CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER II
THE VOYAGE OF THE “ADVENTURE GALLEY”[3]
Legal preliminaries completed, Kidd’s ship, the Adventure Galley, was launched in Castle’s Yard at Deptford, on the fourth of December, 1695, and set sail between two and three months afterwards. Sir Edmund Harrison, described by Bellamont’s apologist as “a reputable city merchant,” had been at the pains to select the crew with great care so as to exclude all Scotch and Colonials, who were regarded as ineligible by reason of their supposed proclivities to smuggling and piracy. “That nothing might be wanting,” we are told by the same writer, “which the nature of the thing would admit notwithstanding the great difficulty of finding men at that time, Sir Edmund Harrison took such care of the crew that every officer in the ship and almost all the seamen had settled families in England.” “True it is,” he adds in the next paragraph, “that this care was in a great degree rendered ineffectual: for most of the crew were pressed before Kidd got out of the river.” Kidd himself in his artless narrative tells the tale more tersely, merely recording the fact that “on the first of March, when he came to the Buoy at the Nore, his men were pressed for the fleet.” Seeing that the First Lord of the Admiralty was one of the principal partners in the adventure, it may seem strange to those who have had no personal experience of official blunderings, that precautions had not been taken to prevent this untoward mishap, which made a hopeless enterprise more hopeless than ever. For it left Kidd no alternative but to get the bulk of his crew from America. With such of his men as had not been deemed worth taking by the press gang, he managed to get away from Plymouth about the end of April. On his way to America, he captured a small French vessel with salt and fishing tackle bound for Newfoundland, and brought her into port at New York. There in the head centre and hotbed of the smuggling and piracy, which the King desired to repress, he set to work to pick up the best substitutes he could find for the men who had been so carefully selected for him and so unceremoniously taken from him at the Nore.
He reached New York in July and did not leave it till September. In the interval the French ship which he had captured was condemned by the authorities as a lawful prize; and according to Kidd’s narrative of these events, “the produce thereof purchased provisions for the Adventure Galley for her further intended voyage.” It must have been anything but an easy job to get the requisite number of men to fill up the vacancies in his ship’s company. The Colony was not over populated, nor was there any lack of work for those who cared to take it. The only terms he was authorized to offer, “No purchase, no pay,” were not likely to be accepted by skilled and experienced seamen, who had the chance of earning a good living at home by smuggling, or of going out and making their fortunes, as some had lately done in the East under such captains as those whom it was now Kidd’s business to catch. Nor was the catching of their old friends for hanging purposes likely to be a popular employment in that part of the world. He probably picked up some adventurous boys, eager to go to sea at any cost, in ignorance of the fate to which they were consigning themselves. Of the older men who joined, Darby Mullins, a rolling stone who had gathered no moss, may perhaps be taken as a fair sample. From so much of his previous history as this poor man told to the chaplain at Newgate, it appears that he was an Irishman, born near Londonderry, kidnapped when young and shipped for the plantations, where he had followed various honest avocations without any conspicuous success. Most of Kidd’s grown-up recruits, it is to be feared, were men of this kind, who for one reason or another were indisposed to remain long in any one employment, and likely to abandon the enterprise as soon as they got tired of it. Whilst picking up one and another of these men during his last stay at his home in New York, Kidd, one would think, must often have regretted that he had embarked on this miserable business. But he seems to have been upheld not only then but till the day of his death by a childlike belief in the great men whose service he had entered, a belief which was possibly shared by his wife. Money was not a matter of great importance to either of them. It is not unlikely that she was pleased to hear about her husband’s great friends, his interviews with them in London, and what they were likely to do for him and her when he had successfully completed his task. It is possible that she may have looked forward with some complacency, poor soul, to the prospect of herself associating with the women folk of these great people. Perhaps she even dreamed of becoming a great lady herself. Why not? What more likely than that her husband would be knighted by the King for his services and that she would become Lady Kidd?
Starting from New York in September in command of his undisciplined and unpromising crew, Kidd proceeded first to the Madeiras, in company with one Joyner, master of a brigantine belonging to the Bermudas. He arrived at his destination on the eighth of October. Thence they sailed together to Bonavista, where they stayed for some days and took in salt; thence to St. Jago where they watered; and thence to the Cape of Good Hope. On the twelfth of December, “in the latitude of thirty-two,” to quote from Kidd’s narrative, “they met with five English men-of-war. Captain Warren was commodore; and sailed a week in their company, and then parted and sailed to Telere, a port in the Island of Madagascar.” Here Kidd failed to find at their usual rendezvous any of the pirates after whom he had come, and concluding that they were preying on the Eastern trade, continued his course eastwards in pursuit of them. In company with a sloop belonging to Barbadoes, which had come in at Telere whilst he was there, he sailed to the Island of Johanna on the coast of Malabar. There he “found four East India merchantmen outward bound and watered there all together and stayed about five days. From thence about the twenty-second of March he sailed for Mehila, an island ten leagues distant from Johanna, where he arrived the next morning and careened the Galley.” “And about fifty men died there in about a week’s time,” he tells us pithily and without comment, as though such a catastrophe was an ordinary occurrence, as indeed it probably was in those days to a ship’s crew suddenly attacked by cholera or plague in those parts. These deaths seem to have induced him to leave that coast somewhat suddenly and to seek healthier quarters. After cruising awhile in the open sea, the only known specific in those days for such mischances, he came to the entrance of the Red Sea; obviously a likely place to find the pirates in, since it was specifically named in the Articles of Agreement between Bellamont, Livingstone, and himself as the place in which the pirates of whom he was in search intended to commit their depredations, and the date of the sailing of the Mecca fleet was approaching. He had now been the greater part of a year at sea without taking a prize, and had lost more than a third of his crew by sickness. His ship had grown crazy and leaky; and neither he nor his men had yet earned a penny. No wonder that his ship’s company was growing discontented. The wonder is that Kidd had thus far been able to keep them fairly in hand, which it is admitted he had done.