Pirate Hunter: Captain Kidd

Home Life in New York

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

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 38½ 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 Lockenums, 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.

Copyright © 2002 Richard Zacks.