Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [97]
THE STRANGE CAREER OF CAPTAIN KIDD
A Scot by birth, William Kidd went off to sea as a young man and at length found his way to the Caribbean. There, along with thousands of other restless, ambitious seamen, he drifted from port to port looking for work, a background that later prompted Leisler to call him, with considerable justice, a “blasphemous privateer.”
When war broke out between England and France in 1688, Kidd got a privateering commission from the governor of Nevis, an English colony in the West Indies. He attacked French ships and colonies until his crew, who preferred piracy to honest plunder, absconded with his ship. Kidd set out after them in another vessel, and over the winter of 1690-91 the chase brought him to New York, where he astutely chose to help Ingoldsby and Sloughter recapture the town from Leisler. The Assembly voted Kidd a reward of one hundred fifty pounds, and he became fast friends with Nicholas Bayard, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, Frederick Philipse, and other anti-Leislerian worthies implicated in piracy and illegal trade. On the very day of Leisler’s execution, he obtained a license to marry Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, widow of a prosperous merchant whose property included a flour warehouse, the fine home on River Road (Pearl Street) once owned by Govert Loockermans and Annetje Jans, and a capital of nineteen hundred pounds. After a few more years, Kidd had acquired fine silverware, a large plot of land north of Wall Street, and an excellent wine cellar; his wife was the proud owner of the first “Turkey worked” carpet seen in New York. When construction began on the new Trinity Church, he provided the block and tackle for hoisting the stones.
In 1695, while marshaling his case against Governor Fletcher, Robert Livingston met Kidd in London and arranged for him to take a heavily armed frigate, the Adventure Galley, into the Indian Ocean to hunt pirates. A syndicate of rich Whigs, organized by Bellomont and Livingston on the eve of Bellomont’s departure for New York, agreed to finance Kidd’s expedition in return for a share of the proceeds.
Kidd returned to New York and filled out his 150-man crew with the kind of restless spirits who usually signed up for risky ventures at sea—mostly young, overwhelmingly poor, and, except for a handful of experienced mariners, thoroughly weary of trying to make a living on land as farmers, laborers, carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, and the like. Two out of three were English, and one out of six was Dutch. There was one African and one Jew—Benjamin Franks, a jeweler from Jamaica who was trying to get to India, then the world’s leading supplier of precious gems.
The Adventure Galley set sail for Madagascar in the early autumn of 1696. Somewhere along the way Kidd decided to turn pirate and spent the next couple of years preying on trade in the Indian Ocean. When he headed back for New York in the spring of 1699, he was rumored to be carrying a treasure worth half a million pounds. His backers, though, were deserting him. He had thumbed his nose at the government, embarrassed important people, defied the navy, outraged the budding imperial bureaucracy, and done harm to the mighty East India Company. The Tory opposition was clamoring for his head, and by early 1699, even as Kidd reentered American waters, the Whigs knew they might lose control of Parliament if they didn’t wash their hands of him at once.
Kidd’s relationship with Governor Bellomont was a particularly sensitive issue for the Whigs. When Kidd showed up in Boston in July, Bellomont had no choice but to order his arrest—a decision probably made easier by the discovery that Kidd’s loot was worth a paltry forty thousand pounds or so, far too meager to make it worth anyone’s while to protect him (though rumors persist that just