|
Captain Kidd
Born : 1645 in Greenock, Renfrew,
Scotland
Died : May 23, 1701, Execution Dock, London The lesson to
be learned from his Life:
Going Pirate is
like picking a fight with a Samurai Warrior;
If you're going to do it, then
just do it,
But don't try to just do it halfway and expect to get off the
hook.
The notorious Captain Kidd
was neither particularly ruthless nor successful. A New York merchant who had
previously served as a privateer against the French in the West Indies,. He was
commissioned in 1696 to hunt pirates but after a series of misfortunes began to
raid vessels in the India Ocean.
He was arrested on his
return to America in 1699 and sent to England to stand trial for piracy. Kidd
bungled his own defense and vital documents were concealed by his former
backers. He was hanged at Execution Dock and his body suspended in an iron cage
at Tilbury Point for years as a warning to other seamen against piracy. (Isn't
England a jolly old place? - ed.)
William Kidd, aka Robert
Kidd, Captain Kidd, 17th-century British privateer and semi-legendary pirate who
became celebrated in English literature as one of the most colourful outlaws of
all time. Fortune seekers have hunted his buried treasure in vain through
succeeding centuries.
Kidd 's early career is
obscure. It is believed he went to sea as a youth. After 1689 he was sailing as
a legitimate privateer for Great Britain against the French in the West Indies
and off the coast of North America. In 1690 he was an established sea captain
and shipowner in New York City, where he owned property; at various times he was
dispatched by both New York and Massachusetts to rid the coast of enemy
privateers. In London in 1695, he received a royal commission to apprehend
pirates who molested the ships of the East India Company in the Red Sea and in
the Indian Ocean.
Kidd sailed from Deptford
on his ship, the Adventure Galley, on Feb. 27, 1696, called at Plymouth, and
arrived at New York City on July 4 to take on more men. Avoiding the normal
pirate haunts, he arrived by February 1697 at the Comoro Islands off East
Africa. It was apparently some time after his arrival there that Kidd , still
without having taken a prize ship, decided to turn to piracy. In August 1697 he
made an unsuccessful attack on ships sailing with Mocha coffee from Yemen but
later took several small ships. His refusal two months later to attack a Dutch
ship nearly brought his crew to mutiny, and in an angry exchange Kidd mortally
wounded his gunner, William Moore.
Kidd took his most
valuable prize, the Armenian ship Quedagh Merchant, in January 1698 and scuttled
his own unseaworthy Adventure Galley. When he reached Anguilla, in the West
Indies (April 1699), he learned that he had been denounced as a pirate. He left
the Quedagh Merchant at the island of Hispaniola (where the ship was possibly
scuttled; in any case, it disappeared with its questionable booty) and sailed in
a newly purchased ship, the Antonio, to New York City, where he tried to
persuade the earl of Bellomont, then colonial governor of New York, of his
innocence. Bellomont, however, sent him to England for trial, and he was found
guilty (May 8 and 9, 1701) of the murder of Moore and on five indictments of
piracy. Important evidence concerning two of the piracy cases was suppressed at
the trial, and some observers later questioned whether the evidence was
sufficient for a guilty verdict.
Kidd was hanged, and some
of his treasure was recovered from Gardiners Island off Long Island. Proceeds
from his effects and goods taken from the Antonio were donated to charity. In
years that followed, the name of Captain Kidd has become inseparable from the
romanticized concept of the swashbuckling pirate of Western fiction. Among other
stories concerning caches of treasure he supposedly buried is Edgar Allan Poe's
"The Gold Bug."
|
