William Kidd

Overview

William Kidd was a Scottish-born New York privateer commissioned in 1695 by a syndicate of senior Whig politicians, including four members of the new King William’s government, to sail to the Indian Ocean and suppress the pirate captains then operating against the Mughal pilgrim convoys. The commission specified that any prizes Kidd took from named pirates or from French shipping would be condemned and divided among him, his crew, and the syndicate. Within two years Kidd had taken several merchant ships under questionable circumstances, been declared a pirate himself, and was the subject of a transatlantic manhunt. He surrendered at Boston in July 1699, was sent to London for trial, and was hanged at Execution Dock in May 1701.

Origins

Kidd was born in Dundee, Scotland, around 1654, the son of a Presbyterian minister. By the early 1690s he was an established merchant captain operating out of New York, with a substantial estate and a marriage to the wealthy widow Sarah Bradley Cox Oort. He commanded a privateer in the Caribbean during the War of the Grand Alliance and took several French prizes in the 1689–1690 campaigns, which established him as a captain of standing.

Career

In 1695 Kidd was approached in London by Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, the incoming governor of New York and Massachusetts, with a proposal for a private anti-piracy expedition to the Indian Ocean. The syndicate that financed the venture included Bellomont himself, Lord Chancellor John Somers, Secretary of State Charles Talbot, Edward Russell (First Lord of the Admiralty), and three other senior Whigs. The thirty-four-gun frigate Adventure Galley was commissioned, Kidd was given dual commissions (one as privateer against French shipping, one specifically against the named pirates Thomas Tew, Thomas Wake, and others), and the expedition sailed from London in April 1696.

The voyage went badly almost from the start. A Royal Navy press gang took twenty of the original crew at the Nore; Kidd had to refill at New York with men whose maritime experience and discipline were variable. In the Indian Ocean through 1696–1697 he failed to find the named pirates, the crew threatened mutiny, and Kidd in October 1697 killed his own gunner William Moore with a thrown wooden bucket during a quarrel about whether to attack a Dutch merchantman. In January 1698 he took the Armenian-owned Quedagh Merchant, sailing under a French pass, in the Indian Ocean — arguably a legitimate prize under the privateer commission, but the action was reported in London as outright piracy and the East India Company, still smarting from the Every affair, lobbied hard for Kidd’s prosecution.

By the time Kidd returned to the Caribbean in early 1699 he had been declared a pirate and was the subject of an arrest warrant. He attempted to clear his name by sailing to Boston and presenting his case to Bellomont — by then governor of Massachusetts and one of the original syndicate members. Bellomont, fearing exposure of his own involvement, arrested Kidd in July 1699 and sent him to London under guard.

Ships

• Adventure Galley Frigate, oar-equipped

  Thirty-four-gun privateer commissioned for Kidd’s 1696 Indian Ocean voyage; abandoned and burned at Saint Mary’s Island, Madagascar, in 1698 after she began leaking badly.

• Quedagh Merchant Armenian merchant ship

  Taken under French pass in the Indian Ocean, January 1698; renamed Adventure Prize; abandoned in the Caribbean during Kidd’s return voyage.

Notable raids & captures

Treasures

Documented

• Gardiner’s Island cache, 1699

  A small quantity of gold and silver buried by Kidd on Gardiner’s Island, off the eastern end of Long Island, in the days before his arrest at Boston. Recovered by Bellomont’s order within weeks. The single documented “pirate treasure” in the historical record.

Rumored or legendary

• Additional Kidd caches unverified

  Local traditions on the New England, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Nova Scotia coasts have, since at least the 1730s, identified specific sites at which Kidd is said to have buried additional treasure. None has ever produced an authenticated find. The persistence of the tradition is the principal source of the buried-treasure motif in all subsequent pirate literature.

Fate

Kidd was held in Newgate Prison for over a year while the Whig government negotiated whether he could be tried without revealing the syndicate’s commission. He was tried in May 1701 on charges of piracy and the murder of Moore. The two French passes from the Quedagh Merchant, which would have established that vessel as a legitimate prize, had been impounded by Bellomont and were not produced at trial — they were rediscovered in the Public Record Office in the twentieth century. Kidd was convicted on both counts and hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping, on 23 May 1701. The first rope broke at the drop; he was hauled up and hanged a second time. His body was hung in chains at Tilbury Point on the Thames for three years afterwards as a warning to mariners.

Legacy

The Kidd case had two long afterlives. The first was political: the Whig administration that had commissioned him was substantially weakened by the exposure of the syndicate, and several members lost office in the 1701 elections that followed. The second was cultural: the persistent rumour that Kidd had buried treasure on Gardiner’s Island and other points along the New England coast before his arrest at Boston — in fact he buried a small quantity of gold on Gardiner’s Island, recovered by Bellomont within weeks — became the foundation of the buried-treasure motif that has shaped almost every subsequent pirate narrative. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) both descend, in different ways, from the Kidd legend.