Captain William Kidd

ExEcution of the pirate Captain William Kidd

.

Captain William Kidd spent his last days on earth, in Newgate Gaol, where on Sunday 18th May 1701, he heard his final sermon, preached by the prison chaplain.

Kidd still hoped for a reprieve, and the others who had been condemned with him for piracy received it – all except one, an Irishman named Darby Mullins.

The line between piracy and government-sponsored privateering was narrow, and Kidd does not seem to have been the typical swashbuckling pirate of popular fiction.

He did not maroon anyone or make people walk the plank, but legends clustered round him which turned him into a name to conjure with.

A Scot by birth, and according to tradition, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he emerges into history in 1689 as a buccaneer in the Caribbean.

A fighter, a fine seaman and evidently a man of some presence, he turned into a privateer captain in British service, sent to pillage French settlements in the West Indies.

He acquired a well-to-do wife and property in New York City.

Kidd was in London in 1696, when he set off on the voyage that was to be his undoing.

It took him almost a year to reach Madagascar and the East African coast.

Hoisting the blood-red flag, or French colours when it suited him, he captured several merchant ships.

Once, in a furious rage when his crew were on the verge of mutiny, he struck his ship’s gunner, William Moore, with an iron-bound bucket.

Moore’s skull was fractured and he died within twenty-four hours.

In January 1698 Kidd seized a valuable ship of 400 tons, on her way from Bengal round the southern tip of India, carrying silk, muslin, calico, sugar and opium.

Kidd then sailed for the West Indies, arriving in April 1699 to discover that the government had proclaimed him a pirate.

Rumour had it that jewels found on Kidd’s ship had been valued at £30,000 (perhaps equivalent to some £10 million today

He was arrested and sent back to England.

On 8th and 9th May 1701, at the Old Bailey, Kidd was tried for the murder of Moore and on multiple counts of piracy, and found guilty.

Nine members of his crew were in the dock with him on the piracy charges.

Whether the evidence was convincing and the trial fair, has been debated ever since.

On the afternoon of 23rd May, they were taken from Newgate in two horse-drawn carts, guarded by marshals and led by the Admiralty Marshal.

To the chaplain’s shocked disapproval, Kidd was the worse for drink.

At five o’clock, low tide, they reached ExEcution Dock at Wapping, a few yards below Wapping Old Stairs, in the presence of a large and lively crowd.

There was a permanent gallows for pirates there, and after the hanging the corpses were customarily chained to a post on the foreshore, where they were left until three tides had flowed over them, as an example.

Kidd spoke to the crowd, warning all ship-masters to learn from his fate.

As he was being hanged, Kidd’s rope snapped and he fell to the ground with the noose round his neck, still alive and dazed.

The chaplain prayed over him once more, and he was hoisted up again, and hanged until he was dead.

His body was taken to be hanged in chains at Tilbury Point.

Kidd was in his mid-fifties when he died, and soon became a legendary figure, largely because no one ever discovered what had happened to the rest of his treasure.

Its value multiplied as time went by, and treasure-hunters have searched for his loot from the Americas to the South China Sea, but so far in vain.......

.

https://www.historytoday.com/.../execution-captain-kidd

.

https://ko-fi.com/thetudorintruders

.

Captain Kidd in New York Harbor, in a c. 1920 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris