Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

In all of the record of the proceedings in the Old Bailey there is nothing said of any one being killed in combat, either with the capture of ships or the engagement with the Portuguese man-of-war, on either side.

And now the captain was content. Save for the complaint of Darby Mullins that the captain took his share away from him, the crew also seem to have been satisfied. After the division Kidd let it become known that he was leaving the way of the law-breaker, and, according to his own account, ninety-five men thereupon left him, almost in a body. Incidental attrition later on took more of them, and when at last he turned the nose of the Quedagh Merchant homeward barely enough men remained with him to work the ship.

IX

Although Kidd arrived at Madagascar in May of 1698 it was not until the turn of the next year, and probably well into that year before he set sail on his stolen ship for home. It must have taken him quite a time to be rid of his merchandise and to pay off his men. After that, short-handed as he was, he seems to have attempted no recorded piracy.

It is quite possible that while he still lay in the Mozambique Channel, Warren and the three benign peace-bearing commissioners came around the Cape and up the coast, and that before he left those waters he was acquainted with the character of the royal proclamation. Or it may have been that it was after his return to New York that Kidd first learned that he was a marked man.

In June of 1699, after an absence of a little more than two years, Captain Kidd arrived in Delaware Bay. But not in the Adventure and not in the Quedagh Merchant. He came in a little sloop, with a crew of about thirty-five men on her articles, named the St. Antonio. What had become of the Quedagh Merchant?

That ill-fortuned ship was snugly stowed and secreted away in a solitary creek of the West Indies. There he had hidden her until such time as he could return and bring her out; that means, until the storm of which he must have felt the first blowings at the West Indies, if not at Madagascar, had passed over. He brought back with him of the old Adventure’s personnel barely one-fourth, probably not more than twenty-five or thirty men. One man, Hugh Parrot, who came in the St. Antonio we know from his own account was recruited in Madagascar and replaced an original adventurer. So it must have been with others.

Hugh Parrot’s brief autobiography as he gave it to the court may be glanced here as typical of the sea folk who homed in Madagascar. He said he “sailed out of Plymouth in the year 1695 in a merchantman, bound for Cork, in Ireland, there to take in provisions; thence to the Island of Barbados; and in sight of the island of Barbados I was taken by a French privateer, and carried to Martinico; and thence coming in a transport ship I was brought to Barbados; there I shipped myself in a vessel bound for Newfoundland, and thence to Madeiras; and then I went to Madagascar, and there I staid some short time after, and came in company with Captain Kidd; and then the commander and I had a falling out, and so I went ashore at that island. And understanding that Captain Kidd had a commission from the king, I came aboard Captain Kidd’s ship.”

Romantic words—“I came aboard Captain Kidd’s ship.” How they quicken the pulse of old, sober-sided fellows such as we are. Suppose we had sauntered about old New York and had read his appeal for men to go off to the Indies? Or been in Madagascar and had a “falling-out” with some blockhead of an old merchant skipper, and seen Kidd and his bully boys swagger by? Eh?

Delaware Bay did not detain Kidd long. He slipped the little St. Antonio out of there and put in at Oyster Bay, from which he now began the most difficult job of his life,—to rehabilitate himself and yet come out of it all a rich man.