The Trial of Captain Kidd

The case

When the rope broke under William Kidd at Execution Dock on 23 May 1701, some in the crowd took it as a sign from God that he should go free. The officials took him back up the ladder and hanged him again. His body was then tarred and hung in chains beside the Thames at Tilbury, where ships coming into London would pass it for years.

Few men have gone to the gallows with better connections. Kidd, born in Dundee around 1645, had made himself a respectable figure in New York: a successful privateer in the war against France, married in 1691 to Sarah Oort, a wealthy widow, and a contributor to the building of Trinity Church. In 1695 Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, the incoming governor of New York and Massachusetts, organised a private venture to send him against the pirates then preying on shipping in the Indian Ocean. Most of the money came from leading Whig lords, Kidd carried a royal commission, and the backers expected a share of whatever he seized.

The voyage went wrong almost from the start. Kidd's new ship, Adventure Galley, lost a large part of her original crew to a navy press gang on the Thames after a breach of etiquette; he filled the gap in New York with hard men recruited on the promise of plunder. He sailed in September 1696. Disease killed many of them in the Comoros, the ship began to leak, and the pirates he was meant to catch did not appear. The crew grew mutinous.

On 30 October 1697, off the Malabar coast, the gunner William Moore argued with Kidd over his refusal to attack a Dutch ship, a capture that would have been plain piracy. Kidd struck him on the head with an iron-bound bucket, and Moore died the next day. Over the following months Kidd took several vessels whose legal status was dubious, and on 30 January 1698 he took the big one: the Quedagh Merchant, a ship of some 400 tons hired by Armenian merchants out of Surat, carrying silk, muslin, sugar, opium and other goods. Her captain was an Englishman, but she carried passes from the French East India Company, and Kidd held that this made her a lawful enemy prize.

London did not see it that way. Coming on top of other English pirate attacks on Mughal shipping, the capture threatened the East India Company's trade, and orders went out to seize Kidd. Most of his men deserted to the pirate Robert Culliford at Madagascar. Kidd burned the rotting Adventure Galley, sailed the Quedagh Merchant to the Caribbean, left her in the care of others and came north in a sloop. He buried a cache of gold and goods on Gardiners Island, off Long Island, as a bargaining chip.

Bellomont, now anxious to separate himself from the enterprise he had promoted, drew Kidd to Boston with assurances and had him arrested on 6 July 1699. Kidd was shipped to England and held for about two years, much of it in Newgate, while the Tory opposition tried to use him against his Whig backers. He named no one useful to them.

At an Admiralty sessions held at the Old Bailey on 8 and 9 May 1701, he was tried first for the murder of Moore and then on five counts of piracy. He had met his assigned counsel only shortly before. His defence on the main piracy charges rested on the French passes, but they were not produced in court. The jury convicted him on all six indictments.