THE FATEFUL CRUISE OF THE “ADVENTURE GALLEY”
Captain William John Kidd
Politics can be very cruel and dishonest at times, therefore, even though we have not been able to find a direct blood line as yet with Captain William John Kidd, we are aware and recognize that this notorious pirate (reportedly) was of the Dundee Branch of the Kidd Clan, and thought you might like to read the Diary of his trial and death.
During the afternoon before he was put to death, Captain William Kidd-shipmaster and navigator of the Eastern Seas, naval hero and “well-beloved” agent of King William III, of England, New York merchant and man of property, faithful husband and devoted father, but now, alas, a convicted pirate and murderer- was visited by one of the more sanctimonious bores of Newgate Prison, the Chaplain and ordinary, Paul Lorrain.
This busy Divine, gained his living in the present world and his hopes of salvation in the next (hereafter), by wringing confessions from condemned felons and publishing the juicy tidbits in moralizing booklets, which he peddled in the coffee houses of London.
The prospect of imminent death being what it is, the Rev. Paul Lorrain usually had little difficulty extracting repentance from the miserable wretches in his charge.
But Captain Kidd was different. “I found him very unwilling to confess the crime he was convicted of,” complained Lorrain. Which is not surprising, since the 56 year old Kidd did not believe he had committed any crime at all. However, the chaplain was not one to give up a challenge lightly.
On the day of the execution, he was in Captain Kidd’s cell early, and hauled him up to his chapel both in the morning and in the afternoon. “I was afraid that the hardness of Captain Kidd’s heart was still unmelted,” he recalled.
“I therefore applied myself with particular exhortations”.
It seemed to work, for Kidd “readily assented and said that he truly forgave all the world; and I was in good hopes that he did so.”
But the chaplain was in for a shock, between the time Kidd left the prison chapel and the time he passed through the prison gates on the way to the place of execution at 3 p.m., some charitable soul slipped him a considerable quantity of alcohol.
When Kidd emerged through the great Arch of Newtgate, he was reeling drunk and oblivious to the howls of execration from the mob waiting outside.
At the front of the procession in an open carriage came the Admiralty’s deputy marshal, bearing over his shoulder the silver oar that symbolized the authority and power of the Admiralty.
Behind him came the marshal himself, Mr. Cheeke, on whom had fallen the responsibility of arranging the execution and the disposal of the bodies.
Flanked by constables, came a black-draped tumbrel carrying the condemned men- Kidd, his shipmate Darby Mullins, and another pirate not involved with their case.
The cortege moved off at a walking pace, clattering over the cobbles of Cheapside, past the Royal Exchange and the Aldgate pump, with the square keep of the Tower of London on the right.
A great, raucous crowd followed Kidd to his execution place. Low class whores and harpies lined the smelly little streets among the run-down tenements and hovels and cheap taverns, and as they closed in behind the procession and screamed out for Arabian gold and rings and gems and pieces of eight- for pirates sometimes threw a few pieces of treasure to the crowd when they were on their way to be hanged- while others bawled out a ballad specially composed for the occasion, “Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas.”
It was two hours before the procession reached Execution Dock at Wapping, on the edge of the Thames mud flats, the gallows, awash at its base at high tide, now stuck up out of the mud.
Besides the scaffold stood the Reverend Paul Lorrain. The Captain would still not confess his crimes or ask forgiveness. “He expressed abundance of sorrow for leaving his wife and children” recalled Reverend Lorrain, “Indeed, the thoughts of his wife’s sorrow was more occasion of grief to him than that of his own sad misfortunes.”
The constables prodded Kidd onto the scaffold and the hangman fitted the noose round his neck. The crowd waited, Lorrain sang a penitential psalm and said a short prayer, and then the hangman pushed the unrepentant drunk, William Kidd into space.
But, if Captain Kidd had one outstanding characteristic in his life, is was bad luck, and bad luck did not desert him now. For he had dangled only briefly from the gallows’ arm before the rope snapped under his weight, tumbling him down into the mud. A great shriek went up from the crowd. Confused and stunned, Kidd was manhandled up the ladder, and tied to the gallow tree a second time.
The indefatigable Lorrain, seizing his chance, clambered up the ladder behind him and, balanced in this precarious position, tried one more time with urgent pleas to get the poor old sailor to repent his sins.
Kidd, not knowing exactly what was happening, gasped it out, and the chaplain, at last satisfied, climbed down. Then the hangman yanked away the ladder and the judicial murder was complete.
At the time of his death in 1701, and for generations after, he was popularly regarded as a maritime gangster of the most evil sort, the apotheosis of a cutthroat pirate. But nobody endured a worse reputation with less reason.
No pirate of the day spilled less blood- or captured fewer prizes, though not entirely by design. If he was a cause ‘celebre’, it was because of political intrigue rather than actual crime. For the complex story of Captain Kidd’s foray into the Eastern Seas is inextricably linked with the shadowy figures of some of the noblest men of the British realm. And in the end they betrayed him.
Little is known of the first 45 years of William John Kidd’s life, he was a Scot possibly born about 1644/45, he presumably took to the sea when a boy, and emigrated to America in his early 20’s. In any case, by the early 1690’s, he was a man of substance in New York.
He had his own merchant ship and had distinguished himself as a privateer Captain in the King’s service against the French in the West Indies in 1689. Returning home, he married a lovely English woman, who had outlived two previous husbands, though she was still in her early 20’s.
Through his marriage Kidd acquired New York property, which one day would be worth a fortune- “86-90 and 119-121 Pearl Street, 52-56 Water Street and 25-29 Pine Street”, within a few years Kidd was not only rich but very well respected; He held a pew at Wall Street’s Trinity Episcopal Church, he was interested in politics and he counted himself among the confidants of the Governor of New York, Colonel Benjamin Fletcher.
In the mid-1690’s, following the wildly successful pirate cruises of Thomas Tew and Henry Every, the Eastern Seas were alive with pirate vessels.
Outraged native rulers laid blame on the Company’s English managers (East India Company); at last in 1695 the King agreed to relieve New York’s Governor Fletcher, who was by then notorious for his dealings with Tew and other pirates.
In his place as governor of both New York and New England, the King appointed the Earl of Bellomont, an Irish peer with a powerful sense of duty. His was the task of stopping piracy on the American coast from New Jersey to Maine. At the same time, the government hoped to attack the pirates in the East. But England’s war with France meant that there were few ships to spare for pirate chasing. And this was when Captain Kidd came on the scene.
The Earl of Bellomont met Kidd in London in 1695, and offered the ambitious sea captain an enticing opportunity; a privateer’s commission authorizing him to attack Red Sea Pirates- and French Traders as well- and to pocket a bit of the plunder. But, there were aspects of the deal that troubled Kidd, he might have backed out had his secret partners not been some of England’s most powerful men.
Lord Bellomont assured me again and again,”, Kidd later wrote, “that the noble lords would stifle all complaints”, Captain Kidd’s secret partners were: (The Earl of Romney, Master General of Ordnance; The Earl of Oxford, First Lord of the Admiralty; Sir John Somers, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; The Duke of Shrewbury, Secretary of State.)
In the summer of 1695, Kidd arrived in London with his sloop ‘Antegoa’, after a trading run from New York, here he chanced to meet Colonel Robert Livingston, a prominent New Yorker, who presented him with a grandiose scheme for ending Red Sea piracy and making a profit in the bargain.
Livingston’s idea was to dispatch a specially built privateer ship under a specially qualified privateer captain with the backing of a syndicate of influential men who would recoup their investment with the profits from captured pirate booty. Like all enterprises doomed to failure, this one was flawed at its heart. While it purported to be a praise-worthy act of grand international policing, it was in fact, merely a device for making a financial killing of astronomical proportions.
For the real target was not so much the pirates but the prodigious plunder presumed to be in their ships. There was thus at the outset an ambiguity, a confusion of aims that was eventually to prove fate to the man who was placed in command- William John Kidd. (Kidd seemed the ideal choice for this venture)
He was an honest, reliable merchant sea captain, and at the same time, as a former privateer in the King’s service, also he was a fighting sailor who knew the ways of pirates.
Forthwith, Livingston hustled Kidd off to see the new governor of New York, Lord Bellomont, at his London home on Dover Street. Bellomont thought it all a splendid idea, he quickly put Livingston in touch with four of England’s most powerful men, all close friends of the King: Those four are previously mentioned, these gentlemen were only too pleased to put money into the venture, provided, of course, that their names were not mentioned.
In October 1695, Livingston, Bellomont and Kidd signed the Articles of Agreement, with Bellomont being responsible for finding four fifths of the cost, this sum coming from the four anonymous noble backers. Livingston and Kidd together put up one fifth.
As was customary, the first ten per cent of any booty would go to the crown. The remaining 90 per cent would be split three ways- 60% for Bellomont’s backers, 15% for Kidd and Livingston and only 25% for the crew- not the usual 60% of a privateering agreement.
There was to be no share-out of the spoil during the cruise, only at the end when it had been properly condemned by the Admiralty Court. If there should be no booty, Kidd and Livingston were to pay back every farthing their backers had put into the venture.
A few months later, Kidd was issued two special commissions to overlay this private venture with an official veneer. One was a letter of marque, which empowered Kidd to capture any ships or goods belonging to Britain’s enemy, France. The other was a commission from the King, issued under the Great Seal of the Crown of England, empowering Kidd to seize pirates, in particular four named pirates including Tew, and their ships and “Merchandises, Money, Good and Wares.”
The commission referred to him as “Our Trusty and well-beloved Captain William Kidd”. But it also contained a prophetic warning: “We do hereby jointly charge and command you, as you will answer the same at your utmost Peril, that you do not, in any manner, offend or molest any of our Friends or Allies, their Ships or Subjects”.
None of these arrangements was particularly advantageous to Kidd. To raise his part of the expenses he had to sell his ship and a third of his interest to a London speculator.
What he would get in return was dubious: there were few French in the Eastern Seas, and the chances of any crew of his capturing elusive pirates were slim at best. The whole enterprise was very vague and equivocal. To give him his due, Kidd tried to wriggle out of it at the start, he knew how fine the distinction between privateering and piracy was. He also knew that it was usual for privateer crews to mutiny and turn pirate if there was no plunder. he was prosperous already.
But Livingston and Bellomont put great pressure on him, they took him along to the impressive houses of their noble backers. They suggested that it would be disloyal to refuse the King’s Commission. As Kidd later protested to one of his backers, Lord Bellomont ” added threats to his wheedles”.
Kidd felt himself powerless to oppose the all-powerful English establishment, “I thinking myself safe with a King’s commission and the protection of so many great men,” wrote Kidd later “I accepted, thinking it was in my Lord Bellomont’s power as Governor of New York, to oppress me if I still continued obstinate.” “Before I went to sea I waited twice on my Lord Romney and Admiral Russell, both hastened me to sea, and promised to stand by me”.
Captain Kidd’s vessel, the ‘Adventure Galley’, was launched at Deptford on the Thames in December 1695, and was well adapted to his mission. An armed ship of 28 tons mounting 34 guns, she carried a large amount of sail and in addition was pierced for 23 pairs of oars for maneuvering when becalmed. Great care was taken to select a reliable cadre for the crew, men who would not, when confronted with pirates, turn pirates themselves; nearly all these first 70 men were married, with settled families in England (the remaining 80 or so were to be recruited in New York on Kidd’s farewell visit home).
But Kidd’s precautions turned out to be in vain. On March 1, 1696, within a day of setting sail from London, occurred the first and perhaps the most crucial of a whole series of setbacks that were to dog his voyage from beginning to end.
As the Adventure Galley slid down the Thames, Kidd unaccountably failed to salute a Navy yacht at Greenwich, as custom dictated. The Navy yacht then fired a shot to make him show respect, and Kidd’s crew, who were handling sail up on the yardarms, responded with an astounding display of impudence-by turning and slapping their backsides in derision.
Shortly thereafter a press gang, from a large man-of-war boarded the Adventure Galley and forcibly carried off nearly all of Kidd’s handpicked crew for service in the Navy, replacing them with a ragtag collection of Navy rejects.
It was the kind of calamity that never should have occurred. In the first place, Kidd should have been far to seasoned a captain ever to permit gratuitous insults to the Royal Navy-unless he had become giddy with power over his King’s commission.
And while there was never any actual proof that the press gang was in retribution, the entire incident was typical of Kidd’s abysmal lack of judgment-and luck-for the brief remainder of his life.
The first voyage of the Adventure Galley proved to be her last. Half full of water and resting on a sandbar in the shallows, she could sail no farther. Kidd had her stripped and her hull burned for its iron. He then fitted out the bulky ‘Quedah Merchant’ for the voyage home, and began the difficult task of recruiting a crew from the nautical flotsam drifting around the islands. He had plenty of time, for he had to wait five months before the northeast monsoons could blow him around the Cape. At last, on 15 Nov 1698, the ‘Quedah Marchant’ weighed anchor in St. Mary’s harbor.
Kidd seems to have had no qualms about the wisdom of returning home, his family awaited him; he had property to attend to; and he undoubtedly believed that he still had enough cargo in goods, jewels, silver and gold to square accounts with his powerful sponsors.
Captain Kidd was only three days out from St Mary’s when the East India Company wrote a letter from its headquarters in Surat to the Lords Justices in London, in which a number of extreme accusations of piracy were leveled against him.
The charges fell on receptive ears. To Kidd’s high-place backers- Lord Somers, now Lord High Chancellor; Lord Oxford, First Lord of Admiralty; Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Chief Justice; and Lord Romney, Privy Councillor- it had been obvious that their opportunist effort at merchant-venturing was a dismal flop.
There had been no decrease in the incidents of piracy. As for Kidd, there had been no news but uncomplimentary rumor. Now, it seemed, their worst fears were confirmed. The response of the Lords Justices was vigorous and immediate, they ordered a Naval squadron, on the point of sailing to the Indian Ocean, to capture Kidd.
At the same time, the Admiralty dispatched a circular letter to the governors of the American colonies ordering them to apprehend Kidd so that “He, and his associates be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the Law.”
Finally, with the object of isolating Kidd, a free pardon was offered to every pirate east of the Cape except Kidd, and two other captains, one of whom was Henry Every.
The news spread like amuck throughout England. A first-class political scandal erupted as Tory opposition politicians ripped into the four Whig Lords, who had sent Kidd off in the Adventure Galley. William John Kidd, had become an arch criminal guilty of the most unspeakable crimes, and in the eyes of the government, the East India Company, the press and the general public, Kidd was found guilty before he had set foot on land, or so much as uttered a word.
Such was the situation when, early in April 1699, Kidd made his landfall at Anguilla in the Leeward Islands and sent his boat ashore. It returned with devasting news. In every port of the colonies, in virtually every quarter of the known world, Kidd and his crew had been declared pirates, to be arrested on sight.
For four hours the ‘Quedah Merchant’ rode at anchor, some of the men wanted to scuttle the ship against the reef and then disperse, rather than sail into a port that was under English control. But Kidd, would not run, he had been away too long, he was too old for an outlaw’s life of exile, he would see the thing through. He thought that he had powerful friends in London and New York, where he reckoned he could count on the protection of the new governor, Lord Bellomont, one of the first supporters of the ‘Adventure Galley’ cruise.
As Kidd sailed north, it was obvious to all that the ‘Quedah Merchant’, had to be replaced. She was too big and distinctive to avoid detection, too barnacled and sea worn to out sail pursuit. In the Mona Passage on the southeast coast of Hispaniola, they came upon a becalmed trading sloop, the ‘Antonio’. The ‘Antonio’, was neat, fast and anonymous, Kidd bought her from her owner-skipper for 3,000 pieces of eight and moored the ‘Quedah Merchant’ under guard up the Higuey River in Hispaniola.
He then transferred much of the ‘Quedah Merchant’ booty including his own personal treasure- gold bars, gold dust, silver plate, precious and semi-precious stones, fine silks-to the ‘Antonio. And then with a crew of 12 men, the rest opting to remain, he sailed boldly for New York.
On Jun 19, the ‘Antonio’ rounded Long Island and anchored in Oyster Bay, Kidd had been away nearly three years. He had voyaged more than 42,000 miles, a distance greater than the circumference of the earth. The ship in which he had sailed was a ruined hulk on a tropic island; all but a handful of his crew were dead or pirating in the Eastern Seas. And, he was an outlaw, his desperate gamble for life and freedom now entered its most critical stage.
Everything depended on winning over Lord Bellomont, and to do this Kidd pinned his hopes on his two French passes. From Oyster Bay, therefore, Kidd sent a letter to an old friend and neighbor of his in New York, a lawyer named James Emmott, asking him to come out to the ship. Emmott arrived in a day or two, spoke with Kidd, then hastened to Boston, where Bellomont had his headquarters. Emmott saw Bellomont late on the night of June 13, proposed that he should grant Kidd a pardon, and handed him the French passes.
Governor Lord Bellomont, had received unequivocal orders to arrest Kidd, was in a difficult position. His own career was in the balance, and he dared not make any move that would cause Kidd to flee. On June 19, he sent a letter to Kidd by the hand of the Boston postmaster, Duncan Campbell, a friend of Kidd, in which he inveigled the captain into port with a masterpiece of double-dealing as follows:
” I have advised with His Majesty’s Council and shewed them this letter, and they are of the opinion, that if you can be so clear as you (or Mr. Emmott for you) have said, then you may safely come hither. And I make no manner of doubt but to obtain the King’s pardon for you, and for those few men you have left who I understand, have been faithful to you, and refused as well as you to dishonor the Commission you have from England. I assure you on my word and honor, I will perform nicely what I have promised.”
Confided Bellomont in a letter to London: Menacing him had not been the way to invite him hither, but rather wheedling.
Captain William John Kidd, overconfident, perhaps, as a result of his exchanges with Bellomont, now played his hand . Instead of bringing in his cargo for condemnation by Admiralty court, he appeared to regard it as his private property. To Bellomont’s wife he unwisely sent as a “gift” a number of baubles, including a magnificent enameled box with four diamonds set in gold. Left and right he handed out large sums, hoping to ingratiate himself with everyone. Yet he was not so foolish as to discard all precautions.
Sloops came and went, carrying away treasure to friends for safe-keeping, finally, in the orchard of Gardiner’s Island at the eastern tip of Long Island, he buried a bulk of his sway-including a chest containing gems and a box of gold- and duly obtained a receipt from the proprietor of the place, John Gardiner.
Captain Kidd’s treasure was now cunningly dispersed in a number of widely scattered caches. If he went free, he could pick them up later; if he was taken into custody, they would be a useful bargain point. His wife and children joined him on board the ‘Antonio’ at Block Island, he had missed much of his children’s lives, and after such a long separation it was a heartfelt reunion, given added poignancy by the terrible circumstances of the occasion.
His wife had suffered through the hue and cry over her husband for months; she could hardly have shared his optimism as to the outcome. The family stayed on board all the way to Boston, they were to enjoy only two weeks together before being parted forever. The Kidd family landed in Boston on July 2, 1699, and took rooms in a boarding house.
Kidd, unwisely sent another bribe to the Governor’s wife, Lady Bellomont, this time $l,000. (English pound dollars) worth of gold bars sewed up in a green silk bag. She immediately sent them back. The next day, Kidd was interviewed by Bellomont, sitting in Council in his house. The Captain was coldly asked for a detailed account of his movements since leaving England. He replied, somewhat truculently, that his crew had destroyed his log.
The Governor and Council ordered him to prepare a report. Kidd either could not or would not.
Finally on July 6, 1699, all patience at an end the Council voted for Kidd’s immediate arrest. The police searched high and low for the better part of a day, and eventually found him outside the front door of Bellomont’s house.
He tried to draw his sword, broke away and rushed into the house, and was caught, his arms pinned in the presence of the chief instigator of the voyage for which he was now being accused- the Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over His Majesty’s Provinces of the Massachusetts Bay and Governor of New York, his Excellency, Richard, Lord of Bellomont.
Bellomont had Kidd clapped into the Stone Prison, in solitary confinement, in irons weighing 16 pounds. And from the moment of his confinement he was treated like a wild animal. “Monster” is how Bellomont described the Old Captain to Lord Somers. For tainting its good name, the English establishment was to exact a terrible revenge.
At the start, a frantic search was made to uncover Kidd’s treasure. His lodgings were ransacked and their contents-even his clothes and his wife’s things- were bundled away. His gifts to various friends were collected. The sloops that had carried off cargo were tracked down and his treasure on Gardiner’s Island was dug up.
Three weeks after his arrest an inventory was made of recovered booty: 1,111 ounces of gold, 2,353 ounces of silver, more than one pound of precious stones, 57 bags of sugar, and 41 bales of merchandise. The entire proceeds were shipped under close guard to the Treasury in England.
Summer passed, then autumn, and with onset of winter the Council became concerned that Kidd and his fellow prisoners might die of cold in the Stone Prison, and they were allowed warm clothing. In the New Year of a New Century, H.M.S. Advice arrived to take the prisoners back to England for trial. On 6 Feb 1700, Kidd was escorted on board and locked up in the steerage cabin. The other prisoners were chained in the gun room. On 11 Apr 1700, in the Thames Estuary, Kidd was transferred from the Navy ship onto the royal yacht ‘Katherine’, and rushed to Greenwich. A squad of musketeers on board was ready to march in to the Admiralty headquarters.
But when his cabin door was opened early on the morning of Sunday 14 Apr 1700, he was found unfit to appear. Sick in body & temporarily unhinged in mind, Kidd had begun his descent from purgatory to inferno. He asked for a knife so that he could kill himself. He held out a gold piece to be sent to his wife, and he begged to be shot, not hanged.
Newgate prison was the principal jail of the City of London, and already 500 years old. It was, even by the standards of time, a disgusting place.
So overcrowded that prisoners slept two or three to a bed, and so verminous that lice crunched underfoot, as one inmate put it, “like shells on a garden path.” Stench of odor, and prison damp were so overpowering that visitors often brought bunches of flowers to bury their noses in, and prisoners were washed with vinegar before they appeared in court. Unbelievably, the prison was run as a private business; prisoners were made to pay rent for their cells and jailers exacted extortionate fees for everything.
In this dark, noisome, clamorous, cavernous hole, Captain William John Kidd, lay in close confinement for more than a year. His jailer had in May 1700, reported to the Admiralty Board: “Captain Kidd was troubled with a great Paine in his Head, and shaken in his Limbs, and was in great want of his Clothes.”
He was allowed no exercise until the following New Year, and no visitors except an elderly Uncle and Aunt. He was not allowed to write letters to his wife or to discuss his case with anyone or prepare his defense.
He lay, old and ailing, in a total vacuum. At the end of March 1701, Kidd was suddenly called before the House of Commons. The abrupt transition from prison to Parliament would have been difficult under the best of circumstances. Kidd did not perform well. Though some members of the House admired his courage, most found him boorish and truculent, and one thought he was drunk.
What the House wanted to hear about was not Kidd’s personal case but the degree of culpability of the syndicate of Whig lords, who had backed him. If he had involved the Whig statesmen who had sponsored his voyage, portrayed them as villains and himself as their victim, he might have then won a pardon from the Tories.
But Kidd had no flair for political intrigue. Instead, he continued to plead his innocence, and by implication, therefore, that of the Whig ministers. ” I had thought him only a knave”, one member commented, ” now I know him to be a fool as well”. The next day the House recommended that he should “Be proceeded against according to law”, the trial was fixed for May 8.
Kidd, had spent nearly two years in prison by the time he appeared in the dock at the Old Bailey. This itself was injustice enough. But was compounded by two further injustices. In the first place, the vital pieces of evidence with which he hoped to defend himself- the French passes that had been turned over to Bellomont- were withheld from him.
More dolorous still, Kidd was without any counsel until literally an hour or two before the start of the trial. The Admiralty had appropriated $50. for his defense. But whoever had mislaid the French passes now neglected to deliver the $50. to Kidd’s two legal advisers until the night of May 7, and without the money they would not start work.
Thus Kidd, after a two year wait for his trial, had time for one brief consultation with his counsel on the morning before the trial began.
The trial of Captain Kidd was held before no less than six justices and consisted of four separate trials on six indictments on the 8th and 9th of May. The justice were highly talented lawmen; the juries of stalwart Londoners asked fair and pertinent questions.
The court gave him, by the standards of his day, a fair trial.But the standards of his day were grossly unfair to the accused. Kidd could not go into the witness box to testify in his own defense nor could any of his crew testify on his behalf during the piracy trials.
Against the biased evidence given by the two King’s witnesses, Kidd’s former crew members Palmer and Bradinham, who had deserted him at Madagascar, there was therefor no riposte except cross-examination. But court procedure ordained the Kidd’s counsel could not cross-examine, only Kidd himself, and the old sailor was obliged to conduct his own defense, in his own fatally clumsy way.
Not that any of this mattered much in the end. The first, shattering indictment was not for piracy at all, but for murder: the death of gunner William Moore on board the ‘ Adventure Galley’. Kidd pleaded provocation. “I had no design to kill him”, he protested. “It was not designedly done, but in my passion, for which I am heartily sorry”. But he blundered about so babbly in his defense that it took the jury barely an hour to return a verdict of guilty.
The outcome of the piracy indictments on the following day was academic. Kidd had stood three separate trials on five counts of piracy on May 9, standing in the dock alongside the nine ex-members of his crew who were his co-defendants. He was charged with the piracy of the ‘Quedah Merchant’, the ‘Maiden’ renamed the ‘November’ and three unnamed ships, two Moorish and one Portuguese.
Kidd, railed the prosecution, “an arch-pirate, equally cruel, dreaded and hated both on the land and at sea. No one of his age has done more mischief, in this worst kind of mischief, or has occasioned greater confusion and disorder, attended with all the circumstances of cruelty and falsehood”.
The two King’s witnesses-again the prosecution’s only witnesses- went through their doctored stories over and over again. Kidd’s cross-examination was inept and could not dent the impression that the witnesses had made.
He claimed the ‘ Quedah Merchant’ and the ‘Maiden’ were lawful prizes because of the French passes and that a mutinous crew had forced him to capture the other vessels. However, he had no material witnesses to call on and no French passes to produce as evidence. In the end Kidd realized the hopelessness of his position.
“This man contradicts himself in a hundred places” Kidd complained as Bradinham gave evidence “He tells a thousand lies”. “Will you ask him any more questions ?” the Solicitor-General asked. “No, No. It signifies nothing,” Kidd muttered. And as the trial drew to a close, he broke in: “Mr. Bradinham, are not you promised your life to take away mine?”
The jury was out for scarcely half an hour, they found Kidd and six of his co-defendants guilty. Three were acquitted. “What canst thou say for thyself,” the clerk of the court asked Kidd, “why thou shouldst not die according to law?”
“I have nothing to say,” replied Kidd, “but that I have been sworn against by perjured and wicked people.” “You have been tried by the laws of the land,” the clerk continued. “Nothing now remains but that sentence be passed according to law. And the sentence of the law is this:”
“You shall be taken from the place where you are, and be carried to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be severally hanged by your neck until you be dead. And the Lord have mercy on your soul!”
“My Lord,” said Kidd, “It is a very hard sentence. I am the innocentest person of all, only I have been sworn against by perjured people”.
When Captain William John Kidd, was strung up for a second time at Wapping, the new rope held, and since he was a heavy man, he probably died quickly. When he had stopped twitching, the executioner cut him down and chained his body to a post and left it there until the tidal waters of the Thames had ebbed and flowed over it three times, as Admiralty law prescribed. Then the body was recovered and painted with tar and bound with chains and the head was set in a metal harness so that the bones and skull would stay in place when the tissues rotted.
The body was hung from a gibbet which was specially constructed at a cost of $10. at Tilbury Point, at a place where it could be seen plainly by everyone sailing in and out of the Thames, so that it would serve, in the words of the Admiralty’s final instructions regarding Captain William John Kidd, “as a greater Terrour to all Persons from Committing ye like Crime for the time to come”.
No one knows for sure how long Kidd’s tarred body swung there. By some accounts it was visible for years. The sun rotted it, the rain lashed at it, the frost prized it apart, the gulls pecked out the eyes. As time passed, the sensation of the Kidd case died away and the dramatis personae went their separate ways.
Only one of the six men convicted with Kidd was hanged. The other five were reprieved. Shortly after the execution, two of them, “Nicholas Churchill and James Howe, after paying the Newgate jailers $315. each for their release, sailed past Kidd’s gibbet en route to Pennsylvania, where they dug up $2,300. worth of Arabian gold that they had buried when they first arrived in the company of their late Captain.”
The Crown witnesses, “Palmer and Bradinham”, were duly rewarded with a full pardon three days after Kidd’s death. Captain Culliford, the pirate to whose ship Kidd’s crew had secreted in Madagascar, was tried and convicted at the Old Bailey on the same day as Kidd, but, as he had surrendered under a royal pardon, he was released after a year.
Kidd’s family survived the trauma of his imprisonment and death. For two years following his arrest they lived in seclusion in New York, but 18 months after his execution his widow married a prominent politician and she lived another 43 years in comfortable circumstances in New Jersey, while his two daughters grew up, married and bore children of their own. His son became a sailor, and was killed in a battle (brawl) near Sterling, Scotland, in the year 1715.
As for Lord Bellomont, whose wiles had first ensnared the Captain, he died nearly three months before Kidd’s execution. “He wore out his spirits,” his widow complained in a letter to London, “and put an end to his life by the fatigue he underwent to serve His Majesty.”
The French passes that Kidd had sent to Bellomont, were later discovered in their proper place-the Public Records Office in London.
The gold, silver, jewels, silks and muslin from the ‘Quedah Merchant’ were forfeited to the Crown and sold by auction for $6,472.
One of the buildings that now houses the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich was bought with part of Kidd’s money. Though many have looked for Captain Kidd’s buried treasure, no one has ever found it, because none remains. (The French passes that Captain William John Kidd had relied on to uphold his claim, was not found until 219 years later).
References: Trial of Captain Kidd, editor, Graham Brooks.
William Hodge & Co.
Please Note: The dollar amounts shown would have been expressed
in the English pound amount.