Pirate Hunter: Captain Kidd

Pirate Port of Choice

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

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 Wan 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 Flyspe 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.

Copyright © 2002 Richard Zacks.