Legal preliminaries completed, Kidd’s ship, the Adventure Galley, was launched in Castle’s Yard at Deptford, on the fourth of December, 1695, and set sail between two and three months afterwards. Sir Edmund Harrison, described by Bellamont’s apologist as “a reputable city merchant,” had been at the pains to select the crew with great care so as to exclude all Scotch and Colonials, who were regarded as ineligible by reason of their supposed proclivities to smuggling and piracy. “That nothing might be wanting,” we are told by[40] the same writer, “which the nature of the thing would admit notwithstanding the great difficulty of finding men at that time, Sir Edmund Harrison took such care of the crew that every officer in the ship and almost all the seamen had settled families in England.” “True it is,” he adds in the next paragraph, “that this care was in a great degree rendered ineffectual: for most of the crew were pressed before Kidd got out of the river.” Kidd himself in his artless narrative tells the tale more tersely, merely recording the fact that “on the first of March, when he came to the Buoy at the Nore, his men were pressed for the fleet.” Seeing that the First Lord of the Admiralty was one of the principal partners in the adventure, it may seem strange to those who have had no personal experience of official blunderings, that precautions had not been taken to prevent this untoward mishap, which made a hopeless enterprise more hopeless than ever. For it left Kidd no[41] alternative but to get the bulk of his crew from America. With such of his men as had not been deemed worth taking by the press gang, he managed to get away from Plymouth about the end of April. On his way to America, he captured a small French vessel with salt and fishing tackle bound for Newfoundland, and brought her into port at New York. There in the head centre and hotbed of the smuggling and piracy, which the King desired to repress, he set to work to pick up the best substitutes he could find for the men who had been so carefully selected for him and so unceremoniously taken from him at the Nore.
He reached New York in July and did not leave it till September. In the interval the French ship which he had captured was condemned by the authorities as a lawful prize; and according to Kidd’s narrative of these events, “the produce thereof purchased provisions for the Adventure Galley for her further intended voyage.” It[42] must have been anything but an easy job to get the requisite number of men to fill up the vacancies in his ship’s company. The Colony was not over populated, nor was there any lack of work for those who cared to take it. The only terms he was authorized to offer, “No purchase, no pay,” were not likely to be accepted by skilled and experienced seamen, who had the chance of earning a good living at home by smuggling, or of going out and making their fortunes, as some had lately done in the East under such captains as those whom it was now Kidd’s business to catch. Nor was the catching of their old friends for hanging purposes likely to be a popular employment in that part of the world. He probably picked up some adventurous boys, eager to go to sea at any cost, in ignorance of the fate to which they were consigning themselves. Of the older men who joined, Darby Mullins, a rolling stone who had gathered no moss, may perhaps be taken as a fair sample.[43] From so much of his previous history as this poor man told to the chaplain at Newgate, it appears that he was an Irishman, born near Londonderry, kidnapped when young and shipped for the plantations, where he had followed various honest avocations without any conspicuous success. Most of Kidd’s grown-up recruits, it is to be feared, were men of this kind, who for one reason or another were indisposed to remain long in any one employment, and likely to abandon the enterprise as soon as they got tired of it. Whilst picking up one and another of these men during his last stay at his home in New York, Kidd, one would think, must often have regretted that he had embarked on this miserable business. But he seems to have been upheld not only then but till the day of his death by a childlike belief in the great men whose service he had entered, a belief which was possibly shared by his wife. Money was not a matter of great importance to either of[44] them. It is not unlikely that she was pleased to hear about her husband’s great friends, his interviews with them in London, and what they were likely to do for him and her when he had successfully completed his task. It is possible that she may have looked forward with some complacency, poor soul, to the prospect of herself associating with the women folk of these great people. Perhaps she even dreamed of becoming a great lady herself. Why not? What more likely than that her husband would be knighted by the King for his services and that she would become Lady Kidd?
Starting from New York in September in command of his undisciplined and unpromising crew, Kidd proceeded first to the Madeiras, in company with one Joyner, master of a brigantine belonging to the Bermudas. He arrived at his destination on the eighth of October. Thence they sailed together to Bonavista, where they stayed[45] for some days and took in salt; thence to St. Jago where they watered; and thence to the Cape of Good Hope. On the twelfth of December, “in the latitude of thirty-two,” to quote from Kidd’s narrative, “they met with five English men-of-war. Captain Warren was commodore; and sailed a week in their company, and then parted and sailed to Telere, a port in the Island of Madagascar.” Here Kidd failed to find at their usual rendezvous any of the pirates after whom he had come, and concluding that they were preying on the Eastern trade, continued his course eastwards in pursuit of them. In company with a sloop belonging to Barbadoes, which had come in at Telere whilst he was there, he sailed to the Island of Johanna on the coast of Malabar. There he “found four East India merchantmen outward bound and watered there all together and stayed about five days. From thence about the twenty-second of March he sailed for Mehila, an island ten leagues distant[46] from Johanna, where he arrived the next morning and careened the Galley.” “And about fifty men died there in about a week’s time,” he tells us pithily and without comment, as though such a catastrophe was an ordinary occurrence, as indeed it probably was in those days to a ship’s crew suddenly attacked by cholera or plague in those parts. These deaths seem to have induced him to leave that coast somewhat suddenly and to seek healthier quarters. After cruising awhile in the open sea, the only known specific in those days for such mischances, he came to the entrance of the Red Sea; obviously a likely place to find the pirates in, since it was specifically named in the Articles of Agreement between Bellamont, Livingstone, and himself as the place in which the pirates of whom he was in search intended to commit their depredations, and the date of the sailing of the Mecca fleet was approaching. He had now been the greater part of a year at sea without taking a prize,[47] and had lost more than a third of his crew by sickness. His ship had grown crazy and leaky; and neither he nor his men had yet earned a penny. No wonder that his ship’s company was growing discontented. The wonder is that Kidd had thus far been able to keep them fairly in hand, which it is admitted he had done.
On reaching the Red Sea, he waited for three weeks at Bab’s Key, a small island at its entrance, a convenient station for observing all ships going into or out of that sea. It was alleged at his trial by Palmer, one of the two men who became King’s evidence, that he said on one occasion to his men, whilst waiting here, “Come, boys, I will make money enough out of that fleet.” Little credence is to be attached to Palmer’s evidence, as will be seen hereafter. But assuming that Kidd made use of these words, they are susceptible of a perfectly innocent interpretation. Kidd was on the lookout not only for pirates but also for French[48] ships. It was not improbable that some of the vessels in the Mecca fleet would be ships belonging to Frenchmen, or sailing under French colours to the French factories in India, in which case he would have had a perfect right to seize them under his letters of marque. It was also by no means improbable that he might catch some of the Madagascar pirates in pursuit of, or possibly in possession of, the fleet or some part of it, in which case it would clearly have been his bounden duty under his commission to seize the pirates and the ships which they had captured. In either of these events he would, to use the words attributed to him by Palmer, have made money enough out of the fleet.
There is some conflict of evidence as to what actually happened on the fourteenth of August, when the fleet came by. One thing is certain, that either before or after Kidd came among them, they flew English and Dutch colours, and that a fire was opened[49] on Kidd from one or both of their convoys. It also appears that “sundry shots were fired from Kidd’s ship,” possibly with the object of bringing the ships to, in order that explanations might be forthcoming from both sides. On this point an attempt made on the part of the prosecution by both their witnesses to mislead the jury was frustrated by Kidd. Palmer had led them to believe that Kidd was the aggressor. “I ask this one thing,” said Kidd. “Did the Mecca fleet fire first at me or I at them?”
Palmer. “No; they fired first.”
Kidd. “And just now, the other” (that is, Bradenham) “said I fired first. Is he not perjured?”
Mr. Justice Turton. “Mr. Bradenham, did he fire first or no?”
Bradenham. “He fired at them. I only said, you fired at them. I did not say first or last.”
No harm was done by the shots on either side; and the fleet went by without any interchange[50] of explanations. It was no fault of Kidd’s that its convoys mistook him for a pirate, of which there were undoubtedly plenty in those parts. But the failure of his plan to make money out of it cannot have added to his prestige with his crew.
Leaving Bab’s Key, the Adventure Galley stood back across the Arabian Sea and cruised again along the coast of Malabar, the only coast on which there is the slightest suggestion that Kidd ever committed any act of piracy. In considering his doings and those of his men here, and the construction placed on them first by the East India Company, and afterwards by the prosecution at his trial, several things must be borne in mind. At that time there were in India not only English, but Portuguese and French factories. Little love was lost between them, and there was open war between England and France. English and American pirates had been for some time past preying on the coast trade, and the Adventure Galley[51] might very reasonably be mistaken for a pirate by any ship which she chased. The coast trade was carried on mainly in vessels manned by Asiatics with, in some cases, two or three Europeans on board. The wily Indian had by this time learned the advantage of carrying Europeans of more than one nationality in each ship, so that if caught by a ship carrying French colours, he might produce a Frenchman as the owner, and if caught by an English ship an Englishman. It was Kidd’s plain duty to take as prizes any French vessels he came across, and with that end in view to examine carefully every ship which he had reason to suspect was French. He knew very little of the coast or of the Eastern languages, and stood greatly in need of a pilot and an interpreter, or, as he was then termed by seamen, a “linguister.” His crew were becoming unruly, and whenever he left his ship to examine personally any suspected prize, he ran the risk of their putting to sea and leaving[52] him in the lurch. The first vessel he was accused at his trial of having plundered was a small one, of little value, manned by Armenians, with two Europeans on board, an Englishman and a Portuguese. He engaged the Englishman as a pilot and the Portuguese as a “linguister.” There is no reason to doubt that both these men were thankful to get on board a European ship again and to join his ship’s company, as others in similar circumstances admittedly did afterwards.
The ship itself with its Armenian crew he allowed to proceed on its course after a few days’ detention. Before it left him, some misunderstanding seems unfortunately to have arisen between the English seamen on board of her and the Armenians; and it is alleged that on this occasion the former hung up four of the latter and spanked them with the flats of their cutlasses. Kidd’s defence, and there is no reason to doubt that it was a perfectly genuine defence[53] so far as he was concerned, was that he had nothing whatever to do with this fracas and that he did not go on board the ship at all. It was further alleged by the King’s evidence that his men took out of her a bale of coffee and a bale of pepper and some beeswax. Whether they neglected to give adequate money or goods in exchange is not stated, but as it is admitted that Kidd trafficked with many of the ships which he met on this coast, it is not unreasonable to suppose that he did so with this one. At any rate, there is no good reason to believe that he was a party to the theft of these paltry articles.
The next vessel he met was a Portuguese man-of-war which attacked him without the slightest provocation, taking him possibly for one of the pirates of whom he was in quest, or possibly for some less reputable reason. Here again, Palmer, the King’s evidence, tried to give the jury the false impression that Kidd was the aggressor.
[54]
Palmer. “He met a Portuguese ship and fought her.”
Kidd. “Who fired first?”
Palmer. “The Portuguese fired first.”
Kidd’s narrative written before he was taken into custody, or had any reason to believe that he would be called to account for this incident, goes more fully into this matter. Though from other parts of his narrative he seems to have been a man of few words, he waxes eloquent on this occasion. It appears that he had been into Carrawarr a few days before, to water. “There the gentlemen of the English factory,” he says, “gave the narrator an account that the Portuguese were fitting out two men-of-war to take him, and advised him to put to sea, and to take care of himself from them, and immediately to set sail thereupon. And the next morning about break of day he saw the said two men-of-war standing for the said Galley, and they spoke with him, and asked him whence he was. Who[55] replied, from London, and they returned answer, from Goa; and so parted, wishing each other a good voyage. And still sailing along the coast, the Commodore of the said man-of-war kept dogging the said Galley all the night, waiting an opportunity to board her; and in the morning without speaking a word, fired six great guns at the Galley, some whereof went through her and wounded four of his men. And thereupon he fired upon him again, and the fight continued all day; and the Narrator had eleven men wounded. The other Portuguese man-of-war lay some distance off and could not come up with the Galley, being calm; else would likewise have assaulted the same. The said fight was sharp, and the said Portuguese left the said Galley with such satisfaction, that the narrator believes no Portuguese will ever attack the King’s colours again in that part of the world especially.” In reading this narrative, it should be remembered that Kidd was no braggadocio;[56] but a plain sea captain who had admittedly greatly distinguished himself in the war, which was still in progress against the French.
The next enormity with which he was charged at his trial was cruelty to the natives. It appears that he had sent some of his men ashore at one of the Malabar Islands for wood and water; and t............