Pirate Hunter: Captain Kidd

Captain Kidd

Converted for the Web from "Chapter One: Mission in New York City" from Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd."

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.)

Copyright © 2002 Richard Zacks.