Again, speaking this time to the judge:
“It is a fine trade indeed that he must be instructed what to say. He knows no more of these things than you do. The fellow used to sleep five or six months together in the hold.”
Once more:
“He tells a thousand lies. The man contradicts himself a hundred times.”
Kidd (speaking this time to Palmer). “I would not go with such a roguish crew as you were. Was I not threatened to be shot in my cabin by such villains as you, if I would not go along with you? This was the reason I could not come home. Did you not with the others set fire to the boat to destroy my ship? My lord, they took what they pleased out of the ship, and I was forced to stay by myself, and pick up here a man and there a man to carry her home.”
That Kidd had no option but to stay on at Madagascar after Culliford had left is obvious. The faithful thirteen who remained behind with him were clearly an insufficient ship’s company to bring the Quedagh Merchant with her freight safely to America. When he left her off the coast of Hispaniola, nearly a year afterwards, denuded of the specie and goods which he had taken from her to Boston, she carried besides her thirty mounted guns, taken from the Adventure Galley, twenty more guns of her own, stowed away in her hold, some two hundred bales of calicoes, silks, and muslins, between eighty and ninety tons of refined sugar, forty tons of saltpetre, and ten tons of iron “in short junks.” No reason, other than stern necessity, can have induced him to prolong his stay at Madagascar. He and his men must have wished to get home as soon as might be. Had they been able to start at once, they might have been in time to put an end to the suspicions of their honesty, which were already accumulating in England owing to the protracted absence of news as to their movements, and the complaint of the East India Company of the seizure of the Quedagh Merchant.
Unfortunately Madagascar was one of the last places in the world in which Kidd was likely to find the men required to bring his ship home. The majority of such English-speaking men as were there were by no means desirous of bringing themselves within the grasp of the law. In the course of the next five months, to quote his own words, “he picked up here a man and there a man,” and “some passengers presented that were bound for these parts,” i. e., America. At last, still under-manned, he started on his homeward voyage, and reached Anguilla in the West Indies in April, 1699. By this time he had been condemned unheard by the home authorities; and the hue and cry had been raised against him and such of his crew as had remained faithful. The lords justices had sent instructions to the governors of all the English colonies in America “to apprehend him and his accomplices, whenever he or they should arrive in any of the said plantations,” and “to secure his ship and all the effects therein, it being their Excellencies’ intention that right be done to those who have been injured and robbed by the said Kidd, and that he and his associates be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.” Consequently when, in all innocence, he sent his boat on shore, to quote again from his own artless narrative, “his men had the news that he and his people were proclaimed pirates, which put them into such consternation that they sought all opportunities to run the ship ashore upon some reef or shoal, fearing the Narrator should carry them into some English port.”
“From Anguilla,” he tells us, “they came to St. Thomas, where his brother-in-law, Samuel Bradley, was put on shore being sick, and five more” (out of his small crew) “went away and deserted him. There he heard the same news, that he and his company were proclaimed pirates, which incensed the people more and more.”
“From St. Thomas he set sail for Moona, an island between Hispaniola and Porto Rico, where they met with a sloop, called the St. Anthony, bound for Antigua from Curaso. The men on board then swore that they would bring the ship no further.” By this time some commanders would have hesitated. Not so Kidd. He held to his purpose to remain true to his employers whatever the cost to himself might be. He tells us, and his evidence is not contradicted, that he “then sent the said sloop, St. Anthony, to Curaso for canvas to make sails for the prize, she not being able to proceed, and she returned in ten days, and after the canvas came he could not persuade the men to carry her to New England. But six of them went and carried their chests and things on board of the Dutch sloop, bound for Curaso, and would not so much as heel the vessel, or do anything.” The remainder of the men not being able to bring the Adventure Prize to Boston “he secured her in a good safe harbour in Hispaniola and left her in the possession of Mr. Henry Boulton of Antigua, Merchant, with three of the old men and fifteen or sixteen of the men that belonged to the said sloop St. Anthony and a brigantine belonging to Mr. Burt of Curaso.” He then “bought the said sloop, St. Anthony, of Mr. Boulton for the owners’ account: and after he had given directions to the said Boulton to be careful of the ship and lading, and persuaded him to stay three months until he returned, he made the best of his way to New York.”
Bellamont was not at New York, but at Boston. An old friend of Kidd’s, Emmot by name, came on board the sloop from New York, and to him Kidd told his simple tale, handed over to him the two invaluable French passes to take to Bellamont, as evidence that the two prizes, in respect of which he had been charged with piracy, had been lawfully taken under his letters of marque. On the thirteenth of June, Emmot came to Bellamont at Boston with these passes, and two days afterwards Bellamont sent Mr. Duncan Campbell, the Postmaster of Boston, to invite Kidd to come into the port of Boston. On the nineteenth Campbell returned, and gave in a memorial,[9] still extant, of all that had passed between him and Kidd.