instead, he sank her, and there must have been a high old scene between him and Kidd as the xebec’s hull slid under.
The xebec’s English captain, we may imagine, wasn’t much impressed by Kidd’s letters-of-marque. He was in a position to make a great deal of trouble, if he lived.
“Walking the plank” was a form of execution invented by pirates, or so we have been led to believe by novels like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” and the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth (who depicts Kidd as a lean, swarthy stage villain with Mongol cheekbones and a scraggly mustache, rather than the clean-shaven, rather portly middle-aged colonial that he was. Wyeth doesn’t even give him the indispensable wig of the period.)
But at the turn of the 18th century, murder at sea was far less formal: a musket ball to the heart or a blow to the head with a marline-spike, and the body tumbled overside. Whatever the technique used by Kidd, the English captain and his crew disappeared from history.
The next ship that came within range was unmistakably English, an East Indiaman flying the British ensign. Kidd refused to attack her, for obvious reasons. But Gunner Moore and the crew had gotten a taste for piracy after the looting and sinking of the Portuguese vessel. They were again on the verge of mutiny when, on October 30th, 1697, Kidd let the fat merchant ship slip by.
It should be remembered that the absolute authority granted to captains of Royal Navy ships by no means obtained with privateer masters, who stood on a footing of uneasy democracy with their officers and crews, and only assumed unquestioned command authority when their ships were committed to battle. Kidd’s hold on his men was precarious, at best. Moore, as the vessel’s gunner, was, in effect, Adventure Galley’s military commander. And unlike a Royal Navy vessel, Kidd’s ship carried no Marines, the seagoing soldiers whose rigid discipline not only assured great slaughter in a boarding action, but also maintained order aboard their own ships: flogging for trivial offenses was possible without mutiny aboard British men-of-war only because of the presence of the troops, bored out of their minds during long cruises and itching to hurt somebody.
But Kidd’s sailors were also his soldiers. It was his job to command Adventure Galley’s maneuvers, guiding her through a long chase with precise estimations of the spar and sail configuration that might give her a few knots’ speed advantage over her prey, and then directing her through the slow, deadly ballet which preceded the actual fight: two vessels in a lethal pas-de-deux, each trying to gain the weather-gage and wind up to windward of the other. Today’s yacht racers are similarly obsessed with gaining the weather-gage, particularly on the windward leg of the race: briefly put, a racing boat that sails closest to the wind, all other factors being equal, will reach the marker buoy with a substantial lead over its rivals, and will probably keep that lead for the rest of the race. This essential tactic was of course borrowed from sea warfare, the difference being that combat ships in the age of sail did their intricate maneuverings not for a blue ribbon or a silver cup, but in order to get into the best possible positions from which to blow their enemies to kingdom come. Next time someone tells you that watching the America’s Cup race on TV is “like watching paint dry,” you might remind him or her that several hundred years ago, the stakes in the torturous game were a little higher. Maybe America’s Cup yachts should be equipped with a few cannons…
Kidd’s exhausting, meticulous maneuvering – and the nature of pursuit and maneuver required the captain to stay on deck almost all the time, catching catnaps when he could – ended when he was within cannon-range of his enemy. At that point he would cede control to his gunner, and move his ship according to the gunner’s estimation of the coming battle: where to lie to ensure maximum slaughter of people, spars and masts, and minimal hull damage. The gunner would decide whether the ship should range down for a rolling broadside (in which the cannons fire sequentially, from bow to stern), or to stand to and fire all the guns at once; and how to take best advantage of the enormous pall of blinding smoke caused by the black gunpowder, in the murk of which a boarding party might leap aboard the enemy vessel almost unobserved, and set their pistols and cutlasses to their bloody work. To sum but, Kidd was master of the ship and planned the battle. But William Moore was master of the guns, and his judgment decided the final outcome of the fight. The crew’s loyalties wavered between captain and gunner.
We know by the ship’s log that in early November, 1697, William Moore was sick, possibly suffering from scurvy, and was resting on Adventure Galley’s upper deck, taking in what there was of fresh air on that cruelly hot day. His captain approached him, and harsh words were exchanged. Moore flared up at Kidd for failing to take the British ship. We must imagine a gaunt, feverish crew gathering around the two men, taking Moore’s part and howling down Kidd’s attempt to maintain his authority. Every rag aloft in the forlorn hope of a breeze, canvas hanging limp, halyards slatting monotonously against masts, and the topheavy masts themselves creaking ominously, threatening to rock out of their steppings as the vessel rolled in the swells, becalmed miles from land. The water-butts low, the hardtack full of weevils, maggots in the bully-beef, the tar in the rigging above liquifying and dripping down as the melting caulking in the seams stuck to the soles of the crew’s bare feet. And all those big, slow East Indiamen, along with the defenseless lateeners of the rich Moghuls and the Turkish potentates, sliding by, crammed with treasure, just at the limits of perception, where heat-haze blurs the distinction between sea and sky into hallucination.
So Gunner Moore, feverish and half-mad, howls riot and mutiny at Captain Kidd. The bony crew tightens its circle around him. Deranged himself by now, knowing he has violated his commission and will probably hang for it, Kidd swings an arm back and grabs the handle of an iron-banded shot-bucket. It is Moore’s own tool, the container which brought canister-shot from the magazine below decks to the galley’s cannons. Kidd’s arm completes its arc, and the shot-bucket cracks Moore’s skull like an egg. We can speculate that Kidd did not mean to kill Moore. The man was expert at his military trade, and Kidd needed him. But Moore dies instantly.
By British Admiralty law, the master of any ship was authorized to do whatever he thought necessary to quell mutiny. Legally, Kidd was blameless. And in fact his crew settled down after the incident, seeming to respect him better – or fear him more – for killing the gunner.
But Kidd himself was forever changed by his act. He was a tough, hardened sea-captain, a veteran of numerous bloody battles during his youth as a privateer, and a man who probably executed the entire company of his Portuguese prize. Yet killing faceless enemies was one thing; murdering William Moore, who served as his co-commander, and may have been a friend, was something else. We must imagine that Kidd, product of an age of routine violence, whose Anglican religion nonetheless prescribed endless agony after death for the souls of the violent, felt he had doomed himself to Hell with one unlucky swing of a shot-bucket.
