of Massachusetts governor. While most of the other famous pirates and privateers of his time sailed the waters of the Caribbean, Phipps was quite familiar with the North Atlantic, and in fact he was almost as celebrated for his sacking of the Acadian city of Port Royal on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy as he was for the capture of the Concepcion. Phipps was proposed as the originator of the Money Pit in a book titled Oak Island and Its Lost Treasure, put out by Formac, a Halifax house that has created a significant-sized cottage industry devoted to publishing works that champion doggedly researched but often weakly supported theories of Oak Island. The suggestion that Phipps kept a huge part of the treasure recovered from the Concepcion and buried it on Oak Island is something that can’t be simply shrugged off, but that’s about as much as can be said for it.
THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THE MAHONE BAY of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had just one pirate in mind when they spoke of the Oak Island treasure, however, and that was William Kidd (1645–1701). This singular focus on Captain Kidd was, I believe, largely a function of time and place. His rise to prominence came three-quarters of a century later than Peter Easton’s and took place only after he had settled in New York City. The unquestionably political circumstances of Kidd’s trial and execution by the British Crown, though, were what made him a pirate legend.
Kidd was “of obscure origin” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, though the man himself testified before the High Court of Admiralty in London that he had been born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1645. His father may have been a ship’s captain who was lost at sea, but some historians have made the case that the famous pirate was sired by a Church of Scotland minister. Historians also have made claims that in his youth Kidd served as an apprentice on a pirate ship, that he commanded a privateer in the wars of William III and fought the French, and that he performed “brave service” for the Crown in the American colonies. It can be stated with a bit more confidence (but no real certainty) that by 1680 Kidd, then thirty-five, had prospered well enough from his life at sea that he was able to resign from the British navy and purchase his own ship. What we can be sure about is that in 1689, Kidd attempted to settle in New York and to establish himself there as a person of means. This early effort at making a life on land was cut short the same year, though, when Kidd was dispatched by British authorities to the Caribbean. There is yet more disagreement about whether he went there as the captain of a privateer or as a member of the French and English crew of a pirate ship that mutinied, renamed the ship Blessed William, and made Kidd their new captain. Either way, the Blessed William became part of the small British fleet that defended the island of Nevis from the French; Kidd and his crew were instructed that they could collect their pay from any French ships or towns they captured and looted.
By 1691, Kidd had made it back to New York, where he married a wealthy young widow named Sarah Oort and began to join society, becoming acquainted with at least three governors and contributing to the construction of Trinity Church in Manhattan. At the behest of the British Crown, he was still employed off and on as a privateer, serving during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York and in the Caribbean. In December 1695, New York’s new governor, Richard Coote, the 1st Earl of Bellomont, tasked the “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” with taking command of a British privateer that was to attack both pirates and ships of the enemy French. Kidd could not refuse without destroying his reputation and so sailed to London to prepare for the voyage that would cost him his life and make him a legend. In England, he was given a new ship named the Adventure Galley, along with command of thirty-four cannons and a handpicked crew of 150. He carried a letter of marque signed by William III that licensed him as a privateer obliged to surrender 10 percent of his booty to the Crown. The Adventure Galley’s voyage got off to a bad start, though, when Kidd and his crew failed to salute a British navy yacht as they sailed down the Thames. When the yacht fired a shot across the bow to demand what was considered a proper show of respect, the Adventure Galley’s crew replied by presenting to the navy their backsides. Such unprecedented impudence resulted in the navy pressing virtually the entire crew of Kidd’s ship into its service. The Adventure Galley made it shorthanded back to New York, where Kidd was compelled to pick up a new crew, this one made up mostly of former pirates and hardened criminals.
By the autumn of 1696, the Adventure Galley was sailing off the coast of Madagascar, where a third of the crew died of cholera. The new ship began to spring leaks and Kidd failed to find any of the pirate ships he had told both his backers and his men would be there. With an increasingly discontented crew aboard the Adventure Galley, Kidd sailed to the entrance to the Red Sea, another popular pirate refuge, but again found no prizes to capture. Under pressure to deliver rewards to his backers (among them Governor Bellomont) and increasingly menaced by an unruly crew that regularly threatened mutiny, Kidd still refused to cross the line into piracy. That refusal would lead to a confrontation with a ship’s gunner named William Moore, who on October 30, 1697, was sharpening a chisel on the deck of the Adventure Galley when a Dutch ship appeared on the horizon. Moore demanded that they attack the Dutchman, but Kidd said he would not do it, knowing that to do so would infuriate Dutch-born King William. Kidd called Moore a lousy dog. Moore replied, “If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so,” and he accused the captain of bringing him and the rest of the crew “to ruin.” An enraged Kidd picked up an ironbound bucket and threw it at Moore, fracturing the skull of the gunner, who died the next day.
At his eventual trial, two members of Kidd’s crew would accuse him of savage abuses that included hoisting rebellious men and drubbing them with the dull edge of a cutlass. Others, not called to testify, said later that Kidd had punished his men only after they ransacked the trading ship Mary while he and the Mary’s captain were speaking in his quarters, and that this punishment consisted mainly of forcing the crew to return what they had taken. Only those who refused were beaten.
It was not until January 1698 that the Adventure Galley finally took a great prize. This was the four-hundred-ton Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship under hire to Armenian merchants, loaded with gold, silver, and a rich assortment of East Indian merchandise that included silks, satins, and muslins. The captain of the captured ship was an Englishman carrying passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French crown. When Kidd learned that the captain was English, he attempted to persuade his men to return the ship and its cargo, but the crew refused and Kidd, who at that point maintained only tenuous control over his men, backed down and agreed to keep the prize. That decision made him a criminal in the eyes of the British navy, which ordered its commanders to “pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices” for having committed “notorious piracies.” Kidd kept the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the captain’s French passes, hoping the latter would justify his capture of the ship. It was a calculated risk, as Kidd knew that British admiralty courts in North America frequently turned a blind eye to the trespasses of English-licensed privateers, especially if those trespasses were committed against the French.
Renaming the seized ship Adventure Prize, Kidd set sail again for Madagascar, where he encountered an old nemesis, the pirate Robert Culliford, who years before had stolen a ship and crew from Kidd. This time, Culliford stole only the crew—or most of it, anyway. With just thirteen men remaining, Kidd ordered the worm-eaten Adventure Galley to be burned at sea, then sailed the Adventure Prize across the Atlantic. Upon arrival in the Caribbean, Kidd discovered he was a wanted man and that at least four English men-of-war were hunting him. He abandoned the Adventure Prize in a concealed location and sailed a sloop toward New York. Avoiding apprehension by a series of clever maneuvers, Kidd came to his downfall by trusting Governor Bellomont, who lured him to capture in Boston. Kidd seems to have convinced himself that Bellomont and the various other Whig politicians (advocates of constitutional monarchy) who had backed him would come to his defense in the end, but the governor and the others were far more concerned about protecting themselves from the accusations of their rivals. Bellomont kept Kidd confined in Boston’s Stone Prison (often having him held in solitary confinement in the prison’s dungeon) and also ordered that Kidd’s wife, Sarah, be imprisoned in New York. After more than a year of that misery, Kidd was returned to England to be questioned before Parliament. The accused pirate quickly discovered that the newly elected Tory ministry was determined to use the
