The Pirate Hunter by Richard Zacks

Author:Richard Zacks [Zacks, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Adventurers & Explorers
ISBN: 9781615538843
Google: P45rAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0786884517
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2003-06-17T14:00:00+00:00

13. Stranded . . . with Treasure

On St. Mary’s Island on June 16, 1698, the day after Culliford had sailed north, Captain Kidd found himself stranded in pirate paradise. After holing up in his cabin for four days with forty small arms primed, he had against all odds saved the treasure of £10,000 of gold dust and bars and pieces of eight and jewels. When the sound of looting had finally died down, he had emerged on the deck.

Kidd discovered that as a parting thievery, Culliford had stolen away Kidd’s lascar deckhands, the forced labour gang who had been pumping out the Adventure Galley. As Kidd stood on the deck of the ship that he had helped design and had watched roll out of the shipyards at Deptford, he knew it was a matter of hours before the Adventure would sink.

Kidd had eleven men and four cabin boys left to him; two of the men, his brother-in-law, Samuel Bradley, and seaman Jan Cornelious, were very ill, several others were in their forties, superannuated for a sailor. It was a race against the water filling the bowels of the Adventure Galley.

Kidd rounded up any Malagasies he could bully or bribe into service, and tried to off-load as much as possible to make the ship more manageable. Without much of a capstan crew, he then ordered his men to cut the anchors and mark them with buoys for later retrieval. Every so often the men pumping in the hold would sing out how high the incoming waters had risen.

As the frantic work continued, Kidd could see the shambles aboard the Quedagh Merchant, the ship that he would now need. Culliford and the pirates had pillaged it of sails, anchors, gunpowder, and rigging, and anything else that caught their eye. They had taken at least four cannon, a bulky item to shoplift.

Hours later, Kidd ordered the sails unfurled of the Adventure Galley so that the breeze would carry the ship ashore in the protected harbour of St. Mary’s. As the Adventure Galley glided shoreward toward the beach, Kidd had men ready with yardarms or tree limbs. As the ship grounded itself; they propped up whatever side tipped over.

Now Kidd and his skeletal crew could catch their breath. Culliford and the pirates had sailed out heading north in the Mocha Frigate in mid-June; Kidd knew that the seasonal winds wouldn’t shift until October to allow him to head southwest to round the Cape of Good Hope.

So Captain Kidd was a sitting duck in a pirate port with a treasure to deliver home, and a feeble crew of men, two very sick, four very young, at least four relatively old. If he could bring the ship to New York and show off the French passes, maybe he could salvage the mission. In any case, he could see his young wife, Sarah, and his little daughter again after more than two years apart.

But his ride home was this ransacked 400-ton Moorish ship, so exotic with its Moslem carved curlicues and design, an attention-grabber in the Atlantic.

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