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Whatever dealings William had with Scotland seem to have provoked irritation and disaster. The case of Captain William
Kidd, though of minor significance, is another example. William Kidd was born in Greenock, probably in 1645, and took to the sea as a boy. By the early 1690s he was a respected merchant captain with his own ship, a
large house in New York, a wealthy wife and a little daughter. At that time the North American coast, from New England to the Bahamas, was home base for innumerable English pirates, who sailed out to intercept ships of
all nationalities sailing from the Indies to Europe. The East India Company, its trade seriously threatened, appealed to the king to send the Royal Navy to suppress the pirates. Not a single frigate could be spared, but
the king suggested that £3000 might be found to cover a portion of the cost of fitting out a privateer. On the recommendation of the earl of Bellomont, the new governor of New York and Massachusetts, Kidd was ordered to
command the vessel. He was not anxious to become a privateering captain, and indeed, as a rather easy going merchant skipper, he was unfitted to do so. But Bellomont bullied him into accepting, and the king
granted him two commissions: one to apprehend all 'Pirates, Freebooters and Sea Robbers of what Nature soever'; the other a letter of marque empowering him to seize all 'ships, vessels and goods belonging to the French
King and his subjects'. On 6 September 1696, aboard the newly built Adventure Galley, Kidd set out from Deptford for the Indian Ocean, with a crew who were offered no pay, but a share of any booty. In October 1697 he
took the Rouparelle flying French colours, and, unwisely, distributed the plunder among his men, who had been sullenly waiting over a year for their pay. Early in 1698 he took the Quetta Merchant. By April
1699 he had returned to the Leeward Islands, where he discovered to his disquiet that he and his crew had been declared pirates. Leaving the Quetta Merchant anchored at the east end of Hispanola, he took a sloop to Long
Island Sound and sent a letter to Bellomont saying that he 'never did in the least act contrary to the king's commission'. Nevertheless, he was imprisoned. Kidd was arraigned on five charges of piracy at the Old Bailey
in May 1701. He had brought with him the French papers of the Rouparelle and Quetta Merchant, but when he asked for them to be produced at the trial they had vanished, and he was hanged at Execution Dock on 23 May,
still protesting his innocence. Two centuries later, an American scholar searching through bundles of old documents in the Public Record Office in London found the two French passes. Kidd's treasure, which he said was
worth £30,000, has never been found. |
