Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

Well, it was a doughty but miscalculated start. The Adventure rode high upon the waves instead of bulwark-deep with goodly gain. The good cheer aboard must have flagged. What, they asked one another, what if the whole commerce of this country should be organized into fleets; what would become of poor pirates? Here they were embarked in a trade at great spending of money and effort, come all the way from New York, only to find a great concentration of merchants against them,—surely a monopoly in restraint of trade. If this sort of thing kept up, there might be nothing for them left to do but to live up to the terms of the captain’s commission and be content to sift the loot from gentlemen of free enterprise who had been on the ground in happier and more prosperous days.

Grumbling doubtless began now, if not before, and was kept up until it ended in a sad mischance to one Gunner Moore, which deplorable accident will shortly be narrated.

Kidd now began to net the gulf for anything he could catch. They hauled in a little Moorish ship, which was but a poor sardine for the whale that had escaped. She was too small to put up a fight and Kidd just bullied her down. From her they took a few bales of coffee, some opium and twenty pieces of Arabian gold.

They also caught a “linguister.” It turns out that a “linguister” is not an article of commerce, but nothing more nor less than an interpreter, in this particular case a Portuguese person. Not a bad word that,—linguister; language rather more expressive than the scholastic interpreter.

Now you cannot ballast even a two hundred-and-seventy-ton craft with twenty pieces of Arabian gold and, refusing to believe that so poverty-stricken a craft could be in these rich reputed waters, Kidd improvised an inquisition. Some of the unfortunate captives were hung up by the wrists and beaten with naked cutlasses by way of persuading them to reveal the real treasures of their ship. Nothing so far as the record shows came of this strenuous examination. So the pirates turned them loose minus their coffee and opium and the contemptible pieces of Arabian gold.

Rough usage this, but not the ultimate of ferocity with which Kidd has been charged. For all we know, this is as far as ever the captain went in the treatment of captive crews. It may be said as well here as anywhere that there is no walking the plank or other picturesque punishments of fiction. Ships were looted and turned loose, in most instances. Those of their crews who wished to might sign up with the pirates; their officers, if not sent back to their ships, were carried to the Indian coast and dumped there.

All hands were then in no very sociable mood when the incidents of this immediate time closed with the matter of the Portuguese man-of-war.

It was on an evening soon after the taking of the Moorish ship that the Adventure saw and was seen by a cruising Portuguese war-vessel. Now there was nothing in Kidd’s contract with Bellamont, Livingston and the rest of them which even suggested that he should take any special risk, and of course not a line thereof which could warrant him in lying-to all night to risk the company’s property in a perfectly gratuitous battle engagement with a ship of war.

This, however, is just what the Adventure did. Instead of taking the hours of darkness for a discreet and quite justified withdrawal from an embarrassing situation, Kidd and his merry men impatiently watched for the first break of light in the east for a go with an enemy. After all the Adventure was well and poetically named. Conduct of this kind makes us suppose that gain was less in the eye of these folk than rip-roaring adventuring in lawless waters.

Historically, the Portuguese opened fire first on Kidd. Evidently that swart son of Lisbon had not heard from the Mocca Fleet that a wild demon was loose on the sea. When you read that the Portuguese opened first fire on Captain Kidd, you think at once of a foolish tramp going out of his way to kick a sleeping bulldog. Mr. Portuguese got a surprising rattle of shot on his bulwarks and sails. He had opened fire on the one man in all the East Indies that with more exact information he would have avoided.