Captain Kidd
Part One
My name was William Kidd, as I sailed, as I sailed,
And so wickedly I did, God’s laws I did forbid,
As I sailed.
I roamed from sound to sound, as I sailed, as I sailed,
And many a ship I found, and them I sunk or burned,
As I sailed.
I’d ninety bars of gold, as I sailed, as I sailed,
I’d a crew both brave and bold, and dollars manifold,
As I sailed.
I murdered William Moore, as I sailed, as I sailed,
And laid him in his gore, not many leagues from shore,
As I sailed.
Farewell to young and old, for I must die, I must die,
And jolly seamen bold, you’re welcome to my gold,
For I must die.
-Anon.
Or so one version of the broadsheet ballad “Captain Kidd’s Farewell To The Sea” would have us believe. The song, sold to the holiday-making crowd that thronged to watch Kidd and six members of his crew hang at London’s Tyburn Execution Dock in 1701, began the legend of the bloodthirsty pirate who left millions in treasure all along the eastern coast of North America. But the ballad had nothing to do with the real captain, who never took an unlawful prize before his last voyage, was forced into piracy by his own crew, proved both inept and monumentally unlucky at it, and died a penniless scapegoat in a political and financial cover-up which involved the innermost circles of the court of King William III.
William Kidd was born in Scotland circa 1645. Details of his early life are unknown, but by 1689 he had had become a privateer captain, taking French and Spanish prizes for the British Crown in the West Indies. By the 1690s, he’d gotten out of the dangerous game. His captain’s share of the prizes, bestowed upon him by strict British Admiralty regulations, enabled him to set up as a merchant seacaptain in New York. He owned a large house on the corner of Pearl and Harbour Streets in lower Manhattan. He also had property, probably warehouses, at 119-121 Pearl Street, 52-56 Water Street, and 25-29 Pine Street, as well as a country house north of the city, near the East River, close to present-day East 79th Street. His town-house boasted New York’s first “Turkey,” or oriental, carpet, and was sumptuously furnished with silver plate and silken wall-hangings, all bought with the profits from his privateer days, and from the more sedate trading voyages of the merchant vessel he owned. He was married to a wealthy woman named Sarah Oort, daughter of a member of the haughty patroon class of Dutch landowners who had stayed on and prospered even more after the English seized the city from Pieter Stuyvesant in 1664. From the evidence, Kidd was a pillar of Anglo-Dutch society, a citizen of impeccable reputation both in business and in private life.
But New York at the end of the 17th century was a wide-open town. The American colonists, hamstrung economically by Britain’s Navigation Acts of 1651, which stipulated that essential goods be carried only in British ships, had naturally taken to trading with pirates, who divided their rapacious attentions between the Spanish Main and the newer hunting grounds of the Indian Ocean. The xebecs and dhows of Arab coffee-sheikhs and the Mughal rulers of India, the portly, bluff-bowed merchantmen of the British and Dutch East India Companies, and innumerable smaller vessels, carried fortunes in specie, silks, spices, and jewels between the Malabar Coast of India and the Ottoman ports of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Other vessels heading back to all seagoing European countries had to follow the trade winds through the Indian Ocean on their way to the hazardous passage round the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip. The pickings were as good as they had been during the glory days of the Spanish treasure galleons plying the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and the pirates, most of whom, like Kidd, had learned their trade during the endless succession of wars which plagued the 17th century, became men of consequence virtually overnight. By the 1690s, piracy had become a vital element in the economy of British Americas, and the pirate captains, with the open connivance of almost every colonial governor of the period, flaunted their wealth and power openly, strolling the streets of New York, Charleston, Salem, and Boston in finery which often outdazzled the raiment of Britain’s nobility. One governor of New York, Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, was so deeply embroiled with the pirates and their trade that he became an embarrassment to H.M.’s Government, and had to be relieved of his office and sent home before his illegal activities forced a scandalous arrest for treason.
His replacement, the Earl of Bellomont, possessed vast holdings in England and Ireland, and was one of the most powerful men at the court of William III; it was precisely his high position that would lead to Kidd’s terrible demise. Bellomont was largely an absentee governer, preferring London’s sophistication to what he considered the barbarity of New York. It was while he was in residence at the fledgling British Empire’s capital that he first met William Kidd.
Kidd had taken his merchant ship on a routine voyage to London in 1695, and there he was introduced to the earl by one Robert Livingstone, a New Yorker engaged in many lucrative enterprises, not all of them strictly legal. Bellomont had pledged himself to the latest of Livingstone’s complicated schemes, prompted in equal measure by avarice and political ambition, and Kidd was to play a crucial role in it.
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, in which a cabal of British lords, abetted by Parliament, replaced the last Stuart king, James II, with William of the Dutch House of Orange, who was married to James’s daughter Mary. The coup rattled the Tories, who had thought themselves free of parliamentary rule after Oliver Cromwell’s death and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. And the Glorious Revolution wasn’t as bloodless as the Whigs painted it. The ongoing unrest in Northern Ireland is to this day tied firmly to the aftermath of the Battle of the Boyne, in which Dutch William’s Protestant troops slaughtered James II’s Catholics. The result was the forcible annexation of Ireland and the extermination of Irish Catholic smallholders, who were replace by Scots Protestants loyal to England. King William’s victory kindled a bitter sectarian resentment in Ireland which wasn’t allayed until the southern part of the country became the Irish Free State in 1922, and it continues to flare up in Northern Ireland.
Be that as it well may be, by the 1690s the Tories were back on the rise. William and Mary, affable nonentities who distanced themselves from realpolitik, had fulfilled their functions adequately, and the crisis besetting England’s real rulers was the same one a different empire’s politicians would howl about three hundred years later: crime.
Specifically, crime that made the wrong people rich. Just as today’s American government has been compromised by its dealings with drug-lords – handy folks when you need quick money on the down-low to finance clandestine military operations against perceived enemy régimes, but rather hard to control – Britain’s Tories found themselves in a bind when it came to negotiating with pirates.
Certainly piracy was helping to enrich the American colonies, as well as their governors and various English noblemen who got a cut of the action. And what pirate depredations cost French, Spanish, and Dutch commerce was a major factor in Britain’s increasing domination of world trade. But the days when an overt bribe from a sea-wolf could be construed as a legal privateer’s Crown share had pretty much died with Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh.
Bellomont and his ilk were in a quandary. On the one hand, the British East India Company, the trading colossus whose profits shored up England’s entire economy, was outraged by the brazen predations of the pirates, even though the company employed piratical tactics itself, using the Royal Navy warships which often escorted its convoys to attack unarmed foreign merchantmen and add booty to the legally-acquired bounty of the East that supported Britain’s new affluence. On the other hand, the pirates didn’t play fair. Deals made with corsair captains (and the most successful of these commanded fleets of heavily-gunned ships which could at least hold their own against the Royal Navy’s thinly-deployed squadrons) to pillage foreign vessels but leave British East Indiamen alone, were routinely broken. Certain prominent people in London were finding themselves out of pocket because of the pirates’ blithe disregard of agreements made between gentlemen.
So Bellomont and his cabal came up with one of history’s first examples of spin control. Their notion was to launch a well-publicized campaign against the pirates of the Indian Ocean. Bellomont’s Tories would accrue civic virtue, and in the process, enrich themselves splendidly, by pretending to stamp out the threat to “John Company,” as the East India Company was popularly known. King William himself, already in ill health and paying little attention to the goings-on in his realm, probably wasn’t aware of the scheme. But the Earl had powerful friends. Sir John Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal and later Lord Chancellor of England; the Duke of Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Sir Edward Russel, First Lord of the Admiralty; and the Earl of Romney, His Majesty’s Master General of Ordnance, were Bellomont’s partners. And there is reason to believe that whatever her stern Dutch-Reformed Protestant husband may have thought, Queen Mary supported the project: she was an Englishwoman and Tory to her bones.
The Navy was in tatters. Ravaged by the recent wars, it was dangerously overextended, its aging fleet strung out over the world’s oceans trying to protect the interests of the English mercantile empire. Some brilliant stroke that might capture the attention of the public – meaning, at the time, the middle-class merchants and bankers who read their daily broadsheets and were shortly to form the world’s first insurance company, Lloyd’s, named after their favorite coffee-house – was imperative. But it should not cost the Exchequer much money, and if it went badly, the Tories needed an expendable man.
Kidd was perfect. When the slippery Livingstone recruited him to Bellomont’s cause, it’s not known how close a relationship he had to the members of the cabal, but he must certainly have been known to Russel and the Earl of Romney because of his services to the Crown as a privateer. He was sober and reliable, an experienced seacaptain who knew how to work his guns and his ship in combat, a man in what the period considered late middle age, and a successful colonial who knew that his further advancement depended on the favor of his betters. Bellomont asked him to make one last voyage. Captain Kidd signed on