Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  He also did something else he thought clever. He sent a number of jewels in an enameled box to young Lady Bellomont. It seemed an obvious bribe, and it embarrassed the colonial governor at a time when he was already feeling exceedingly discomfited by his relationship with Kidd.

  On his way to Boston aboard the Antonio, Kidd put in at Block Island where he was reunited with Sarah and their two daughters, who had been only three and four years old when he had set out on his fateful journey more than three years earlier. It was a touching reunion, with many tears. Together the family sailed to Boston, where they landed on July 2, 1699.

  In Boston Kidd once again made a bumbling attempt to ingratiate himself with Bellomont through the Governor’s wife. He sent Lady Bellomont a green silk bag containing gold bars worth £1,000. Lady Bellomont returned the unsubtle gift.

  On the day after Kidd’s arrival in Boston, Bellomont summoned him to an interview.

  Kidd met with Bellomont and members of his colonial council in Bellomont’s house. The colonial governor treated Kidd with cool formality. He requested that Kidd provide a full account of his activities since embarking down the Thames aboard Adventure Galley.

  Kidd apparently had not expected Bellomont to receive him so coldly. He told Bellomont and his council, truthfully but with some belligerence, that his crew had destroyed the log of Adventure Galley and he was therefore unable to provide a detailed account of his adventures. The governor and the council then directed Kidd to put together a written report from memory, and dismissed him temporarily.

  For two days Kidd stalled over the requested written report. Perhaps he feared self-incrimination. Perhaps he felt that without precise times and places as set forth in his log, his story would sound vague and unconvincing. More than likely, however, he merely hoped that if he could avoid the task long enough, Bellomont and his council might take some other tack with him—and he could avoid the pitfalls of writing out what might be construed as a confession.

  After two days of Kidd’s stonewalling on their request for a written statement, and fearing that Kidd might try to flee their jurisdiction, the council ordered Kidd’s arrest.

  He was arrested on July 6 outside Bellomont’s house. Apparently he had had it in mind to see Lord Bellomont alone and was on his way to do so when he was stopped by the police officers, for he drew his sword when seized and broke away from the arresting officers, running into Bellomont’s house crying out that he wanted to speak to his one-time patron.

  Whatever Kidd may have wanted to convey privately to Bellomont, he never got the chance. He was taken away and clapped in irons in the Stone Prison in Boston. Probably it would have done Kidd little good even if he had succeeded in meeting Bellomont alone. The colonial governor had washed his hands of the king’s privateer, for in his report to London on the affair, Bellomont referred to Kidd as “a monster.”

  Throughout July 1699, while Kidd languished in prison, Bellomont’s agents tracked down and confiscated all Kidd’s loot—from the chests buried on Gardiners Island to the gifts to various friends to the cargo stowed aboard the Antonio and hidden elsewhere. Even Kidd’s clothes, and his gifts to Sarah, were hauled off.

  One inventory of the recovered loot showed 1,111 ounces of gold, 2,353 ounces of silver, more than a pound of precious stones, 57 bags of sugar, and 41 bales of expensive brocade and other fabrics.

  Bellomont also sought to discover the fate of the Quedah Merchant—which Kidd had left, supposedly under guard, at Hispaniola.

  Bellomont, believing that the Quedah cargo would actually be worth far more than the goods he had already recovered from Kidd, eventually sent a ship to find her and to salvage whatever cargo might be left. But the mission was unsuccessful. Quedah Merchant had “disappeared.” (Later evidence indicated that her “guards” had sold her cargo to passing ships at a good profit and had then fled. One witness reported that after her cargo had been sold, Quedah Merchant had been burned to the keel and destroyed off the coast of Hispaniola. But there was never any proof of her actual fate, or of the fate of her cargo, and the mystery was never cleared up.)

  While in Stone Prison, Kidd himself had offered to go and find the Quedah for Bellomont. He had claimed that her recoverable cargo would be worth £50,000 or more. But Kidd’s offer was probably no more than a desperate effort to tempt Bellomont into freeing him from the solitary confinement and chains of his prison. (Perhaps Kidd also hoped that once free of jail, he would find a way to escape altogether. Certainly Kidd would not have left goods worth £50,000 on a ship he had entrusted to strangers. In any case Bellomont ignored Kidd’s offer—and the captain remained in prison.)

  When Bellomont was at last satisfied that he had found all there was to find of Kidd’s booty, and that all the necessary legal paperwork had been completed, he shipped the recovered plunder back to England under heavy guard—to be added to the Royal Treasury if and when the law permitted.

  As for Kidd himself, on February 16, 1700, after seven months in prison, he was taken aboard H. M. S. Advice for transport to England and trial. During the voyage, he occupied a steerage cabin. The Advice was also carrying thirty-one other prisoners back to England for trial on various charges. Among them were members of Kidd’s crew who would stand trial with him. These thirty-one prisoners, all ordinary seamen, did not rate cabins. They were chained together in the ship’s gun room.

  While Kidd was en route to his destiny, Parliament was boiling over with the scandal of the Kidd affair. Basically it was a case of the newly elected Tory majority in Parliament taking advantage of an opportunity to blacken the now-minority Whigs—whose leaders had been the secret backers of the Kidd adventure.1

  The Tory members of Parliament were determined to root out and expose the story of the Whig leadership’s role in the Kidd affair. Toward this end Parliament had ordered the Admiralty to deliver to it for investigation all papers and information pertaining to the voyage of Captain Kidd.

  Inevitably, the real names of Kidd’s sponsors had been revealed in Parliament. Thereupon the Tory members had not only expressed shock and shame, they had also proposed a motion censuring the pirate-catching scheme as “dishonorable to the King, against the law of nations, contrary to the laws and statutes of this realm, invasive of property, and destructive of trade and commerce.” Despite the Tory majority, this motion was defeated by a vote of 189 to 133. But the parliamentary political pudding did not stop boiling. Parliament was scheduled to adjourn in April and not sit again for months. The Tories feared that the Whigs would somehow manage to hush up the Kidd affair while Parliament was in recess. They therefore petitioned the king not to allow Kidd to be “tried, discharged, or pardoned, until the next session of Parliament.” The request was granted.

  On Thursday, April 11, 1700, Parliament recessed.

  On that same day William Kidd had been transferred from his locked cabin aboard H. M. S. Advice to the Royal yacht Catherine in the Thames estuary—to be taken, under heavy guard, to the Admiralty office in Greenwich.

  The Catherine arrived in Greenwich with her infamous prisoner early on the morning of April 14. But when officials opened his cabin door to examine him, Kidd was found to be nearly insane. He cried out for a knife with which to end his life. With a trembling hand he proffered a gold piece, begging his hearers to send it to Sarah. He implored all who heard him to spare him the ignominy of the hangman’s noose. He wished to be executed by shooting.

  Later in the day Kidd recovered sufficiently to make a deposition at the Admiralty. After signing it, he was transported to Newgate Prison in London to await trial.

  Newgate, already an ancient pile of damp stone when Kidd was brought there, was a foul overcrowded warren of dank corridors and dark cells. It stank of the fetid odors of unwashed prisoners’ bodies and of piles of excrement. So bad was the stench that it was the custom for visitors to bring a bunch of flowers with them to inhale while inside the noisome place. Prisoners had to be doused in vinegar to kill the odor befor
e court appearances.

  Here Captain William Kidd, crawling with lice and, according to his jailers, “troubled with a great Paine in his Head, and shaken in his Limbs,” lay month after month in what was called “safe” and “close” confinement. He was not permitted to write any letters—not even to his wife. His only visitors were an aunt and an uncle who were allowed to see him only when a guard was present. He was not even allowed to communicate with anyone about his trial—except to write directly to the Admiralty board. Such deprivation of rights was unusual. In fact, safe and close confinement was ordinarily reserved for men accused of treason.

  Nevertheless, it was under such conditions that Kidd was expected to prepare for his coming trial. It is little wonder, then, that he wrote plaintively to the Admiralty, saying about the trial that sooner or later he would have to undergo: “I am wholly unprepared, having never been permitted the least use of pen, Ink, and paper to help my Memory, nor the advice of friends to assist me, in what so nearly concerns my life.”

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  On March 27, 1701, after he had spent almost a year under horrendous conditions in Newgate Prison (and months before that in Stone Prison in Boston), Kidd was taken from his cell—but not for trial.

  Instead he was taken before the House of Commons to testify not in his own case but in an inquiry that Parliament, pressed by the Tories, was conducting into the conduct of Kidd’s Whig backers. The Tories made no secret of their expectation that Kidd’s testimony would help impeach his sponsors, the Whig ministers. As Bishop Gilbert Burnet later recalled Kidd’s parliamentary testimony: “All endeavors were used to persuade him to accuse the Lords. He was assured that, if he did it, he should be preserved; and if he did not, he should certainly die for his piracy; yet this could not prevail on him to charge them.”

  Kidd, shuffling and confused after his long incarceration, appeared to understand little of what was happening. Instead of taking the deal offered him and giving the Tories the testimony they wanted, he insisted that he had not committed piracy. Like a man obsessed, he defended his actions. In the process he appeared stubbornly self-righteous. He even seemed to resent the questions directed to him by House members—an attitude that offended many Tories who had been prepared to offer him a pardon had he given the testimony hoped for, and had he thrown himself upon the mercy of the House.

  As one member put it: “I had thought him only a knave. Now I know him to be a fool as well.”

  Instead of a victim of dishonest, but powerful, Whig ministers, the truculent fumbling Kidd made himself appear their accomplice. If he—as he insisted—had committed no piracy on the high seas, how could the House accuse his sponsors of financing his crimes? Unless Kidd testified to his own crimes, there was no case against the Whigs—and Kidd held tenaciously to his claim of innocence.

  Disappointed and irritated with Kidd, the House dismissed him, returning him to Newgate. By his stubborn mishandling of his parliamentary testimony, Kidd had destroyed his value as a witness. Parliament washed its hands of him, declaring that he should be “proceeded against according to law.”

  Now Kidd finally seemed to understand what it was the Tory members wanted of him. He wrote to the Speaker of the House, Robert Harley, claiming that his Whig sponsors had made him “the Tool of their Ambition and Avarice.” But even in this letter he refused to admit guilt—a fact that rendered all else in his letter useless to the Tories.

  Ironically, the House eventually passed motions impeaching Kidd’s Whig backers, but Kidd himself no longer had any role to play in the proceedings. The Tories had lost interest in him. He was now a discredited witness. Even if he were to confess to everything, it would be regarded as nothing more than a desperate man’s lying effort to extricate himself from peril.2

  On May 8, 1701, Captain William Kidd went on trial for his life at the Old Bailey. He was grossly unprepared.

  Kidd had been informed of his trial date only two weeks earlier. The court had appropriated £50 for him to retain defense attorneys, but the £50 had not been delivered until the night before the trial was scheduled—and Kidd’s two attorneys had refused to handle his case until their fee was in their hands. Thus Kidd had been able to hold only one brief meeting with his defense lawyers—an hour before the start of his trial.

  Kidd still believed that the two French passes, which had been turned over to Bellomont two years earlier, were the key to his defense because, in his view at least, they proved he had acted within the bounds of his commission. But unfortunately for Kidd, the passes could not be found among the voluminous documents that Lord Bellomont had forwarded to the Admiralty on Kidd’s case. As Kidd went to trial on the morning of May 8, 1701, the passes still had not been located.

  Even though Kidd felt he had no real defense without the missing French passes, his trial went on as scheduled.

  Under the rules of court that applied in that era, Kidd would not be allowed to testify in his own defense. Nor would his lawyers be allowed to cross-examine witnesses against him. Only Kidd, in his clumsy, angry, self-righteous and blundering way, would be permitted to cross-examine.

  The first charge against Kidd was for the murder of the gunner, William Moore, on board the Adventure Galley. The Crown’s two chief witnesses were Joseph Palmer, one of the most mutinous of Kidd’s men aboard Adventure Galley, and Robert Brandinham, Adventure Galley’s surgeon.

  These two, among those who had deserted Kidd at Madagascar to join Culliford’s pirates, were themselves charged as pirates—and had turned King’s evidence against Kidd in order to save their own necks.

  Palmer painted Moore as a peaceful fellow whom Kidd had killed without provocation.

  Kidd cross-examined—and made a mess of it. He tried to get Palmer to admit that Moore was fomenting a mutiny.

  “There was no mutiny,” Palmer insisted. “All was quiet.”

  The clumsy Kidd could not shake Palmer’s story.

  Bradinham testified that he knew of no quarrel between Kidd and the dead gunner.

  Kidd’s own witnesses, also crewmen, proved ineffective.

  Kidd pleaded that the gunner had provoked his fury.

  “I had all the provocation in the world given me, and I had no design to kill him,” Kidd declared. “It was not designedly done, but in my passion, for which I am heartily sorry.”

  In his charge to the jury, the judge declared: “I cannot see what distinction can be made, but that the prisoner is guilty of murder.”

  Not surprisingly, the jury, after only an hour’s deliberation, returned a guilty verdict.

  On the next morning Kidd and nine of his men shuffled again into the courtroom, this time for trial on the piracy indictments.

  The prosecutor for the Crown referred to Kidd as “an arch-pirate, equally cruel, dreaded, and hated both on the land and at sea…. No one in this 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 prosecutor condemned Kidd for piracy in taking the Quedah Merchant, and November, and three other, unnamed, ships. He also argued that Kidd had been derelict in his duty by not seizing Culliford and Mocha Frigate while at Madagascar.

  Again the two men who had testified against Kidd in the murder trial—Bradinham and Palmer—were the Crown’s chief witnesses. They told their thoroughly rehearsed stories in convincing detail, careful to paint Kidd as a man who had intended piracy all along.

  Kidd, inevitably inept in his cross-examination, kept returning to the question of the French passes, pleading that if only they were found they would prove his innocence. As for the ships he took that had not been sailing under French passes, Kidd tried to convince the court that he had seized them only when compelled to do so by his rebellious crew. Even Kidd’s own witnesses could not definitely testify to the existence of the crucial French passes.

  In the end, Kidd seemed to despair.

  “This ma
n contradicts himself in a hundred places,” Kidd said of Bradinham. “He tells a thousand lies.”

  In his charge to the jury, the judge noted that even if the French passes had been placed in evidence, Kidd had clearly committed a series of felonies upon the high seas: by attacking the Moorish convoy at the mouth of the Red Sea; by taking other Moorish ships and Portuguese ships off the coast of India; by consorting with Culliford; and by sharing out plunder before condemnation by an Admiralty court as required of legal privateers. There was also reference to Kidd’s “mistreatment” of natives when Adventure Galley had briefly put into the Maldive Islands during the early days of her cruise off India.3

  The judge then returned to the subject of the French passes.

  “As to the French passes,” he declared, “there is nothing of that appears by any proof; and for aught I can see, none saw them but himself, if there were ever any.”

  Not surprisingly the jury found Kidd guilty, taking only half an hour to deliberate. Of the nine men tried with Kidd, six were found guilty along with their captain. Three others, who had been employed primarily as servants aboard Adventure Galley, were acquitted.

  Asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, Kidd declared: “I have been sworn against by perjured and wicked people.”

  He was then sentenced to be hanged. “My Lord,” said Kidd, “it is a very hard sentence. For my part, I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.”

  Kidd’s execution was set for May 23 at Wapping—a marshy tenement area on the Thames mud flats where the Admiralty customarily hanged its criminals on gibbets visible to all the traffic on the great river.