Waterfront by Phillip Lopate

Author:Phillip Lopate [Lopate, Phillip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49296-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

The rest of the story is an illustration of the adage that one might as well be hanged for a wolf as a sheep. Kidd plunders and seizes ships, robs the Indians, and even kills one of his crew, the gunner Moore, in a fit of rage by striking him over the head with a bucket, after Moore had railed at the captain for ruining them all. Yet what surprises us in the contemporary accounts is how cautiously Kidd acted, for the most part, even when his crew threatened to mutiny because he was being insufficiently piratical. Kidd was by no means the most ruthless pirate; but he became the most notorious, the subject of ballads and speeches in Parliament, largely because of bad timing. His protector, the Earl of Bellomont, being a Whig, the Tories seized on this connection to bring about a change in government; so Kidd became the fall guy, the symbol of all who flew the Jolly Roger. Bellomont put as much distance as possible between himself and his former protégé. When Kidd sailed back to New York, in fact, he walked into a trap set by Bellomont, and was quickly arrested and sent to Boston, before being shipped to London for trial. Captain Kidd spent several years in the hideous Newgate Prison while awaiting trial (there were actually four trials of Kidd and his confederates). Later, Bellomont's damage control included a curious pamphlet issued in 1701, “A Full Account of the Actions of the Late Famous Pyrate, Capt. Kidd, with the Proceedings against Him, and a Vindication of the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Bellomont, Lord Coloony, Late Governor of New England, and other Honourable Persons, from the Unjust Reflections cast upon them, By a Person of Quality.” This whitewash of Bellomont shifts the blame to Kidd and Livingston. Kidd, for his part, insisted in court that his men had forced him into piracy, threatening to kill him if he did not do so, and that the case against him was based on perjured testimony. Defoe summarizes: “But the evidence being full and particular against him, he was found Guilty…. Wherefore about a week later, Capt. Kid, Nicholas Churchill, James How, Gabriel Loff, Hugh Parrot, Abel Owens and Darby Mullins, were executed at Execution Dock, and afterwards hung up in chains at some distance from each other, down the river, where their bodies hung exposed for many years.”

No question, Kidd engaged in piracy, though the moral meaning of that fact had shifted in his lifetime. Ritchie argues that ultimately he was “crushed by the forces of bureaucracy and the modern world.” Even his old haunt pulled away from the practice. “In New York the loss to pirates … of three of the four ships that went to Madagascar in 1698 dimmed the ardor of the New York merchant community.”

AS I WANDER DOWN PEARL STREET, I already know it is unlikely I'll find a shred of Captain Kidd's residence here, amid these glass towers. In 1695

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