Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

This outfit was rather more than merely master and men; they were co-partners. Forty shares were to go to the ship and the remainder was to be parceled out in lumps of average weight according to a scale agreed upon by all. Bellamont and Company supplied arms and equipment at a charge.

The late winter ice still cluttered the Hudson River when the Adventure at length turned its prow toward the Indies, Madagascar and Fortune. Kidd, according to the proprieties of the sea, kept himself a cabin, the rest of them shifted in forecastle and hold as well as a hundred and sixty men in a small ship might. With the best they could do conditions of life must have become very serious and in a way invited the heavy sickness that fell upon them when the hot regions of the East were reached.

At the Madeiras the voyage was broken briefly, then off again to India. Summer was torrid on land and sea when the company finally “watered and victualled” at Madagascar. And now for some months Kidd cruised up and down the coast without any overt act under his commissions, cruised, that is, with a ghastly plague aboard which tumbled four or five men a day over the bulwarks and into the oily, turgid deep. When one conjectures the sanitation of the Adventure it is marvelous that any one escaped the calamity.

What could the captain have been thinking of as he loafed aimlessly up and down the Indian coast? He did business with neither pirate nor merchantman, just seems to have gone here and there as the wind blew him. He may have been acquainting himself with the nature of the commerce of those parts; it may have been a period of debate with him as to whether to persist as a law officer or strike out in the new line of law breaker. It is hard to think that Kidd arrived at Madagascar with a formed pirate purpose; perhaps they may be right who say that after carefully appraising the situation as a whole he chose the plundering line. However that may have been, Kidd’s first major operation in those parts was not against pirates, according to his commission, nor the French, but against merchantmen in their peaceful pursuits.

At this point let us get the lay of the land, or sea, as it may happen. The captain leaving New York shot across the Atlantic to Madeira Islands, from which he right-angled down to the Cape of Good Hope. Swinging around this broad pedestal of Table Mountain, he ran up the coast of Africa, probably by way of the Mozambique Channel to Madagascar. He stopped here long enough to refresh his stores, then beat up toward India.

Roughly, Madagascar, for Kidd’s purposes, may be thought of as the apex of a sort of isosceles triangle, with the Red Sea for one angle and Bombay for the other. Within these boundaries the captain had the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean to navigate, with Madagascar to run back to from time to time.

Sea traffic, such as it was, around the cape was not attractive to the pirates, at least so much as that which passed more quickly from India through the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and gulf countries. Compared with Africa, India, of course, had an old and rich civilization and it was for the products of that country that the mouths of pirates watered; the costly silks, linens, spices and gold and silver treasures which had become the traditions of sailors’ dockhead stories.

As it happened, however, it was not a cargo going from India which first enticed Captain Kidd, but cargoes going thence from the gulf region, more particularly the fat freight of what was known as the Mocca Fleet.

“Men,” said Kidd, as he swung the Adventure’s nose suddenly about at the end of his dallying days in the Indian Ocean, “we are off to Bab’s Key and the Mocca Fleet. We will ballast our good ship with gold and silver from this Mocca Fleet.”

Thus did Kidd treat his commission as a scrap of paper, to be quite modern, and thus, with a roaring cheer, another terror was added to the troubles of honest commerce.