“You may take the boats and go. But those who thus leave this ship will never ascend its sides again.”
One of the men, a gunner by the name of William Moore, was particularly violent and abusive. With threatening gestures he approached the captain, assailing him in the most vituperative terms, saying:
“You are ruining us all. You are keeping us in beggary and starvation. But for your whims we might all be prosperous and rich.”
The captain was by no means a meek man. In his ungovernable passion he seized an iron-bound bucket, which chanced to be lying at his side, and gave the mutineer such a blow as fractured his skull and struck him senseless to the deck. Of the wound the gunner died the next day. Not many will feel disposed to censure Captain Kidd very severely for this act. It was not a premeditated murder. It was perhaps a necessary deed, in quelling a mutiny, in which the mutineers were demanding that the black flag of the pirate should be raised, and which demand the captain was resisting. And yet it is probable that this blow sent Kidd to the gallows. Upon his subsequent trial, but little evidence of piracy could be adduced, and the death of Moore was the prominent charge brought against him.
Kidd ever averred that it was a virtuous act, and that it did not trouble his conscience. It was done to prevent piracy and mutiny. He also averred that he had no intention to kill the man. Had he so intended he would have used pistol or sabre. In the ballad which, half a century ago, was sung in hundreds of farm-houses in New England, the lullaby of infancy, the event is alluded to in the following words:
“I murdered William Moore, as I sailed, as I sailed,
I murdered William Moore as I sailed;
I murdered William Moore, and left him in his gore,
Not many leagues from shore, as I sailed.”
We will give a few more verses to show the general character of this ballad of twenty-five stanzas, once so popular, now forgotten: