Kidd had to sell his ship Antigua to raise funds. Kidd and an acquaintance, Colonel Robert Livingston, orchestrated the whole plan and paid for the rest. This letter reserved 10% of the loot for the Crown, and Henry Gilbert's The Book of Pirates suggests that the King may have fronted some of the money for the voyage himself. Kidd was presented with a letter of marque, signed personally by King William III of England. The request preceded the voyage which established Kidd's reputation as a pirate, and marked his image in history and folklore.įour-fifths of the cost for the venture was paid for by noble lords, who were among the most powerful men in England: the Earl of Orford, the Baron of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury and Sir John Somers. This request, if turned down, would have been viewed as disloyalty to the crown, the perception of which carried much social stigma, making it difficult for Kidd to have done so. On 11 December 1695, Belmont, who was now governing New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, asked the "trusty and well beloved Captain Kidd" to attack Thomas Tew, John Ireland, Thomas Wake, William Maze, and all others who associated themselves with pirates, along with any enemy French ships. On, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, an English woman in her early twenties, who had already been twice widowed and was one of the wealthiest women in New York, largely because of her inheritance from her first husband. In New York City, Kidd was active in the building of Trinity Church, New York. In 1695, William III of England replaced the corrupt governor Benjamin Fletcher, known for accepting bribes of one hundred dollars to allow illegal trading of pirate loot, with Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont. One year later, Captain Robert Culliford, a notorious pirate, stole Kidd's ship while he was ashore at Antigua in the West Indies. Shortly thereafter, Kidd was awarded £150 for successful privateering in the Caribbean. During the War of the Grand Alliance, on orders from the provinces of New York and Massachusetts, Kidd captured an enemy privateer, which duty he was commissioned to perform, off the New England coast. Kidd and his men attacked the French island of Mariegalante, destroyed the only town, and looted the area, gathering for themselves something around 2,000 pounds Sterling. As the governor did not want to pay the sailors for their defensive services, he told them they could take their pay from the French. In either case, he must have been an experienced leader and sailor by that time. Captain Kidd and Blessed William became part of a small fleet assembled by Codrington to defend Nevis from the French, with whom the English were at war. Kidd became captain, either the result of an election of the ship's crew or because of appointment by Christopher Codrington, governor of the island of Nevis. There they renamed the ship Blessed William. Kidd and other members of the crew mutinied, ousted the captain of the ship, and sailed to the British colony of Nevis. There is some information that suggests he was a seaman's apprentice on a pirate ship, much earlier than his own more famous seagoing exploits.īy 1689 he was a member of a French-English pirate crew that sailed in the Caribbean. It was here that he befriended many prominent colonial citizens, including three governors. Kidd later settled in the newly anglicized New York City. There is no mention of the name in comprehensive Church of Scotland records for the period. The myth, that his "father was thought to have been a Church of Scotland minister", is also discounted. Dobson, who found neither the name Kidd nor Kyd in baptismal rec Reports that Kidd came from Greenock have been dismissed by Dr. Richard Zacks, in the biography The Pirate Hunter (2015), says Kidd came from Dundee. A local society supported the family financially. His father was Captain John Kyd, who was lost at sea. David Dobson later identified his baptism documents from Dundee in 1645. He gave the city as his place of birth and said he was aged 41, in testimony under oath at the High Court of the Admiralty in October 1695 or 1694. Kidd was born in Dundee, Scotland, January 1645. Despite the legends and fiction surrounding this character, his actual career was punctuated by only a handful of skirmisheshe died in a river, followed by a desperate quest to clear his name. Captain William Kidd was either one of the most notorious pirates in the history of the world, or one of its most unjustly vilified and prosecuted privateers, in an imperialistic age's rationalisations of empire.
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