by Frank Sherry
3.Kidd himself also owned some real estate that would now be among the most valuable in the world. He owned several lots on what is now Wall Street in the heart of the New York financial district. He also owned property on Water Street and on Pine Street, all occupied today by Manhattan skyscrapers.
4.One of these honest men was Kidd’s brother-in-law, Samuel Bradley, who had been with him throughout the cruise. Unfortunately, Bradley had not been of much help to Kidd since he had been ill for more than fifteen months—of the mysterious malady that had killed fifty of Kidd’s crew at Mohéli in the Comoros during Adventure Galley’s initial foray into Indian Ocean waters.
Nine: A Voyage to Wapping
1.Although not yet formal parties, the terms Whig and Tory described divisions that already existed in Parliament—and which would lead to the emergence of party government. Basically the Whigs were regarded as liberal, tolerant of religions other than the established Church of England, committed to parliamentary government, and—usually—supporters of King William and his war against Louis XIV. Tories, on the other hand, were generally considered more conservative, more likely to defend “Divine Right” and royal prerogatives. Generally speaking, if they did not openly oppose William and his war, they were not enthusiastic—and they hated the Dutch courtiers William had brought with him from Holland to serve as his aides in his strange new realm of England. Tories were also strong supporters of the established Church of England. The actual names Whig and Tory were unflattering terms that each emergent party had pinned on the other. Whig was a term meaning a Scottish outlaw, while Tory meant an Irish robber. King William tried to stand apart from the parliamentary wrangling between Whigs and Tories, saying that the only difference he could discern between the two parties was that “the Tories would cut your throat in the morning, the Whigs in the afternoon.” Kidd, unfortunately for him, was victimized by a particularly ugly eruption of the new party feeling in Parliament. It is interesting to speculate whether Kidd’s cruise would have become a political scandal, and Kidd himself a wanted man, if King William had invested in the enterprise—as he had originally intended.
2.All the Whig grandees impeached by Parliament were acquitted. Under the parliamentary procedure of the time, the House of Commons had the task of bringing charges of impeachment, while the Lords later passed on their validity. In this case the impeachment charges were judged by many to be merely political, and the charges were not even placed before the House of Lords.
3.The judge was alluding to an incident that took place after the battle that Kidd and Adventure Galley had with the Portuguese warship. As a result of that gun duel, Adventure Galley had suffered some serious damage and eleven of Kidd’s men had been wounded. Kidd had then taken his ship south to the Maldives for repair. While he was refitting, unfriendly natives had attacked him and his crew, killing the ship’s cooper. Kidd had retaliated by shooting one of the natives and by burning their huts.
1.Only one of the six men convicted with Kidd actually went to the hangman. The others were reprieved, and eventually released.
The Crown’s star witnesses, Bradinham and Palmer, received what they had been promised in exchange for their testimony against Kidd: full pardons. Kidd’s little family felt the shame of his fate deeply. They hid away in their New York home for months after the captain’s execution. But the lively and beautiful Sarah was not one to sit for long alone in a room. Approximately eighteen months after Kidd was hanged at Wapping, Sarah plighted her troth to a New Jersey politician and lived many more years of comfortable and productive life. She died in 1746. Kidd’s two daughters also recovered soon enough from their shame, and both of them made good marriages and raised families of their own.
2.It is not likely that Kidd’s fate would have been very different even if he had managed to find the French passes and to have them introduced into evidence. There were too many other circumstances against him, from the testimony of Palmer and Bradinham to his own admission that he had violated Admiralty codes by distributing booty among men and by taking Moorish and Portuguese ships—which were not, after all, covered by French passes. There is absolutely no reason to suspect a deliberate attempt to deprive Kidd of this “evidence,” which he was so sure would save him. The French passes simply got lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, for—much too late to do Kidd any good—they were eventually located in the Public Records Office. As for Kidd’s treasure, it seems beyond question that Lord Bellomont recovered all that was recoverable and shipped it off to London while Kidd was still in colonial custody. Despite all the later stories about Kidd’s having buried treasure in various places, the reality seems to be that any goods that might have been left aboard the Quedah Merchant were sold by her “guards” and that the rest of Kidd’s treasure was quickly found and confiscated. Following Kidd’s death, his booty—gold, silver, jewels, and silks, forwarded to London by Bellomont—was sold at auction for approximately £6,500. The proceeds were turned over to the Crown. Part of the money was used to buy a house that is now part of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
3.One of the most ironic sidelights to Kidd’s story is the career of Robert Culliford, the pirate captain with whom Kidd had sworn a pact of friendship in Madagascar. After Culliford sailed away from St. Mary’s harbor in Mocha Frigate, taking with him most of Kidd’s crew and the guns from Adventure Galley, he resumed his piratical career, sailing in company with other pirate vessels off the coast of India. Concentrating his attentions on Moorish ships, Culliford gained a reputation for cruelty and barbarity in the treatment of captives. He eventually returned to St. Mary’s and was there in 1699 when he accepted one of the pardons periodically offered to pirates by the Admiralty. This turned out to be a serious mistake on his part, for the act of grace had already expired when he accepted it.
Eventually Culliford and a number of others who had also mistakenly accepted the pardons were brought to London for trial. Though they argued that they had only surrendered in the belief that they would be pardoned, the court found them all guilty. In a supreme irony, Culliford was tried and convicted at the Old Bailey on the same day that Kidd was. But Culliford, unlike Kidd, never made the journey to Wapping. The wily pirate had apparently convinced a high-ranking churchman that he was worth saving, and he was released after a year’s imprisonment. Apparently he learned from his experience and did not return to piracy.
Ten: Counterstroke and Intermission
1.By the time Bellomont initiated his campaign against colonial pirate brokers, Baldridge had already left Madagascar, toppled from his throne by a native revolt. His fall from power was precipitated, apparently, when Baldridge attempted to pull one slick slave trade too many. Although the details are not clear, it appears that Baldridge had unwisely attempted to sell to slave traders some young native women and men who happened to be related to a powerful local chief. The chief took umbrage at Baldridge’s unfriendly act and attacked him in sufficient numbers to force the canny trader to flee forever from his palatial home on St. Mary’s. Baldridge, however, always knew where his bread would be buttered. He therefore made his way to New York where, in 1698, he was able to witness Bellomont’s suppression of the trade from which he had profited so handsomely and for so long. It is said that Baldridge became a successful merchant in New York, lived well into his seventies, and died comfortably in bed.
As for Philipse, despite the loss of his ships to Bellomont’s coast guards, he remained one of New York’s wealthiest men. He also remained a pillar of the community. When he died in 1702 on his 90,000-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River, he still refused to admit that there was anything immoral or unlawful about his role in the sweet trade.
2.Lord Bellomont himself did not live to enjoy the triumph of his policies. He died in February 1701. Wrote his widow of his death: “He wore out his spirits, and put an end to his life by the fatigue he underwent to serve his Majesty.” Bellomont’s death came five years and six months after his first meeting with Kidd
in London—and three months before Kidd himself went to the gallows in Wapping. It is not known whether the captain knew of his aristocratic backer’s passing.
Twelve: Nemesis of Pirates
1.Dampier was one of the most improbable seafaring figures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. According to his own account, he had served with the buccaneers of Jamaica in the late 1670s, after which he crossed the Isthmus of Panama (on foot, of course) to the Pacific. From there his adventures had taken him on a twelve-year odyssey around the world. He kept extensive notes of his journeys, bringing them home safely in bamboo cases that had been waxed to seal them against rain and humidity. He wrote two books about his adventures: A New Voyage Round the World, which appeared in 1697, and Voyages and Discoveries, which appeared in 1699. Both books were much admired. Later Dampier explored the west coast of Australia. In 1703, after the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, he joined a privateering expedition and circumnavigated the world for a second time—the only man of his time ever to have done so. In the first decade of the eighteenth century no man in the English-speaking world knew as much about the Pacific, its winds and its currents, as Dampier did. So valuable was his knowledge that the Royal Navy had given him a command, despite the fact that he was not, strictly speaking, a “gentleman.” He was later relieved by the Admiralty for quarreling with his officers. This was hardly surprising. Dampier, who could be infuriatingly sulky at one moment and explosively wrathful at the next, was not a man to get along in the bureaucratic and snobbish Royal Navy of the day. But he seems to have gotten along well with Woodes Rogers—or at least well enough to avoid any overt break in their relationship. Rogers, in fact, may have been the perfect complement to Dampier: calm where Dampier was choleric, determined where Dampier was sometimes despairing. In any case, they worked well together and Dampier’s knowledge of the Pacific proved invaluable on the voyage.
2.Although there is no doubt that Alexander Selkirk was the model for Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Selkirk himself profited little from the book. According to William Mavor’s Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries, published in 1796, Selkirk was advised, upon his return to England, to consult Daniel Defoe in order to arrange for publication of his story. This Selkirk did, turning over to Defoe written notes of his years as a castaway. But instead of writing a book about Selkirk, Defoe converted Selkirk’s rough material into the fictional Robinson Crusoe, published in 1720 and a great success. Selkirk was thus deprived of the remuneration he might have realized if his story had been published as his memoirs.
Selkirk’s life in England, after so many years as a castaway, took several odd turns. He went back to his home village of Largo and dug a cave in the garden in back of his father’s little house. Here he sat for long hours and even for days, deep in solitude and meditation. If the people of Largo thought Selkirk mad, at least one young woman did not share their opinion. She was Sophia Bonce and she found Selkirk fascinating. She often visited him in his cave where the two would spend long hours together in conversation and, apparently, in other even more pleasant activities. Eventually Selkirk and Sophia eloped to Bristol, where they lived together, although—to the scandal of Largo—they were not married. In time Selkirk abandoned Sophia and married a widow, a certain Mrs. Frances Candis. But he apparently found life ashore, even with the willing widow, too busy, or too boring, or perhaps just too civilized, after the quiet of Juan Fernandez. In any case, Selkirk returned to the sea in 1720—the year of Robinson Crusoe’s publication—and served as mate aboard the Royal Navy man-of-war Weymouth.
He died aboard the Weymouth in 1721. He was only forty-five.
Thirteen: Blackbeard Himself
1.Blackbeard’s relationship with Stede Bonnet remains a curious puzzle. The flamboyant Teach seems to have harbored a peculiarly ambivalent feeling for the gentleman pirate. Although it is clear that he despised the ex-major, he treated him with a civility that was far from characteristic. Instead of disposing of Bonnet at their first meeting, Blackbeard carried him with him for months, and even propounded the fiction that Bonnet was a colleague, not a prisoner. Blackbeard also seems to have been in the habit of addressing Bonnet with an odd mixture of rough courtesy and sarcasm. There are, perhaps, several explanations for Blackbeard’s atypical behavior with Bonnet. It may be that the bumbling major simply tickled Blackbeard’s unsubtle sense of humor, and that it amused the evil giant to treat Bonnet with exaggerated courtesy. It is also possible that in Blackbeard’s devious mind, Bonnet, as a gentleman, represented a potential payday, that Blackbeard kept him alive and relatively happy in the expectation that one day he might offer Bonnet for ransom to Bonnet’s wealthy Barbadian family. If so, Blackbeard gave up on that scheme when he severed his relationship with Bonnet. It is also possible that, as a gentleman, Bonnet elicited some residual respect from Blackbeard, or by his presence in Blackbeard’s fleet, imparted some respectability to the giant’s piratical enterprise. Whatever the explanation, Blackbeard kept it to himself. Perhaps he was not quite clear in his own mind why he showed such consideration for the major. It was, however, as much a puzzle then as it is now.
2.Because of his lameness, Hands left Blackbeard’s employ, eventually getting back to London where, according to Defoe, he became a well-known beggar and, of course, the model for the evil gunner in Treasure Island.
3.Unlike most colonial governors of this era, Spotswood did not return to England when his term ended in September 1722. Instead, he remained in Virginia, making his home in Germanna, a settlement of Germans. He also established an iron-works in the area. From 1730 to 1739, Spotswood served as deputy postmaster general of the colony. Spotsylvania County is named in his honor and was later the scene of a bloody battle during the Civil War. Spotswood died in 1740 at the age of sixty-four.
4.All the pirates captured by Maynard aboard the Adventure were hanged, including Caesar. Although Maynard found an incriminating letter from Tobias Knight among Blackbeard’s papers, and although Governor Spotswood reported the details of Blackbeard’s capture and his relationship with the officials of North Carolina to the Board of Trade in London, neither Governor Eden nor Tobias Knight was ever convicted of collusion with the pirate. Both remained in office. Governor Eden, however, died of yellow fever three years after his friend Blackbeard was killed in battle. The reward money for the capture of Blackbeard and his men was a source of disagreement for years. The captains of the two Royal Navy men-of-war, H.M.S. Pearl and H.M.S. Lyme, argued that the reward should be shared out equally among all the crewmen of both ships. Lieutenant Maynard, on the other hand, maintained that only those who had actually participated in the battle should share in the reward. In the end a reduced reward (reduced because Blackbeard and many of his men had not been taken alive) was shared out among all the navy personnel with those who had actually fought getting a slightly larger share than those to who had remained behind. As finally determined, each combat share came to something less than £2 per man. There is some strong evidence that Lieutenant Maynard either resigned or retired from the Royal Navy in order to settle down in Prince George County, Virginia. The records there indicate that a Captain Maynard was murdered in that county by two black slaves in the late 1720s.
Fourteen: Rogers at Bay
1.The eight backsliders were not the only men Rogers hanged in that December of 1718. He also tried and condemned a man, apparently an ex-pirate, for “robbing and burning a house.” In reporting this capital action to London, Rogers wrote: “If for want of lawyers our forms are something deficient, I am fully satisfied we have not erred in justice.” It was a most characteristic remark.
Sixteen: King of Madagascar
1.John Plantain was undoubtedly the most successful pirate “king” in Madagascar. But he was not the first. There was, of course, the trader prince Adam Baldridge, who built a fort and settlement in St. Mary’s, and who had made himself the virtual ruler of his island in the 16
90s. There had also been successful leaders of settlements of ex-pirates who had used their European knowledge and their European weapons to establish rough sovereignty over the natives in their neighborhoods. Many of these leaders gave themselves the title of king.
One of the most successful of these pirate kings of Madagascar—prior to Plantain—had been one Abraham Samuells, a Jamaican mulatto. Samuell’s story began when the pirate ship he was serving on was wrecked off Port Dauphin and he was washed ashore. He was taken in and well treated by the natives. Then the old chieftainess of the tribe became convinced that Samuells was her long-lost son whom she had borne twenty-five years earlier as a result of a love affair with an English sea captain stranded on Madagascar. When the captain was rescued, he had taken the mulatto boy child with him. Now, in Abraham Samuells, the chieftainess “recognized” her son, providentially restored to her by God. She immediately abdicated her throne, and the shipwrecked Abraham Samuells became king of the tribe. For the next ten or twelve years, Samuells led his tribe in a gruesome business: Sighting ships out at sea, they would lure them onto the rocks and then loot the wreckage. Samuells’s fate is unknown but it is thought that he was killed in a revolt by members of his tribe, or by European pirates whom he had befriended and made colleagues in his enterprise.
Most ex-pirate settlers on Madagascar, however, did not seek to rule, but only to live in ease and in peace among the natives. Most of them found contentment.