Summer reading: Deadly vengeance starts myth of piracy

By JEREMY REES

Richard Zacks: The Pirate Hunter

Hyperion,

$57.95


Commodore Thomas Warren, of the Royal Navy, was a hazard in an age when bungled navigation meant sailors died of thirst at sea.

Navigation in the 1690s, before a way of calculating longitude was invented, was by guess, by God or good seamanship.

In "Wrong Way" Warren's case, God and seamanship did not enter the equation.

He set sail from London at the head of five heavily armed Royal Navy frigates, guarding a flotilla of 100 merchant ships against pirates on the long voyage to the East Indies.

He missed his first watering post by hundreds of miles.

Soon his men began to die of thirst.

Warren lived well.

His private washerwoman on board was given fresh water to wash his shirts (salt water makes ruffled white shirts stiff). The 14 cows he had on board to provide beef dinners drank their way though the men's water.

One night, half the merchant ships stole away, preferring to risk death by pirates than death with Warren.

Into this mess - mutinous, dying men, a military operation in tatters and an embarrassed Commodore - sailed Captain William Kidd of the colonial outpost of New York.

Over a dinner of beef, Warren ordered Kidd to hand over half his crew.

Kidd's men were appalled. This was the age of the press gang and the cat o' nine tails, arrogant officers, hard, unrelenting lowly paid labour and a very good chance of dying.

So in the dead of night, Kidd stole away.

When what remained of Warren's convoy finally limped into port at the Cape of Good Hope, the Commodore had his revenge. He told of seeing off a blood-thirsty pirate, of a buccaneer who had a fleet of ships ready to smuggle booty from the West Indies and the East and of a man who was a profligate liar, never to be trusted. Captain William Kidd.

Piracy had a new name.

It grew with every retelling.

For centuries, novelists have revelled in the bloodthirsty ways of the legendary Captain Kidd. Kidd's anchorage is there on the map in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Hollywood talkies filled the screen with the murderous Kidd.

But author Richard Zacks says everybody has got it wrong.

In The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd, he argues Kidd was no pirate, but a pirate hunter. He was no blackguard but a man on a mission from the king of England. Kidd was no rogue, says Zacks, but a gruff man of honour.

Born in Scotland, Kidd had made a good living as a merchant captain sailing out of New York.

As a younger man, he had come close to piracy. Rootless, he hung out with the rag-tag band of men who abounded in the Caribbean, looking for money, then spending it in the whorehouses and ramshackle taverns, before lighting out for the next adventure.

He had sailed aboard privateers. They stole for profit from their country's enemies; pirates stole for profit.

But in one of the perennial wars between France and England, he distinguished himself as a war hero. He stole a French privateer, cutting the throats of sailors as they slept off a skinful of rum, and sailed it against the foes of King William III.

Respectability sat well with him. He gained the title "Captain". He worked hard. He married Sarah, beautiful, kind and the wealthiest widow in New York City. They had a daughter, Sarah.

Enjoying his status, he decided to set sail for London to seek a commission from the Royal Navy. He was soon disappointed.

Month after month he petitioned the lords of the Admiralty. But Royal Navy commissions were for the wealthy, the well-connected and the high-born. Kidd was a brilliant seaman, but also a low-born, Scottish colonial.

One day his luck changed. He met Robert Livingston, an American merchant, who had the social standing and the money to open doors. And Livingston had a cunning plan. He had convinced some of the top lords of the British Government to back a scheme which could make them wealthy and help rid the seas of the pirates.

The scheme was simple. The king would commission a boat to hunt pirates. But instead of handing the captured loot back to its original owners, it would go to the cash-starved aristocrats of London.

Chief among the backers was Lord Bellomont, "a tall, gout-ridden, 60-year-old Irish aristocrat with a quick mind and a desperate shortage of cash", says Zacks.

Kidd was granted a royal privateering commission, the Adventure Galley - a warship bristling with 34 cannon - and a crew. On April 23, 1696, Captain Kidd sailed down the Thames to do battle with pirates.

Within weeks, he had angered and embarrassed Commodore "Wrong Way" Warren.

News that Kidd had turned pirate sparked a political scandal. Was it true, slavered the Tories, that the king and the highest Whig lords of the realm had given permission to this bloodthirsty pirate?

The lords of the realm denied all.

The Adventure Galley sailed on past the Cape of Good Hope, around Madagascar, to the Arabian Sea and the southern tip of India. Not a pirate to be seen.

Crew members were growing restive. Who cared about the king's commission, they grumbled. They wanted loot.

Finally, Kidd's luck changed. He seized two French merchant ships - not pirates, certainly, but fair game as England was at war with France.

Aboard one of the ships was a small fortune in goods belonging to a nobleman at the court of the Grand Moghul of India. A furious Grand Moghul delivered an ultimatum to the East India Company; get rid of pirates or leave India.

The Moghul knew the name of the pirate he wanted dead. One easy-to-remember syllable. Kidd.

As Captain Kidd turned for London, everyone on the seven seas was after him.

Like a piratical Mission Impossible he was in a race against pirates, the English East India Company, the Royal Navy, the Dutch, Spanish, French and the Portuguese. In London, his backers washed their hands of him.

In Zacks' hands, the desperate voyage of the Adventure Galley is gripping.

It ended at the pirate hangout of St Mary's Island, off Madagascar. Kidd's mutinous crew had finally had enough. Stealing half the treasure, they jumped ship, leaving Kidd to limp back to Boston, where he presented himself to his patron, Lord Bellomont.

The earl immediately grasped the danger to himself. He had Kidd arrested.

Kidd was now at the mercy of English justice and English justice was in no mood for pirates.

Upon his head, says Zacks, were "dumped all the piracies of the era".

His trial at the Old Bailey was a sham. Denied a lawyer, he struggled mightily against judges determined to find him guilty, perjuring witnesses, extraordinarily inflated accounts of his "crimes" and the Admiralty which had "lost" the papers Kidd had kept for his defence.

Zacks makes the court scenes zing along like the best John Grisham.

But no courtroom thriller has a scene quite so startling as that when Kidd is found guilty on all counts of piracy while his old colleague, Robert Culliford, stands in the dock and brandishes a pardon signed by "Wrong Way" Warren.

Culliford was Kidd's opposite - handsome, cunning, a born leader, a roistering pirate who had brawled and whored his way around the world, stealing much more loot than Kidd. He was also a survivor.

If anything tops Zacks' description of the court case, it is the manner of Kidd's death. It is not giving away the book's ending to say that Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock at Wapping on May 23, 1701.

(The tension in The Pirate Hunter comes not from whether Kidd will die but how long he must struggle against his fate).

Half of London came out to see the terrible pirate as Kidd, thoroughly drunk and flinging out curses at his persecutors, was led on a three-hour parade to the noose.

Someone managed to slip through the crowd and shout to Kidd that Lord Bellomont had died in New York. He had little time to enjoy the irony before he was trussed up with other pirates.

Then the blocks were yanked from under the platform. And Kidd survived.

His noose slipped, then broke and he found himself on the ground staring up at the wildly kicking feet of the asphyxiating pirates above him.

At times, prisoners who survived were given a reprieve; clearly they were not meant to die. Not Kidd. He was picked up, dusted off and hanged again.

His body was then cut down and lashed to a pole in the Thames, until by tradition three tides had washed over it to make sure it was dead.

The powers that be were not yet finished with Kidd. His body was rowed the 25 miles (40km) to the mouth of the Thames, where it was and hung out for display. For years after, people entering or leaving London by sea would stare at the bones of Captain William Kidd, swinging in the breeze.

What he left behind was the legend of the pirate and the tantalising belief that this master criminal must have left chests of treasure buried around the world. For centuries, bounty hunters dug up every place he had landed.

What Zacks has dug up from the naval and state archives of Britain and the United States is far more precious.

As befitting a pirate book, this is a rollicking yarn of sea fights, mutinies, backstabbing and double-cross.

But it is based on three years of hard research. Zacks has used official sources - people who accused Kidd of piracy - to piece an all-together different story.

Best of all, he found fascinating accounts, woven into the book, of life aboard pirate ships. Among them was the diary of a sailor held aboard Culliford's pirate ship for 11 months.

He is wise on pirate lore. Like the fact that pirates were the democrats of the high seas. Captains were voted in and could be removed by vote. All actions required a vote. Sometimes pirates wasted time debating whether to seize a ship.

Zacks is at his best describing the ports on Kidd's odyssey with all their smells and bawling humanity. They were ports such as St Mary's, where traders paid low prices for stolen silks but charged exorbitant prices for liquor, while toffee-skinned native women plied their trade with pirates.

The Pirate Hunter works on all sorts of levels. As a tale of piracy, as a 17th-century chase story, as an account of life at sea and as a wonderfully written tale.

But Zacks has achieved something better. This is an excellent study of character.

The author has to grapple with a tantalising question. Why didn't Kidd, knowing everyone was out to get him, simply sail away? With his modest loot, he could have bought a Caribbean plantation, settled down with Sarah and remained at large by bribing officials to alert him when the Royal Navy was on its way. Instead, he sailed back to face a world which wished him dead.

Perhaps, says Zacks, he was too stubborn, too single-minded, too honourable for his own good.

Perhaps, with a sea captain's self-belief, he thought he could convince his accusers of his innocence. Perhaps he was driven by the thought of his beloved wife Sarah and daughter being branded by his shame.

In an age of treachery, he lacked the flexibility to survive.

Zacks gives the last word to Kidd's wife Sarah.

She managed to dodge an order to forfeit all her property since she had been married to a pirate.

Left alone with a young daughter, she married a wealthy East Jersey merchant. Their affairs prospered. She died at an old age, a very wealthy widow.

She, at least, knew how to survive.