The Pirate Hunter
The True Story of Captain KiddBy Richard ZacksHyperion Books
Copyright © 2003 Richard Zacks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780786884513
Chapter One
Mission in New York City New York in the summer of 1696 was an ink spot on the tip of the map of Manhattan, a struggling seaport with a meager population of 5,000, about a fifth of them African slaves. A public whipping post stood just off the dock, and New Yorkers wanting their slaves "corrected" were expected by law to tip eighteen pence to both the town-whipper and to the bell-ringer who drew the crowds.
While London boasted 300,000 inhabitants and the architectural marvels of Christopher Wren, New York claimed only a handful of paved streets and a rundown city hall building. Hungry pigs helped the city's one sanitation man, a Mr. Vanderspiegle. "[New Yorkers] seem not very strict in keeping the Sabbath," wrote a doctor venturing south from Puritan New England. "You should see some shelling peas at their door, children playing at their usual games in the streets and ye taverns filled."
Dutch women wore scandalously short dresses extending to just below the knee, showing off their homemade blue or red stockings. Dutch girls even into their teens generally went barefoot in long white morning gowns with nothing underneath as they lugged laundry through the Land Gate at Wall Street to do their wash at a stream by Maiden Lane. Women of a different sort, often French Huguenot desmoiselles escaping the persecutions of Catholic Louis, plied their trade on Petticoat Lane just off Beaver Street. (City planners-perhaps irked by the nearness of Beaver to Petticoat-changed the lane's name to Marketfield.)
And, three hundred years ago, pirates in gaudy colorful silks with pistols in their waistcoat pockets walked the streets of New York City, and local merchants, some Dutch, some English, bargained for their goods and lined up to back their larcenous voyages. Shares were bought and sold over rum punch at Hawdon's Tavern and the King's Arms.
For a decade or so from the early 1690s on, New York edged out Carolina and Rhode Island as the pirate port of choice in the English colonies in North America. "It is certain that these villains," wrote an East India Company official, "frequently say that they carry their unjust gains to New-York, where they are permitted egress and regress without control, spending such coin there in the usual lavish manner of such persons."
The pirates boosted the sagging local economy. New York merchants, Dutchman Frederick Flypse and Frenchman Steven Delancy, financed ships that sailed halfway around the world to sell provisions and arms to New York pirates operating out of St. Mary's Island, Madagascar. And shares in these voyages-some promising a twenty-fold return on investment-were openly traded in taverns not too far from the town wall that still stood on Wall Street.
While merchants, barkeeps, and brothel owners back then welcomed pirates and tried to lighten their coin-heavy pouches, piracy in this small English colony of New York was still officially illegal. Choicely placed gold prompted the temporary blindness of customs officials. It was all "Wink, wink." The current governor still wrote home to the Lords of Trade and Plantation that he was rooting out piracy. Governor Fletcher-a pious man who arrived at church in a coach and six-preferred his bribes to be delivered not in cash but in objets d'art; silversmiths thrived during his administration.
On the fourth of July, 1696, Captain Kidd in the Adventure Galley glided into the harbor, and greeted the people of Manhattan with a couple of shots from his cannon to announce his triumphant return home. As he had hoped, the boom of his guns stirred the merchants and the sailors out of their smoky lethargy in the taverns, away from the rent-a-pipe racks and tankards of cider, to come down to water's edge.
Captain William Kidd-a Scottish striver who often felt he never got his due in this mostly Dutch and English town-proudly guided the Adventure Galley, an immense warship studded with thirty-two cannon, into Manhattan harbor. Kidd, who called New York his home port, had left ten months earlier in a dinky 10-gun merchant ship, and now he was returning in this magnificent private man-of-war.
The Adventure]'s sails were furled and men below deck leaned on long oars, called sweeps, to propel the ship forward. New Yorkers, lining the dock, were somewhat shocked to see the oars; almost no one in the 1690s-with glorious huge sails to catch the wind-put oars on a warship, but they had come to realize that Kidd always did things differently.
The captain, peacocking a bit in his waistcoat on the quarterdeck, tucked the Adventure Galley into a neat opening amid the forest of masts of idle merchant ships. His quartermaster barked out orders; the men on deck played out the anchor cables-ropes as thick as a sailor's bicep-until the anchor hit bottom and the flukes grabbed. Small ships clustered about, and quickly learned that Captain Kidd had come here looking to line up 150 hardy men to go on a mission to hunt down pirates.
In essence, Captain Kidd had entered a pirate stronghold in search of a crew to chase pirates. Only a man with towering self-confidence (or a death wish) would dare to load his ship with former pirates or friends of pirates who, mid-voyage, with any ill luck, might find themselves shooting at cousins or neighbors.
Captain Kidd, on this summer day in 1696, was forty-two years old, in the prime of his life, physically vigorous, able to outmuscle most of his crew. His face was ruddy from decades of winds at sea.
The only surviving portrait of Kidd catches him in half profile: penetrating brown eyes arced by strong brows, a somewhat large nose. His lips seemed curled at the edge with a certain cockiness. He wears a wig, as did most successful men of his generation. (A 1703 wig tax would show that about fifty New Yorkers donned this succinct status symbol.) Kidd's choice in borrowed hair is a fairly subdued shoulder-length affair, in stark contrast to some of the "big wigs," i.e., the giant cascades of curls favored by some crotchety bald English businessmen.
Kidd was surprisingly literate in a mostly illiterate age. Sober, he showed a terse Scot's wit; with a couple of rums in him, he could turn boisterous, then argumentative or worse. Kidd was defiantly independent, a hard taskmaster, ambitious, distrustful. In this lone portrait, the artist seems to be trying to capture Kidd's temper in the clenched mouth, the slightly flared nostrils.
Captain Kidd on this July day was rowed ashore, then he walked the length of the city dock past the recently rebuilt town outhouse. The hub and meeting place for all colonial shipping back then were the town's numerous taverns offering penny-a-glass rum and wads of fresh Long Island tobacco to pack into long clay pipes. So Kidd, over the next few days and especially nights, wandered to these popular "tippling houses" to tack the ship's articles-a kind of "Help Wanted" poster-to the walls. He also sent out some of his current crew to talk up the voyage; these Adventure Galley men whispered that the newly appointed (but not yet arrived) governor of New York, Lord Bellomont, was a backer of the voyage, as was Admiral Russel. These were big-wig names to impress illiterate seamen.
William Kidd, to this point, was a completely respectable individual; he was a privateer, not a pirate. (His life would later depend on the not always clear distinction between the two.)
A privateer was a kind of independent nautical mercenary, commissioned by a government to attack ships of an enemy nation in exchange for a piece of the spoils. Royal navies couldn't be everywhere, so countries in times of war turned to profit-hungry freelancers. In Elizabethan times, Drake and Raleigh had become national heroes as privateers attacking Spain. (Nearly a century after Kidd, during the Revolutionary War, the fledgling United States would commission a fleet of American privateers that captured more than 1,000 British merchant ships; while landlocked historians have dwelled on George Washington's battle plans, this economic strangulation by sea undeniably helped the colonies win their independence.)
Privateering, at its best, was a perfectly honorable profession, a unique blend of profit and patriotism. Typically, a group of investors banded together to finance a privateer mission to capture enemy ships and bring them back to port to be condemned as prizes and sold. The king might receive a tenth for granting the original privilege; the Admiralty might siphon off as much as a third for doing the paperwork and applying the stamp of legality. The investors would receive the rest and dole it out to themselves and the crew, according to a formula agreed upon before the voyage. Pirates, on the other hand, thumbed their noses at all these niceties; they weren't sanctioned by any government; they readily attacked ships of all nations and they didn't share their booty with any admirals or kings. They were shipborne thieves, the "enemies of mankind and the trading nations."
Captain Kidd, the privateer, in his voyage over from England in the Adventure had already legally captured a French fishing vessel off the banks of New Foundland with a crew of four. The conquest had resembled more a ritual at a masquerade ball than a sea battle. Kidd's warship had borne down on the fishing vessel; when close enough, it plunked a cannonball nearby; the French ship surrendered and Kidd in a few minutes had paid for his transatlantic voyage. The Vice Admiralty Court in New York sometime in July condemned the ship as worth 350 [pounds sterling], the price of a couple of Manhattan buildings. The four French sailors were shipped to Boston to be exchanged for English prisoners held in Canada.
Kidd's mission-as he'd said many times over many rums in Hawdon's and elsewhere-provided sailors with a unique legal opportunity to steal from pirates and from the hated French.
And yet almost no one signed up for Kidd's voyage.
No employee surveys were done at the time, but apparently it boiled down to ... money: Kidd wasn't offering any wages, just a share of the future profits from captures. The sailors back then nicknamed this approach: "No prey, no pay." If they didn't catch a pirate ship or French vessel, they might callus their hands reefing sails for years for absolutely nothing. However, it wasn't the "No prey, no pay" that bothered them; it was the division of spoils. Kidd's Articles, his "Help Wanted" poster, specified that the 150 crewmen would split up only a quarter of the treasure, after expenses-that is, after they had repaid all the food, medicine, and weapons at prices set by the owners. (The weapons' charge alone was 6 [pounds sterling] or three months of typical sailor wages.) Kidd told them the split was ordained by his blueblood owners in London; he said it followed more along the lines favored by the Royal Navy that first rewarded admirals, commodores, captains, lieutenants, before finding perhaps ten percent for the crew.
The New York sailors weren't the least bit swayed. Pirates, they knew, kept 100 percent and shared with no one back at the dock; en masse, the Manhattan mates opted to ignore the appeals of Kidd.
So, despite being blessed with a brand-new warship and a potentially lucrative commission, Captain Kidd couldn't go anywhere without a crew. The man was landlocked in sweltering New York City.
In mid-July, while trying to land sailors one by one, he settled himself in at the family mansion on Pearl Street, then a posh riverfront address. He lived there with his wife, Sarah, and their very young daughter, also named Sarah.
Tax rolls reveal Captain Kidd to be among the wealthiest citizens in his affluent East Ward neighborhood; while Kidd had certainly earned some money from his merchant sailing days, he came by most of his fortune through wedlock. A half decade earlier, William had married Sarah, who-in addition to being attractive and sixteen years younger than he-also happened to be the wealthiest widow in New York City. Through her inheritance, they owned five prime swatches of Manhattan real estate, including 56 Wall Street and 38 1/2 acres of a tanning mill way north of the city in Niew Haarlem (located today at 73rd Street and the East River).
From his living room on Pearl Street, William Kidd had a nice view of the harbor and his idle ship. In a city already known as cramped, Kidd's three-story mansion was a double wide, at thirty-eight feet across, and also boasted an unheard of forty-eight-foot depth. Built a half century earlier by a Dutch merchant, Govert Lockermans, the house replicated the Dutch taste for six-foot stoops up to the front door (to avoid Amsterdam's rising canal waters); a high peaked gable roof (because Amsterdam's buildings were squeezed together); and the facade followed the popular pattern of red and yellow Flanders glazed bricks. A rooftop crane allowed Kidd to lift merchandise into a secure warehouse on the uppermost floor.
Inside, the furnishings were elegant: the Kidds walked on the city's first Turkey work carpet, sat in chairs from the East Indies, and dined with silver spoons and knives. (Their household inventory, however, listed only one "large flesh fork", i.e., a meat fork for cooking in the fireplace.) In the 1690s, from dukes to rag-pickers, the main course was still carried to the mouth via fingers.
During the day, the sound of little Sarah playing echoed through the large house; at night, twenty-six-year-old Sarah and forty-two-year-old William made love in a four-poster curtained bed, lying on cotton sheets, flat-ironed smooth by slaves. They relaxed on goose-down pillows in soft Dutch pillow-cases.
Outside the cocoon of that four-poster bed, though, Kidd was still having no luck rounding up a crew.
So, with time on his hands, on July 19, 1696, Captain Kidd took a walk with the family lawyer, James Emott, over to the construction site for the city's first English house of worship, then going up on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, to be called Trinity Church.
The English community, still outnumbered by the Dutch, for years had been complaining about saying Sunday prayers over at the Dutch Calvinist churches. The English especially quibbled about the unique olfactory experience occuring there in winter. Dutch women, in those days of semiannual bathing, routinely, to warm themselves in the unheated nave, carried with them small ornamental coal braziers and placed them under their floor-length Sunday dresses. Every so often a wisp of smoke peeped out. The aroma, it seems, provided an unintentional Protestant counterpoint to Catholic incense. Some of the rougher English-speaking citizens in New York coined the word "sooterkin" to describe "a small animal about the size of a mouse" that "Dutch women through the constant use of stoves breed under their skirts." (This flipness of New Yorkers apparently has deep roots. "No discourse [here] is thought witty unless larded with oaths and execrations," complained the Reverend Jonathan Miller in 1695.)
Kidd joined lawyer Emott, stepping over the oyster shells littered in the streets. At the building site, the two wigged gentlemen saw slaves in the July heat wearing little more than the breech-clouts of Indians as they trudged up Broadway, a rutted dirt road sometimes called Wagon Way. Babel prevailed as French and Dutch masons argued over technique. (Included in the church budget was the item that the dozen stone masons be allowed "six pennies a day to provide all of them with drink.")
Kidd was pleased by the project's progress; and this captain, who had married a wealthy Englishwoman, also very much wanted to impress his fellow English upper-crusters, and join their tight ruling clique. The captain dropped enough silver into vestryman Emott's collection plate to buy a family pew so he could worship near the governor and other leading citizens. (The good captain would never sit in pew number four up front.)
In addition, the meeting minutes that day, as recorded by the church founders, reveal that William Kidd lent "runner and tackle for hoisting up the stones as long as he stays here" in port.
The city at that moment in late July, as Kidd searched for crewmen, was tense with war rumors and bread shortages. Greedy merchants had exported most of the region's prized flour, leaving local bakers with little to bake. The shortage had gotten so acute that the City Council passed a law forbidding the home baking of biscuits or even cookies.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Pirate Hunterby Richard Zacks Copyright © 2003 by Richard Zacks. Excerpted by permission.
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