Pirate Hunter: Captain Kidd

Kidd's Pirate Crew

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

The muggy late-August weather swaddled New York. As he waited for the port embargo to lift, Captain Kidd signed up more crewmen, quite a few of them known pirates.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Long John Silver dupes Squire Trelawney into hiring a crew of pirates such as Israel Hands and others. Kidd wasn't duped; he was merely confident that he could control them.

Kidd had known John Brown for almost a decade. Brown, in his forties, had crossed the line from privateering to piracy years earlier, heading off to the Red Sea. He had made the big score but then gambled or humped it all away. Kidd signed him on.

Kidd, who had sailed the East Coast and Caribbean for years, surely knew the troublemaker reputation of gunner William Moore. When Moore was eighteen years old, he had been arrested in New York for the unthinkable act of attacking his captain, and kept in prison the uncommonly long stint of almost two years. (Usually, prisoners died before that.) Authorities in Barbados had also locked him up in the early 1690s for an unspecified charge and refused him bail because he admitted to his cellmate that he planned to "desert to the French" But Kidd apparently wanted a belligerent gunner.

Kidd's crew ran the gamut of colonial manhood and boyhood, from rough ex-pirates to pasty landsmen such as Kidd's brother-in-law, Samuel Bradley, a very wealthy young man. He had recently turned twenty-one and inherited a large estate and several pieces of Manhattan real estate. Kidd, who had only a very young daughter, felt a special fondness for Sam Bradley.

The last days of August ticked down toward Kidd's departure; the new crew carried barrel upon barrel aboard; sails were mended; ropes coiled. Looking over Kidd's shoulder throughout this process, counting pennies, was Kidd's main American backer, Robert Livingston, also Scottish, also forty-two years old. To put it bluntly, Robert Livingston was cheap. Wrote one English official: "He pinched a fortune out of the soldier's bellies." In other words, he overcharged the crown and underfed the soldiers. "Beginning as a little bookkeeper," sniped Governor Fletcher, "he has screwed himself into one of the considerable estates in the province" Fletcher was using "screwed" in a gutter sense; Livingston, Eke Kidd, had married a very wealthy widow, one Alida Schuyler van Rensselaer.

On September 1, Kidd decided that it was time to live on board the Adventure to oversee final preparations. He had to leave his cushy confines on Pearl Street. Kidd's eyes recorded the walls of his home. He sat one last time in the living room chairs; he ate one last meal in the dining room; he joined his young wife in the bedroom one last time. The farewell must have been difficult because subtle clues, such as offhand comments from neighbors and friends, point to William loving Sarah very much, and Sarah returning that love. They knew that they would not see each other for at least a year and a half, if ever again.

The sails of the Adventure Galley were furled and the three masts, like metronomes pointing to the sky, tipped now this way, now that, as the ship felt the local current.

With departure so close, the sailors also began sleeping aboard ship. That meant that their companions would have to come visit them.

Privateers followed a Royal Navy tradition that allowed "wives" aboard in port, whether or not the woman in question was actually that particular sailor's wife. "You would have wondered to see here a man and a woman creep into a hammock, the woman's legs to the hams hanging over the sides or out of the end of it," wrote an eyewitness of a similar departure. "Another couple sleeping on a chest; others kissing and clipping, half drunk, half sober, or rather half asleep."

On September 6, 1696, the entire crew of 150 men stood crowded upon the deck, which rose and fell. Trumpets blared. A magistrate, in full wig, held parchment in his hand and read aloud in a booming voice the two commissions from the Lords of the Admiralty and the king authorizing the voyage.

More than fifty smaller merchant ships with their tall masts clustered in the harbor while an English man-of-war, the HMS Richmond, hovered nearby.

Seagulls wheeled. The magistrate droned on. Many of the sailors were probably feeling the aftereffects of the previous night's entertainment. Joseph Palmer, a young sailor from Westchester, later said he stood upon the forecastle and didn't remember a word of what was said. The magistrate stood and read the many polysyllabic words of Kidd's commission. "Whereas we are informed that Captain Thomas Too, John Ireland, Captain Thomas Wake, Captain William Maze or Mace, and other subjects . . . of New England, New York and elsewhere in our Plantations in America . . . daily commit many great piracies upon the seas . . . to the great Hindrance and Discouragement of Trade and Navigation . . . ." The precise meaning would have probably eluded almost all of the mostly illiterate crew, but the gist of it would have sunk in. One commission entitled Kidd to attack ships of Catholic France and the other encouraged Kidd to go after pirate ships. To the sailors -- mostly colonials and Dutchmen -- these privateering commissions were minimally about patriotism and mostly about money. You capture the ship, you split the prize money.

Maybe some of the least hungover among them heard the words from the king: "And we do hereby charge and command all our Officers, Ministers and other loving Subjects whatsoever to be aiding and assisting you!"

The gunner, William Moore, loaded several cannon with gunpowder but no balls and fired off salutes to the city of New York. The cannon at Fort William roared an equal response.

The sea of faces -- white except for one Indian and one "negro" John Parcrick -- feigned attention. They awaited orders to lift the heavy anchor, which weighed more than a ton. The men put bars into the capstan and to the rhythm of a shanty pushed round and round -- like mules turning a millstone -- to haul in the stout anchor cable.

Any "wives" remaining, any merchants out for the show, the magistrate and preacher, climbed down into small boats and canoes to return ashore. Hours later with the anchor finally stowed, the ship headed south out to sea, accompanied by a colonial brig.

The two ships moved out past Sandy Hook, that smuggler's rendezvous in the Jersies, and out into the waves of the Atlantic. The skyline of Manhattan with its windmill and two church steeples faded into the distance.

Copyright © 2002 Richard Zacks.