Captain Kidd: The War Hero on the Hudson and New York’s Most Famous 17th-Century Historical Figure by Samuel Marquis

​On May 23, 1701, my ninth-great-grandfather Captain William Kidd was gruesomely hung at the gallows at Execution Dock in Wapping, East London. The New York sea captain, who knew the Hudson (North) River and New York’s other tidal estuaries like the back of his hand, had been tried two weeks earlier at the Old Bailey on five counts of piracy and one count of premeditated murder. The crimes were allegedly committed during his 1696-1699 Indian Ocean voyage to fight the French and hunt down pirates. Although the piracy charges against the prominent New York sea commander were weak and the death of his fractious chief gunner, William Moore, was accidental when Kidd struck him with an empty wooden bucket while quelling a mutiny, it made no difference in the outcome of the trial.
The courtroom drama proved to be nothing but a sham proceeding to make an example of Kidd and protect England’s trade with the Great Mughal of India, Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir I, and the East India Company’s profitable monopoly in the region. He was swiftly convicted on all counts based on the perjured testimony of two of his mutinous seamen, both of whom served as the Crown’s star witnesses and received full pardons for their betrayal of their commander. Today, Captain Kidd is known as perhaps the most famous “pirate” of all time, but his notorious legend is built on a bed of lies and he was railroaded by a corrupt English Crown. Thus, instead of indulging in the popular mythology of a villainous cutthroat and treasure-chest burying scoundrel who never existed, we should be celebrating the heroism of this most famous New Yorker with deep Hudson River Valley roots, a man who was called the “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” by the King of England himself.

At the time of his high-profile public execution in 1701, the English-born Captain Kidd was not only a New York war hero in King William’s War against France (1689-1697), successful merchant ship captain, and a licensed private naval commander, or privateer, but a propertied gentleman, widely liked family man, and well-known community leader. He stood as one of the most prosperous citizens of not only he and his wife Sarah’s affluent East Ward neighborhood but all of Manhattan, which at the time had a population of 5,000 souls. His lawfully purchased New York real-estate properties included what are today some of the most expensive real estate holdings in the entire world, worth hundreds of millions of dollars: 90-92 and 119-121 Pearl Street; 52-56 Water Street; 25, 27, and 29 Pine Street; and his Saw Kill farm in Niew Haarlem at today’s 73rd Street and the East River.

For his privateering voyage to the Indian Ocean, Kidd was recruited in 1695 by a group of wealthy London financial backers, who hoped to make a bundle of money for King William III and themselves. Among them was Lord Bellomont, a powerful Whig House of Commons member and soon-to-be royal governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The plan was for Kidd to not only fight the French but to hunt down the Euro-American pirates of Madagascar, legally seize their ill-gotten riches, and keep them for not only himself and his crew but for the king and other lordly sponsors from the powerful Whig party, who would take a hefty 60% cut of the proceeds. Kidd was to capture these predators of the seas—the “Red Sea Men” as they were known at the time—and seize their freshly plundered riches after they had raided the royal treasure fleets of the Great Mughal and other East Indian shipping between the Malabar Coast of India and Mocha and Jeddah in the Red Sea. Based on the colonial New Yorker’s sterling reputation, the investment group not only issued Kidd two special government licenses but built a 34-gun warship, the Adventure Galley, to his personal specifications.

Unfortunately for Kidd, his nearly three-year-long voyage turned out to be an epic disaster and turned him overnight into a notorious criminal and media sensation. During the hellish voyage that involved biblical storms, a tropical disease outbreak that took the lives of 35 of his crewmen, and constant attacks on his ship by virtually everyone, Kidd lawfully seized two Moorish (Muslim East Indian) ships, the Rouparelle and Quedagh Merchant, that presented authentic French passports and carried gold, silver, silks, opium, and other riches of the East. However, while these wartime seizures were 100% legal and he never once himself committed piracy in the Indian Ocean, he soon thereafter looked the other way during the capture of a Portuguese merchant galliot that presented official papers of a nation friendly to England (at least marginally). His seamen sailing separately from his 34-gun Adventure Galley in the captured Rouparelle seized from the Portuguese vessel two small chests of opium, four small bales of silk, 60 to 70 bags of rice, and some butter, wax, and iron.

It was a measly haul, and if Kidd hadn’t later become such an infamous figure, few would have cared that he had turned a blind eye to his unruly sailors from a separate ship plundering a few foodstuffs from a Catholic merchant vessel crewed by Moors. However, it was technically piracy even though Kidd wasn’t directly involved in the capture. He only allowed the seizure to pacify his unruly and mutinous crew, who had by this time divided into “pirate” and “non-pirate” factions aboard his three separate privateering gunships; and in reprisal for the damage inflicted upon the Adventure Galley and serious injuries sustained by a dozen of his crewmen from two Portuguese men-of-war that had attacked him without provocation months earlier.

Despite the numerous challenges he faced during his grueling voyage and a full-scale mutiny because he refused to go all-in on piracy, Kidd miraculously made it back to the American colonies from Madagascar with around £40,000 ($14,000,000 today) of treasure in his hold and the French passports that proved he had taken the Rouparelle and Quedagh Merchant legally in accordance with his commission. However, when he and his small band of loyalists reached Antigua in the Caribbean on April 2, 1699, they received heartbreaking news. The Crown, at the urging of the East India Company, had sent an alarm to the colonies in late November 1698 declaring them pirates and ordering an all-out manhunt to capture and bring them to justice.

Kidd decided to try to present his case for his innocence and obtain a pardon from his lead sponsor in the voyage, Lord Bellomont, who had by this time taken office as the royal governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. After burying a portion of his legally obtained treasure on Gardiner’s Island in Long Island Sound and distributing a number of goods to trusted community leaders as a precautionary measure, Kidd sailed into Boston on July 3, 1699, to meet with Bellomont, who had promised him a full pardon. However, the treacherous governor had merely lured him into the Puritan stronghold: upon Kidd’s arrival, Bellomont treated him with suspicion and several days later arrested him and his seamen.

After being stripped of all his lawfully seized plunder and enduring six months of incarceration in Boston, Kidd was shipped to England to stand trial, was found guilty, and hung in public shame before a drunken, jeering mob of Londoners. Days later, his corpse was coated with tar and hoisted in a gibbeted iron cage downriver at Tilbury Point near the mouth of the Thames, where it would remain for the next twenty years to serve as the English State’s grisly warning to other would-be pirates of the fate that awaited them if they dared disrupt England’s valuable trade relations with India by pursuing the short but merry life of a marauding freebooter.

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Today, my ancestor Captain William Kidd stands as one of the three most famous “pirates” of all time, along with Sir Henry Morgan plastered on rum bottles and Edward Thache, better known as Blackbeard. But the truth is he was no pirate at all and was most certainly not “the sinister personification of piratical wickedness” or “most fiendish pirate that ever ravaged the seven seas,” as he has been called by some melodramatic researchers over the centuries. Like so many tall tales of Captain Kidd — especially stories of barbaric cruelty, piratical villainy, and treasure chests overflowing with gold and silver buried up and down the Hudson River and Atlantic seaboard — the Kidd-as-evil-arch-pirate myth has its roots in the anti-piracy propaganda campaign of the English Crown and the East India Company.

Because England failed to arrest and capture the most dastardly and successful pirate of the day, the Englishman Henry Every, the authorities made the colonial American Kidd out to be a Public Enemy #1, even though William III and his powerful Whig leaders in England had commissioned the privateer commander in the first place. Kidd’s biggest crime was disrupting England’s enormously lucrative East Indian trade. Because he followed in the wake of Henry Every during his 1696-1699 Indian Ocean voyage to hunt down pirates, the English State and its largest corporate monopoly launched a massive public relations smear campaign, spinning countless Treasure Island-like yarns of a brutal and mean-spirited Kidd, because they were unable to capture the real pirate Every and needed a scapegoat.

Over the centuries, Captain Kidd has come to define the “pirate” brand even though he was never actually a pirate. In his own lifetime he was a global sensation, and his fame has endured for more than 320 years and shows no sign of letting up. The wildly inflated estimates of his buried treasure have been a huge part of his allure over the centuries and they continue to fuel treasure hunters all over the globe, but they do not explain his longevity as an American icon and his exalted position as a favorite of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. His unique and captivating life story, his moral ambiguity, and his unfair trial in London have also played a huge role in this most famous New Yorker’s enduring popularity.

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What continues to make Captain Kidd important today is not merely his remarkable rags-to-riches-back-to-rags story but how many people were profoundly affected by his actions and how entrenched his myth has become in popular culture. In Kidd’s own day, he was a luminary of the media and popular culture, the hot topic of “the courtrooms and coffee shops of New York, Boston, London, and India.” He rose to fame, and later infamy, while rubbing elbows with an unbelievably vast network of shipmates, friends, family members, colonial officials, and esteemed peers of the realm, ranging from ordinary seamen, to wealthy merchants and royal governors, to the most powerful English lords of the late seventeenth century.

But what many people don’t know is that Captain Kidd made his mark in America along the Hudson River and that he has deep roots in the Hudson River Valley as a result of American folklore. On two separate occasions in mid-March of 1691, the duly commissioned New York privateer sailed his 16-cannon gunship Antigua from New York Harbor westward around the southern tip of Manhattan, anchored a quarter mile up the Hudson River, and threatened to unleash a blistering fire upon Fort William with his 12-pounders. The fort was occupied by Jacob Leisler, the leader of Leisler’s Rebellion, and his provincial militia, who had seized power from the rightful English government and taken over the city. The fifty-year-old merchant, militia captain, and ultraorthodox Calvinist Protestant of German extraction had capitalized on the unsettled state of affairs in New York in response to the 1688-1689 Glorious Revolution, the ongoing political struggle in Europe between Protestants and Catholics over the English throne that had sent several American colonies into disarray.

On March 17, Captain Kidd forced Leisler’s militiamen to abandon the blockhouse by training his heavy guns on the fort in a raging storm from his upriver position on the Hudson. The next day, he personally ferried the incoming English governor, Richard Sloughter, from Sandy Hook into New York City to assume office and replace the “usurper” Leisler; and on March 19, he again threatened Leisler from the Hudson with his big carriage guns, forcing the tyrannical leader and his army in the fort’s garrison to ground arms and march out. Thanks to Kidd, the leader of the two-year rebellion and his top lieutenants were promptly arrested and tossed into the fort’s prison.

Captain Kidd also played a pivotal role in the building of sacred Trinity Church overlooking the Hudson River. To assist with the construction of the Anglican house of worship in 1696, Kidd lent his runner and tackle from his privateering ship Adventure Galley as a pulley system to help the workers hoist the stones. In return for his community service, Kidd was given Pew Number 4 in the original church, located right up front near the rector and which bore the nameplate inscription “Captain Kidd—Commanded ‘Adventure Galley.’” Unfortunately, the gentlemanly New York privateer would never get the opportunity to pray at the magnificent church he helped build in the New World, but his wife Sarah and daughters Elizabeth and little Sarah would. As one of New York City’s greatest links to its historic past, the latest incarnation of legendary Trinity Church stands today in the exact same spot where Captain Kidd lent his runner and tackle over 330 years ago. Fittingly, Captain Kidd’s wife Sarah is buried today in the churchyard of Trinity Church looking out on the mighty Hudson.

But Captain Kidd’s greatest Hudson River connection comes from his buried treasure mythology. The legend of the colorful outlaw and swaggering pirate, with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of buried treasure still to be found in the northeastern U.S. and throughout the world, began soon after his grisly hanging at Wapping. However, it was the buried-treasure myths in Hudson River Valley lore that by the early nineteenth century secured his place in the pantheon of American folk heroes as our maritime Kit Carson and Jesse James. It is in the Hudson River Valley of authors Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, both of whom were obsessed with Kidd, where his cultural legacy began and where it continues to resonate in unusual ways.

In the 1820s, American newspapers published stories claiming that Captain Kidd had constructed a subterranean hideout in Kiddenhooghten, New York, or “Kidd Heights” along the banks of the Hudson near Dutch Albany, where he stashed away fifty boxes of gold for a rainy day. By mid-century, the myths of his vast hidden caches of gold and jewels had spurred treasure-hunting expeditions from Maryland to Nova Scotia. Fortune hunters claimed to have discovered these long-buried troves of treasure in virtually every state along the Eastern Seaboard, with gold and silver literally washing up on the shores of the Hudson. Others reported to have found sealed bottles containing letters and treasure maps scratched out by Kidd himself. At this time, several companies began scouring the lower Hudson River Valley for Captain Kidd’s lost treasure and his undiscovered fortune became linked with the supernatural.

For the past two hundred years, treasure hunters have claimed an occult connection to the privateer. “Scholars have well established that the prevalent use of folk magic and divining practices in New York and the New England states for the search of buried treasure was motivated by Captain Kidd’s legend.” When one reads the countless tales of Captain Kidd’s unrecovered treasure from the nineteenth-century to the present day—featuring treasure chests guarded by headless men, guardian dogs with red eyes, monster horses, enormous crows, and magical rings that deflect bullets—one cannot help but wonder if all this insanity is my ancestor’s revenge for the miscarriage of justice that brought him to his inglorious demise at Wapping in 1701.

To this day, Captain Kidd stands as one of the most well-known, popular, and controversial figures in world history, with countless books, short stories, articles, ballads, and songs written about him, as well as rock bands, pubs, restaurants, streets, and hotels named after him. There are a large number of websites on the man and the myth, including more than a few with helpful tips on where plucky treasure hunters can find his long-lost fortune. In the U.S. alone, legend still places buried chests of Captain Kidd’s treasure in not only New York’s Hudson River Valley but in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

However, Captain Kidd’s contribution to history is not limited to his romantic myth of the flamboyant pirate, or his treasure rumored to be scattered throughout the Hudson River Valley and all over the world. More important is his role in planting the seeds of rebellion against the English Crown that would grow into a full-fledged revolution by 1776. Kidd was not merely a leading New Yorker who helped build Trinity Church, the latest incarnation of which still stands proudly today on Wall Street and Broadway, nor was he just a courageous privateer commander in King William’s War against France and important member of America’s first unofficial Coast Guard. His story—as much as any other between the settling of Jamestown and the American Revolution—symbolized defiance against the English Crown and its Navigation Acts.

The spectacular irony is that Captain Kidd has won a posthumous victory over his English foes who publicly shamed, tried, and hung him for the crimes of Henry Every and the other true Red Sea pirates. The same powerful forces that humiliated and destroyed the American colonial have made him a staple of popular culture and sanctified his historical legacy in a way he never could have imagined. For today, Captain Kidd remains every bit as popular, puzzling, and controversial as he was four centuries ago. The delicious irony of my ninth-great-grandfather, of course, is that, as legendary historian Philip Gosse declared over a century ago, the greatest pirate of all time was “no pirate at all.”
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Instead, he was the consummate New York “Gent” and war hero of the Hudson.

Author

The ninth-great-grandson of legendary privateer Captain William Kidd, Samuel Marquis, M.S., P.G., is a professional hydrogeologist, expert witness, and bestselling, award-winning author of 12 American nonfiction-history, historical fiction, and suspense books, covering primarily the period from colonial America through WWII. His American history and historical fiction books have been #1 Denver Post and Amazon bestsellers and received multiple national book awards in both fiction and non-fiction categories (Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, American Book Fest and USA Best Book, Readers’ Favorite, Colorado Book Awards). His historical titles have also garnered glowing reviews from #1 bestseller James Patterson, maritime historians, U.S. military veterans, Kirkus Reviews, and Foreword Reviews (5 Stars). His pirate book “Blackbeard: The Birth of America” has been an Amazon #1 Bestseller in Colonial Period History of the U.S. Marquis lives with his wife in Louisville, Colorado, where they raised their three children. Find out more about him at samuelmarquisbooks.com. ​

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