CHAPTER II
THE VOYAGE OF THE “ADVENTURE GALLEY”[3]

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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; 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 the natives having cut one of their throats, he caused one native to be shot by way of reprisal. The manner in which capital was attempted to be made by the prosecution out of this incident appears plainly from the verbatim report of the King’s evidence. In reply to a question by the counsel for the prosecution, as to what Kidd had done after fighting with the Portuguese man-of-war, Bradenham replied, “We went to one of the Malabar islands for wood and water, and Captain Kidd went ashore and several of his men, and plundered several boats and burnt several huts, and ordered one of the natives to be tied to a tree and one of his men to shoot him.” Hoping apparently to bring some further atrocities to light, counsel proceeded to ask, “What was the reason for his shooting this Indian?”

The answer he got from Bradenham, his own witness, was, “One of his men that was his cooper had been ashore, and some of the natives had cut his throat, and that was the reason he ordered his men to serve this man so.” Needless to say, counsel pursued the subject no further.

Whatever his men’s inclinations may have been at this time, the next untoward incident recorded of his doings on this coast conclusively shows that it was Kidd’s firm determination that his men should not be guilty of piracy. He came across a Dutch ship, The Loyal Captain, under the command of Captain Hoar. The greater part of his crew were undoubtedly in favor of seizing this ship, and it is indisputable that Kidd prevented them from attempting it. Kidd’s own account at his trial, was as follows:

“My lord, I will tell you what the case was. I was coming up within a league of this Dutchman, and some of my men were making a mutiny about taking her, and my gunner” (Moore) “told the people he could put the captain in a way to take the ship and be safe. Says I, ‘How will you do that?’ The gunner answers, ‘We will get the captain and men aboard.’ ‘And what then?’ ‘We will go aboard the ship and plunder her, and we could have it under their hands that we did not take her.’ Says I, ‘That is Judas-like. I dare not do such a thing.’ Says he, ‘We may do it; we are beggars already.’ ‘Why,’ says I, ‘may we take this ship because we are poor?’ Upon that a mutiny arose.”

Palmer, the King’s evidence, admitted that on this occasion there were nine men with muskets who were for taking the ship and that Kidd was against their doing so. The same incident was thus described at the trial by Parrott, one of the youngsters of the crew, a Plymouth boy of nineteen years of age at the date of the trial.

“I shall tell you how it happened according to the best of my knowledge. The commander fortuned to come up with this Captain Hoar’s ship, and some were for taking her, and some not. And afterwards there was a little sort of a mutiny and some were in arms, the greater part. And they said they would take the ship. And the commander was not for it; and so they resolved to go away in a boat and take her. Captain Kidd said: ‘If you desert my ship, you shall never come aboard again, and I will force you into Bombay, and I will carry you before some of the council there.’ Insomuch that my commander stilled them, and they remained on board.”

It is easy to understand that although for the nonce the mutiny was quelled, it left bad blood behind between Kidd and Moore, the spokesman of the mutineers. About a fortnight afterwards another altercation arose between them, which ended in Kidd’s knocking Moore down with a bucket. According to Parrott, it arose in this way: “Moore said, ‘Captain, I could have put you in the way to have taken the ship, and have never been the worse for it.’ He says, ‘Would you have me take this ship? I cannot answer it. They are our friends!’ And my commander was in a passion, and with that I went off the deck. I understand that afterwards the blow was given, but how I cannot tell.”

From the evidence given by the cook and a seaman named Barlicorn, who remained on deck, it appears that Moore upbraided Kidd and said, “You have brought us to ruin, and we are desolate;” and that Kidd said, “Have I brought you to ruin? I have not done an ill thing to ruin you. You are a saucy fellow to say those words.” And then he took up the bucket and gave him a blow with it.

The version given by Palmer, the King’s evidence, was this: “Captain Kidd came and walked upon the deck, and walks by this Moore. And when he came to him he says, ‘Which way could you have put me in a way to take this ship and been clear?’ ‘Sir,’ says Moore, ‘I never spoke such a word nor ever thought such a thing.’ Upon which Captain Kidd called him ‘a lousie dog.’ And says William Moore, ‘If I am a lousie dog, you have made me so. You have brought me to ruin and many more.’ Upon his saying this, says Captain Kidd, ‘Have I ruined you, you dog?’ and took the bucket and struck him on the right side of his head, of which he died the next day. Repeating the words two or three times, he took a turn or two on the deck and then struck him.”

Kidd admitted at the trial that he had given the blow; but pleaded that he had all the provocation in the world given him; that he had no design to kill Moore and no malice or spleen against him. It was not done designedly but in his passion, for which he was heartily sorry.

It is not certain that Moore died of the blow, for one witness deposed that Bradenham, the surgeon, who subsequently deserted Kidd at Madagascar to join the pirate Culliford, said at the time, “This blow was not the cause of his death,” and that Moore had been on the sick list for some time before. It is only fair to say, however, that Bradenham denied this.

Whether or not Moore died from the blow, it is clear that he was the spokesman of the mutineers on the two occasions on which dispute arose between Kidd and his crew as to the plundering of the Dutch ship, that he upbraided Kidd for his not allowing his men to commit a gross act of piracy, and that his death had the effect of quieting the mutineers for a while.

Coming next to the two cases in which Kidd did take prizes in the course of this voyage, according to his own illiterate but intelligible narrative, he met in November, 1697, “A Moore’s ship of about 200 tons, coming from Surratt, bound for the coast of Malabar, loaded with two horses, sugar, and cotton in trade there, having about 40 Moors on board, with a Dutch pilot, boatswain and gunner, which said ship the narrator hailed and commanded” [? The Master] “on board. And with him came eight or nine of the Moors and the three Dutchmen who declared it was a Moor’s ship and” (were) “demanded their pass from Surrat, which they showed and the same was a French pass which he believes was shown by mistake. For the pilot swore sacramentally she was a prize and staid on board the Galley and would not return on board the Moor’s ship, but went in the Galley to the port of St. Marie’s.”[4]

This statement is corroborated by such of his crew as returned with him to America, from whose depositions it further appears that all the Christians ultimately remained in the Galley and “took up arms there,” that the Moors had the long boat given them to go on shore, which was two leagues distant; and that Captain Kidd and his men sold the cotton and horses to the natives of the country for money and gold, but kept the ship itself with them and carried her to Madagascar, the Galley being very leaky. The King’s evidence against Kidd was practically to the same effect.

This was a prize of no great value, but such as it was he and his men were no doubt glad enough to lay hands on it. For they must by this time have been running short of money, and it was the first capture they had made. Moreover, their own ship being very leaky, they were glad to keep it in company.

Shortly afterwards, on the fifth of February, 1698, they came across a very different ship, the Quedagh Merchant, an extremely valuable prize. Sailing under French colours, as Kidd frankly admits “with a design to decoy,” he met, to quote his own words, “with a Bengal merchantman belonging to Surratt of the burden of four or five hundred tons, and he commanded the master on board. And a Frenchman, an inhabitant of Surratt, and belonging to the French factory there, came on board as master; and when he came on board the narrator caused the English colours to be hoisted and the said master was surprised and said, ‘You are English,’ and asking which was the captain. Whom when he saw, he said, ‘Here is a good prize,’ and delivered him the French pass.”

There is no reason to believe that this is not a perfectly correct account of the taking of the ship; but for the capture of which it is improbable that any complaint against Kidd would ever have been made by the East India Company. Kidd’s own account of the capture is corroborated even by the King’s evidence, Bradenham, who states that Kidd chased the ship under French colours, and that when he came up with her he commanded the master on board. “And there came,” he says, “an old Frenchman in the boat; and after he had been aboard awhile” (mark the subtlety of the word “awhile.” Who would have conceived that it meant five or six days?), “he told Captain Kidd that he was not the captain but the gunner, and Kidd sent for the captain, whose name was Wright.” Palmer, the other King’s evidence, says he was not on board when the ship was taken. At the trial Kidd went more fully into this incident than in his narrative. “My lord,” he said, “this Frenchman was aboard for five or six days before I understood there was any Englishman aboard. ‘Well?’ said I. ‘What are you?—an Englishman?’ ‘I am, master.’ ‘What have you to show for it?’ ‘Nothing.’”

Fortunately the French passes given to Kidd on the taking of both prizes were carefully preserved by him. He sent them to the Earl of Bellamont on his first arrival in American waters, and Bellamont forwarded them to the Admiralty. They were included amongst the papers relating to Kidd, delivered in at the clerk’s table of the House of Commons by the chairman of the committee appointed to sort the papers received from Bellamont and report thereon. Verbatim copies of them are to be found in the Journals of the House of Commons (Vol. 18, page 21), and are printed in Appendix C of this work. They constitute the most important documentary evidence that could have been forthcoming at Kidd’s trial; but although the Admiralty officials had them in their possession, and the House of Commons had directed that Kidd should have access to them, and although Kidd pleaded hard for a postponement of his trial in order that they might be produced, not only were they not produced, but the jury and judge were led to suppose that they existed only in Kidd’s imagination.

The belated suggestion made by the Englishman Wright that he was the master of the ship, coupled with an offer on the part of the Armenians to redeem the prize for twenty thousand rupees, a wholly inadequate sum,[5] seems to have raised some doubt in Kidd’s cautious Scotch mind as to the expediency of carrying off the ship to America in accordance with his sailing orders. He called his crew on deck and consulted them as to the course they should take. They voted not to accept the proffered ransom but to take her to Madagascar, which he decided to do, Madagascar lying in the direct route for America. His sailing orders[6] from Bellamont as to the course he should take with any prizes were explicit. They were: “You are to sail directly to Boston or New England, there to deliver to me the whole of the prizes, treasure, merchandise, and other things you shall have taken by virtue of the powers and authorities granted you.” The only contingency in which he might depart from them was, “if you shall fall in with any English ship bound for England having good convoy, you are in such case to keep them company and bring all your prizes to London.” It is difficult to see how, in the face of these orders, he could have done otherwise than take his two prizes to Madagascar.

As a matter of fact, he set sail at once with both; and according to his narrative “sailing thither the Galley was so leaky that they feared she would have sunk every hour; and it required eight men every two glasses to keep her free; and” (he) “was forced to woold her round with cables to keep her together, and with much ado carried her into the port of St. Marie’s, where they arrived the first day of April, 1698.”

On her way to Madagascar the Adventure Galley unfortunately seems to have fallen in with a Portuguese ship. According to the deposition[7] of William Jinkins, a London lad, one of the boys who had remained faithful to Kidd, “she also in her passage to St. Marie’s aforesaid took a Bark or Ship, navigated with Portuguese. She came from Bengall and was bound to Goa, and had on board, Bengalls, Muslins, Calicoes, and other things, which the Galley’s Company began to plunder and bring on board the Galley: but seeing several Ships coming towards them the said Galley with the other two prizes she had taken, came to sail, and left the said last Prize at a place between Brin John and Angingo, so called from being an English and Dutch factory; and left on board the same all the company belonging thereto, except the Master Merchant and seven men more that had come on board the Galley, when she first took the said Ship.” This deposition made two years before Kidd’s trial was confirmed in substance by two other lads, Barlicorn and Lumley. At the trial, Bradenham, the King’s evidence, told the story thus: “We met with a Portuguese ship off the coast of Malabar and he” (i. e., Kidd) “took her and he took out of her some opium, some East India goods, some plunder and sixty or seventy bags of rice.” Asked by Kidd whether he had seen them brought on board, Bradenham evaded the question by saying: “I am answering the bench.” In reply to a further question by the Solicitor General, “Were there any other goods,” he replied: “Yes, there was bees’ wax and thirty jars of butter.”

This is the only vessel with respect to which there is any good ground for suspecting that Kidd’s proceedings were irregular. His omission to make any reference to this ship in his narrative is significant; and points to the conclusion that he felt some difficulty in justifying what had been done. It is not improbable that he was forced by stress of circumstances to acquiesce in what was undoubtedly an act of piracy on the part of his crew, though it may have been regarded by them as a very justifiable reprisal for the damage and loss of life which the Galley had sustained by the recent unprovoked attack of the Portuguese man-of-war. That Kidd was placed by their action in this case in great difficulty is obvious. In their then temper, it is unlikely that if he had had time to reason with them, he could have induced them to return to the Portuguese the goods they had wrongfully brought on board the Galley. As it was, the sudden appearance of several other ships bearing down on them left him no alternative, but either to make off at once, or to hand over the wrongdoers to be dealt with by their enemies, who might in the meanwhile themselves make off with his two lawful prizes. Kidd’s paramount object during his voyage seems to have been to do his best for his employers, and he may well have thought that it was not to their interest that he should await the arrival of the approaching ships.