Pirate Laureate: The Life & Legends of a Captain Kidd [Reprint 2022 ed.] 9781978813014

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Pirate Laureate

Epitaph "Kidd was an attractive and cultivated man." —Lamb, History of New York. "There was never a greater liar or thief in the world than this Kidd." —the Earl of Bellomont. "This worthy, honest hearted, steadfast, much enduring sailor." —Dalton, The Real Captain Kidd. "This fellow, I thought, had been only a knave, but unfortunately, he happens to be a fool likewise." —One who examined Kidd before the House of Commons. "One of God's finest gentlemen." They — Robert W . Chambers, The Man Hanged. "Reader, Near his Tomb don't stand, Without some Essence in thy Hand; For here KIDD'S stinking Corps does lie, The Scent of which may thee infect: He Base did Live, and Base did Die." —Elegy on the Death of Capt. William Kidd. "Our trusty and well beloved Captain William Kidd." —King William.

Pirate Laureate: THE LIFE & LEGENDS OF

^ C A P T A I N KIDD BY

Willard Hallam Bonner

PUBLISHED AT

New Brunswick

NEW JERSEY BY

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

MCMXLVII,

A.B.

PRESS

COPYRIGHT

1947

BV T H E

COLLEGE

IN

All rights

PRINTED

IN T H E DESIGNED

TRUSTEES

NEW

UNITED

OF

RUTGERS

JERSEY

reserved

STATES O F

B Y ANDOR

BRAUN

AMERICA

For Kaékryn

CONTENTS

Preface: Pirate Laureate

xi

PART I GROWTH

OF A

LEGEND

i. What Kidd Did 11. Political

3

Vortex

18

hi. Clamors and False Stories

33

iv. The "Kidd Business"

56

v. Octavo Kidd vi. The Road to Hell and Heaven

74 82

vii. Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds . .

113

PART II LITERARY

viii.

USES

Knickerbocker Kidd

ix. Leatherstocking

Kidd

151 166

x. The Oval Stone and the Old Women of New England xi. Wizard of the Sea xii. Scaraboid Kidd

176 182 189

xiii. Kidd's Anchorage Efilogue

193

Notes

209

202

Acknowledgments

1

AM GRATEFUL TO MY COLLEAGUES IN T H E

ENGLISH

Department of the University of Buffalo who made available several months of free time in which I began to read and gather materials. I have been given free access to works and papers in both the general collections and rare book rooms of the University of Buffalo and the Grosvenor libraries of Buffalo, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the New York Public Library, the Columbia University Library, the Cornell University Library, the Library of Congress, the library of the American Antiquarian Society, and the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Margaret M. Mott, of the Grosvenor Library, has been untiring in assisting me in things pertaining to the Kidd ballad, including transcribing the music. Henry Holt and Company gave permission to reprint the melody of Caftain Kidd. Some parts of this book have appeared in articles in American Literature, The New England Quarterly, New York Folklore, and The Journal of American Folklore, which are reprinted with permission. Numerous other aids I have tried to acknowledge elsewhere in the text.

Preface

B

ACK OF EVERY GREAT LEGEND LIES A DRAMATIC EVENT,

a will to believe, and the wagging tongues that shape it to the heart's desire. Once it is well started, nothing can stop it. Like a great elemental disturbance— a storm or a spring tide—it rolls on and on. Expose it as untruth, print the facts, organize in intellectual outrage against it, and you are but putting a broom to an ocean. It will have its way because it is an elemental thing. It is human imagination—crank, left-handed, folklorish if you will—but just as powerful as love, religion, the artistic impulse, or anything else in which the mind creates its own world. There was Captain William Kidd, tongue-wagged to infamy in England and America from 1696 to 1701. No one need search in books for him—he lives in every mind as the sign and symbol of the archpirate: a blackened, bloody, treasure-burying rover. Two hundred and fortyodd years have not been enough to exhaust the list of places where believers may dig for his gold. H e is the pirate laureate; and the composite legend surrounding him is Saxon North America's first full-bodied legend, recognized by modern historians as an aggregation of the deeds of nearly all the pirates who have frequented our shores.1 Yet when it is known that no act of piracy actually can be proved against Kidd, when we know that he was a reputable trader and navigator of old New York, publicly rewarded for distinguished maritime service to the Crown and generous in lending a "Runner and Tackle for hoisting

xii

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up stones" in the erection of the first English church in New York, when we know that many other pirates were more picturesque and buccaneers more bloody, when we know that Kidd's backers turned against him and that his trial was a perversion of justice, when we know that he never made anyone walk the plank or that his most violent act was to discipline a surly and mutinous gunner by hitting him over the head with an eightpenny wooden bucket so that the gunner unfortunately died, and when we know that the greatest men in the Government of both England and the Colonies were his associates, we can only say, "Here is a pretty kettle of legendary fish." 2

Actually more pathetic than extraordinary in his life, Captain Kidd leaped suddenly into piratical fame and never has lost ground. More American than British, he was created by those forces of commercial and political exploitation that we recognize and in part deplore as typical of an expanding America. Historians and other scholars do not like this and have sought to disentangle the real Kidd from the myth but the myth persists. Its colorful lines etch the first figure in American life to stir the imagination of the world. " W e are now going to give an account," wrote Kidd's first biographer in 1724, "of one whose name is better known in England than most of those whose histories we have already related. The person we mean is Captain Kid, whose public trial and execution here rendered him the subject of all conversation, so that his actions have been chanted about in ballads." 8 But why Kidd? W h y not Blackbeard, who spectacularly set fire to pots of brimstone in his cabin to make a little hell, who fiercely plaited his beard, who married a fourteenth wife, and who hobnobbed with the governor of Carolina? W h y not Calico Jack Rackam, who really gave

Preface

xiii

up his religion and picturesquely married into the trade by taking as his partner the female pirate, Anne Bonney? Why not Stede Bonnet, the successful amateur, one of the few pirates known to cause prisoners to walk the plank? Why not Morgan the Terrible or Avery the Grand Mogul? A puzzling discrepancy, recurrently noted, exists between fact and fiction. Philip Gosse, whose knowledge of pirates seems to exceed that of anyone else, who has perhaps the finest pirate library in the world, and who has prepared both a history of piracy and a pirate Who's Who, once wrote that Kidd is "probably the most famous name in the annals of piracy . .' . yet if Kidd's reputation was in just proportion to his actual deeds, he would have been forgotten so soon as he had been 'turned off' at Wapping Old Stairs. His fame in piracy was as undeserved as the glory of Dick Turpin, the reputed king of all the 'gentlemen of the r o a d . ' " 4 A modern professional historian, coolly examining Kidd's reputation, feels that Kidd may have been honest at the beginning but, even so, was weak and vacillating, "a sugar-and-water pirate" who succumbed to temptation, then remorse—"a third-rate pirate and a fourth-rate gentleman." 8 Another resolves this dilemma by simply concluding, with apparent logic, "His name lent itself to a poesy of a sort." 6 Students and investigators have cut away the romance and the legend and have laid bare the true Kidd, generally either to disprove romantic legend or analogously to exonerate completely an abused man. In books, therefore, there are actually three Kidds: the archpirate, the honest gentleman betrayed and martyred, and the real Kidd. Much research has continued and many papers and records have appeared in print. The only document of importance that

xiv

Preface

has not been found is Kidd's own journal, which, he said, was taken from him at the Island of Madagascar by his angry men. The only portion of his life that is not at all known is the early part. Yet we do know for certain a great deal of what he did from 1691, when he first appeared in New York, to 1701, the year in which he was gibbeted. The rather vague piratical Kidd and much of the true Kidd are ours. However, in spite of the effort that has been expended, the results often have been clouded, undocumented, and curiously negligent concerning the phase that is most interesting of all, the legendary. One writer may assert with assurance that Kidd stepped immediately into legend and became well-grounded in our folklore. Another may assert that no legend grows around a man like Captain Kidd until he has been dead one hundred years. Nearly all make reference to the prominent fiction writers who have made use of Kidd tales: Irving, Poe, and Stevenson.7 Ralph Paine and Harold T . Wilkins stand almost alone today in suggesting the legend and folklore that have crowded about the head of Kidd and referring to the existence of superstitions and tales from non-Kiddian sources. But we are left for the most part with mere tantalizing statements. Harold Thomson, taking all New York for his province, very properly has no time in his chirky book, Body, Boots and Britches, to follow the lure of the Kidd of folklore— to him and to me the most fascinating of the three Kidds.8 How and when did the Kidd Legend grow? Was it of purely political manufacture? If so, would it, for this reason alone, have caught the popular fancy as it has? When did it begin? What exactly is the "Kidd legend"? Was there any buried gold? If not, where did tales of buried treasure come from? What did sailors sing of Kidd? Just

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xv

what part of this legend may be discerned in chanted ballads or in the work of serious artists like Irving, Cooper, Poe, and Stevenson? Have other writers used it? Is it of genuine literary or social significance either as an example of how a legend develops in modern times or as an influence on the imagination of varieties of men? Is Kidd merely a figure of folklore? An attempt to answer as many of these questions as possible brought this book into being. I have tried to see Kidd as people saw him in his time and to, present much that was printed and spoken of Kidd in his day. Not only the political world but the people in the street shared excitement over him—imagination was stirred in the tavern and down the backstairs as well as in the House of Commons and at the trial in the Old Bailey. Records of wagging tongues or diaries kept by the footboy's sister's lover are unfortunately elusive. There are no archives of national gossip. Legends, however, have recognized habits and the strong excitements of the popular mind are never completely effaced. The chapters that follow will attempt to evoke enough of Kidd's world and of Kidd's growing figure to make the whole fantastic concept of the "arch-pirate," seen in the light of very human ways, of emotions, and of imagination, clearer and more reasonable than it ever has been. These chapters will be seen to play upon a theme, which is the simple outline of the ascertained events in Kidd's life insofar as I have been able to determine them. They will reveal what many in various walks of life have said and done about these events in several parts of the world. From fact the way will lead through gossip, ballads, politics, witchcraft, and legend to literature. And Captain Kidd will be found, I think, neither the best nor the worst

xvi

Preface

of men, but a colorful Colonial figure about whom enough is known to furnish grounds for belief in his piracies and to whom enough vagueness still clings to furnish ample suggestion to the untrammeled imagination. Kidd will emerge as a kind of symbol of an evil with which American life heretofore has been extraordinarily concerned, the exploitation of America's opportunities for getting rich, for getting rich quickly, for escaping the domination and excessive burdens of Europe, for making money without limit and unhampered by the taxes and laws of more settled countries—rich, free, and outlaw, meaning not only outside the law but against it.

PART

I

GROWTH OF A LEGEND

t

I.

What Kidd Did

H

ERE THEN ARE T H E SIMPLE FACTS.

Whatever opinion we may have of Captain Kidd, whether we are of the romantic or of the martyr school, his story 1 is briefly that of a highly successful sea captain of New York, a privateer and trader—reputed, respected, and sought after—who fell notoriously into disgrace and in three years became worthy of any diabolic tale hatched in the minds of the credulous in two hemispheres. In medieval times his story might have been among the tales of the falls of princes. His quick decline before fickle fortune partook of the melancholy thing that Bacon mentions. Circumstances forced Kidd to take sides in the rising but he found the standing excessively slippery. W e can only speculate as to who or what Kidd was before 1691. One tradition has it that his rearing was pious because his father was a Scottish minister. On the other hand, at least one enthusiast believes he had been a pirate before his New York days, even in the China Sea,2 and merely returned in 1697 t 0 his old ways. Be that as it may, his reputation in the Colonies was quite to the contrary, so good, in fact, and his skill and achievements so notable, that the great and unfortunate exploit of his life could not

4

Pirate Laureate

have been undertaken except for them. In 1691 he made proposals to the Province of Massachusetts and was employed to pursue a pirate off the New England coast. H e was cited for reward before the Assembly at Albany and was awarded £150 for his services at sea against the French. Petitions before the New York Council were granted in deference to the "valuable services of Capt. Kidd." One of these was in protest against the pressing from his ship of a seaman by Captain Jasper Hicks of the man-of-war Archangel. Shortly after Kidd's marriage, Governor Sloughter of New York was jealous enough of his services to write jocosely to Colonel Codrington, Governor of the Leeward Islands, that he could not spare Kidd at the moment. " I have commanded Capt. Kidd for their Matys Especial service here but hope in a few months he may be with you if his wife will let him." 3 Kidd's service in the West Indies the next year was equally distinguished. Kidd commanded the Blessed William and in company with another American privateer, Captain Hewson, successfully engaged six Frenchmen. When ashore afterward at the island of Antigua, he suffered the embarrassment of having several of his men run off with his ship in order to take part in the indiscriminate and outrageous plundering going on in the Red Sea. Among these were "Captain" Culliford, Mason, and Burgess, and other "Madagascar men" who may already have been notorious but who certainly became so from this moment on. Kidd's path was to cut across Culliford's again, rather picturesquely. It is easy to assume from this that in 1691 and 1692 Kidd and these men were birds of a feather. The authorities did not think so, however. T h e Governor of the Leeward Islands gave Kidd another ship, the Antigua (or An(egoa), to replace his losses, and

What Kidd Did

5

Captain Hewson remained a stanch supporter always. Kidd was a substantial citizen of New York, operating at one time a kind of packet line between New York and London. New York was full of merchants and sea captains of no nice conscience, trading to Madagascar for the East India goods of the pirates there and making as much as £30,000 on a single voyage. Although Kidd and his Atlantic world knew the Madagascar traders well enough, and although dozens of them are still known, there is no indication that Kidd engaged directly in this trade. In May of 1691 he married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, a well-known and perhaps colorful New York widow who brought him several pieces of property. Kidd bought more. He thus ultimately owned ground in streets that are now called Pearl, Pine, Wall, and Water. He had a fine brick town house at Hanover and Pearl Streets in which he laid an expensive Oriental rug, said to be the first "Turkey carpet" to be owned in the New World. H e also had a country place out on the edge of Harlem, a piece of the old Saw Kill farm, now the foot of 74th Street, where garbage trucks empty their loads into barges. A daughter was born to the Kidds, so that later when Captain Kidd was recommended to the King for the greatest exploit of his life, among various other qualifications, he was cited as a home-loving citizen of New York where he had a wife and family. Robert Livingston, a shrewd Scot who was Commissioner in charge of Indian affairs, went bond for him. Many prominent persons of the time were his friends and acquaintances, including three governors. Later some of the greatest Whigs of England, and at one time King William himself, were his backers. In 1695 he was in London at a time when the British Government was talking of taking steps to check the almost unlimited depreda-

6

Pirate Laureate

tions on Red Sea commerce by English and American pirates. The East India Company cried aloud for aid and was forced to convoy the East Indian fleets. The Earl of Bellomont, an Irish earl of unquestioned though chilly honesty, was preparing to go out to become the new Governor of New York and New England and clean things up. Robert Livingston, who was not only Secretary for Indian Affairs but a member of the Council of New York, recommended Kidd to Bellomont as an able and dependable man to be sent out to round up pirates. Kidd knew the men and their haunts, he said, and was willing to go, being available in London at the time, and in need of only a strong ship with a good crew. Kidd thus early became part of a reform government, an ill-starred role in any age. Bellomont went to the King with the idea. The King went to the Admiralty, but the Admiralty and all British warships were too busy fighting the French. Livingston, with an eye for turning a penny, then proposed the timehonored device, a private venture, he himself being bound for £10,000 for Kidd's integrity. The King approved and the Earl of Bellomont with several others, both peers and commoners, raised £6,000 as their share in starting the enterprise. Kidd and Livingston were to put in £1,500. The King reserved for himself a tenth 4 share in whatever booty was brought in, although neither his name nor the names of any Whig peers,5 except Bellomont's, appeared at the end of the Articles of Agreement. Among the great men backing Captain Kidd were the Lord High Chancellor, the first Lord of the Admiralty, and two of the King's principal secretaries of state. Before taking the final step, Kidd consulted his old friend Captain Hewson, who also was in London, and who advised against it. Unfortunately, Kidd did not take his advice. The Earl of Bellomont, anx-

What Kidd Did

7

ious either to take definite action against the notorious pirate and smuggling trade or to make a handsome profit, brought pressure to bear on Kidd, and Kidd consented. At the same time, the East India Company was petitioning the Admiralty for a free hand to deal in armed force with the Madagascar pirates. The Adventure Galley, a new ship of two hundred and eighty-four tons and thirty-four guns, was fitted out and a carefully selected crew of officers and men, nearly all family men, was put aboard. Kidd hoisted anchor early in 1696, but had not sailed by the buoy at the Nore at the mouth of the Thames before most of his men were pressed into the navy by Captain Stuart of H.M.S. Duchess, who came alongside. Kidd went ashore immediately, protested to the Admiralty, and demanded the return of his men. Admiral Russell, one of his noble backers, ordered them returned, but Kidd was given other men (presumably lower types), not his own hand-picked crew, and lost nineteen days in the negotiations. He sailed from Plymouth finally in April, arriving in New York on July 4, with a French prize taken along the way, which he legally declared. He was legally given receipts for the New York Governor's share of onefifteenth and King William's share of one-tenth. Kidd was provided with two commissions. One was the customary commission empowering him to attack and bring in enemy ships. The other was an extraordinary special commission under the Great Seal of England to take pirates, which, in part, was as follows: "William Rex. "William the Third, by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. . . To our trusty and well beloved Captain William Kidd, Commander of the Adventure Galley, or to any other the com-

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mander of the same for the time being, Greetings; Whereas we are informed, that Captain Thomas Too, John Ireland, Captain Thomas Wake, and Captain William Maze or Mace, and other subjects, natives or inhabitants of New York, and elsewhere in our Plantations in America, have associated themselves with divers others, wicked and ill-disposed persons, and do, against the Law of Nations, commit many and great piracies, robberies and depredations on the seas upon the parts of America, and in other parts, and to the great danger, and hurt of our loving subjects, our allies, and all others, navigating the seas upon their lawful occupations, Now Know Ye, that we being desirous to prevent the aforesaid mischiefs, and as much as in us lies to bring the said Pirates, free booters, and sea rovers to justice, have thought fit, and do hereby give and grant to the said William Kidd, to whom our Commissioners for exercising the office of Lord High Admiral of England, have granted a commission as a private Man of War, bearing Date the 11 th day of December 1695, and unto the Commander of the said for the time being, and unto the officers, marines and others, which be under your command, full power and authority to apprehend, seize, and take unto your custody as well the said [as above] all such Pirates, free booters and sea rovers, being either our subjects, or of other nations associated with them, which you shall meet with upon the seas, or coasts of America, or upon any other seas or coasts, with all their ships and vessels, and all such merchandise money, goods and wares as shall be found on board, or with them, in case they shall willingly yield themselves. . . "And we do hereby command all our officers, ministers, and all other loving subjects whatsoever, to be aiding and assisting to you in the premises. And we do hereby enjoin you to keep an exact journal of the proceedings in the execution of the premises. . . And we do hereby strictly charge and command you, as you will answer the contrary to your peril, that you do not, in any manner, offend or molest our

What Kidd Did

p

friends or allies, their ships or subjects, by colour or pretence of these presents, or the authority thereby granted." Kidd was not only to take pirates and enemy prizes by force if necessary, and to bring all seized persons to a legal trial, but had lawful authority to "beat up" men to fill out his already depleted crew. He lodged in public places and had circulated by hand a printed statement to this effect itemizing the terms under which men might sign on, particularly the shares of booty they might expect if the voyage were successful. Final articles with the men were agreed upon and signed after the ship was a few days at sea, John Walker affixing his name for the ship's company. According to the terms of the agreement among the noble adventurers, furthermore, Kidd was sailing under the old familiar plan of "no purchase, no pay." The crew's share was not to exceed one quarter of the whole. Kidd was to bring in goods, merchandise, and prizes directly to Boston "without touching in any other port or harbour whatsoever, or without breaking Bulk, or diminishing any part" of what he should take "on any pretense whatsoever." In case he took no pirates, the Earl of Bellomont was to be recompensed for his outlay before March 25,1697, "the Danger of the Seas, and of the Enemies, and Mortality of the said Capt. Kid always excepted." If he were to bring back goods to the value of £100,000 or more, Livingston and he were to receive the Adventure Galley as a reward. A memorandum at the end, apparently the final result of more extended discussion, allowed to Livingston and Kidd, their heirs and assets, one tenth of the whole. There were many dark hints about how Kidd occupied himself from July to September of that year. Some said he caroused the summer away. It is more likely that he occu-

io

Pirate Laureate

pied himself with fitting out his ship, recruiting men, and erecting a mansion in the expectation of passing the evening of his days in the city of his adoption. All we know is that after having signed on his crew, which included his grumpy brother-in-law, Samuel Bradley, he was outward bound from Sandy Hook, a pirate taker and a privateersman extraordinary, on the sixth of September, 1696. From then on until his arrest in 1699 the'record is very inconsistent, being the statements of Kidd and other eyewitnesses later lined up for or against him, their accounts in each instance justifying the speaker or writer's personal stand. However, it seems that Kidd fell in with a convoy of East Indiamen to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and for six days traveled with them. The commander of the convoy was suspicious of the people on the Adventure Galley, though he did not know at first of their mission. The only account of this meeting has it that Kidd grew boastful in his cups, "talked very big," and promised the commander thirty men but sneaked over the horizon in the night. H e put in at Johanna in the Comoro Islands off the East African coast, where his men were disorderly and difficult to control. Things were bad indeed. A third of his crew had been wiped out by cholera, his new ship, apparently badly treated, was leaking, and his men were itching to go "on the account." They had been making trouble for him ever since his first approach to the African shore. Instead of going in to Madagascar, therefore, to take Tew, Ireland, Wake, and other "wicked and ill-disposed persons," among whom was his former associate (but now "Captain") Culliford, he continued on to India and was off the Malabar Coast in September, 1697. This would indicate he might have turned pirate himself. It seems quite clear, either forced by his mu-

What Kidd Did

II

tinous men, as he declared, or tempted beyond self-control, he did turn pirate, unsuccessfully attacking the well guarded Mocha fleet in August and taking several small ships in September. His refusal to attack a "Dutch" ship in October provoked further mutiny, the aftermath of which was murder. A few of his men had deserted him, later declaring they were being made pirates against their will. That this was partly true seems to appear in the famous affair of William Moore, gunner on Kidd's ship. Off the Malabar coast Captain Kidd had vigorously refused to attack and take the Loyall Captain, a rich ship of a dubious New York privateersman, Captain Hore, whom Kidd's crew called a Dutchman. He was probably a pirate but Kidd had no orders to take him. He preferred to think of him not as "wicked and ill-disposed." For weeks Moore and others fumed and grumbled ominously. Moore was one of the many very sick men aboard the Adventure Galley, and things may have easily appeared sorrier than they were. Kidd came upon Moore one day as the gunner was sharpening a chisel on deck. Moore could stand things no longer and touchily cried out, "You have brought us to ruin and we are desolate. I could have put you in the way of taking that ship and be none the worse for it." Kidd flew into a passion, called him a "saucy fellow," and seizing an iron bound wooden bucket, hurled it fiercely at the gunner's head. In twenty-four hours William Moore was dead, whether from the captain's blow or from his long illness the crossfire and confusion of the evidence will never reveal. Much was made of the incident, however. On January 30, 1698, Kidd made his biggest haul, an Armenian ship, the Quedagh Merchant, laden with a valuable cargo of silks, muslins, money, and general East India

12 Pirate Laureate goods. She was sailing under a French pass or commission and was legitimate prey for an English privateer. The news soon reached England through agents of the East India Company who interpreted the seizure as piracy. Considerable, if not general, alarm followed, whereupon tales of Kidd's savagery became current: pillaging and murdering of Malabar natives and the brutal whipping of prisoners. English factors to whom he appealed for provisions refused to have anything to do with him. Kidd's own ship was now so unseaworthy that he had to put in at St. Mary's on Madagascar, where she sank for one reason or another, and he took over his great Armenian prize ship, renaming her the Adventure Prize. His troubles continued through his early failure to take a firm stand and knock down half his crew if necessary to keep them under control. It was now too late. Captain Culliford and others he was out to take were at St. Mary's, but he could not have taken them if he really had wanted to. He proposed it to his men, but they refused. Ninety-seven of them deserted him and joined Culliford. Kidd then fraternized with the proclaimed pirate, invited him aboard, exchanged gifts, and drank "bombo" (a very unpiratical drink of lime juice, sugar, and water) with him. He shared some booty with his men, but they plundered his chest and took his papers, including his journal which he was under oath to keep. They also threatened his life so that Kidd had to lock himself in his cabin at night in self-protection. So he said. From Madagascar Kidd now sailed for home in the Quedagh Merchant, rich with cargo and aided by a fragment of the old crew plus a group from Madagascar who were willing to work their passage home. Still others came as passengers, presumably paying the usual one-hundred-

What Kidd Did

13

dollar fare. In April, 1699, he dropped anchor for four hours off Anguilla in the West Indies against his express orders to proceed directly to Boston. Here he learned that he was proclaimed a pirate himself, and that a British squadron was searching especially for him and Captain Avery. In November of the year before a circular had gone out to Rear Admiral Benbow and the Colonial governors declaring that the Lords Justices have been informed "of the notorious piracies committed by Captain Kidd and of his having seized and plundered divers ships, as their excellencies have given orders to the commander of the squadron fitted out for the East Indies . . . to pursue and seize the said Kidd . . . so likewise they have commanded me to signify their directions to . . . take particular care for apprehending the said Kidd and his accomplices." Their Lordships further desired their secretary to say 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 vigour of the law.® At St. Thomas in the West Indies, where Kidd stayed four days, the Danish Governor refused him both provisions and the sanctuary of safe anchorage. Here Kidd cruelly marooned his brother-in-law, Samuel Bradley, who had quarreled with him almost constantly on the whole, long, ill-fated journey, and who was now deathly sick. As so often happens, Bradley did not die but lived to reach the Carolinas and make a deposition there. Having eluded both Admiral Benbow, who was sent out from England, and Captain Billingsly, of H.M.S. Queeneborough, who was sent out from the Leeward Islands, Kidd beached the Quedagh Merchant somewhere along the coast of Hispaniola, leaving the ship and some of her cargo

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in charge of Henry Bolton, a merchant and former Collector of Customs at Antigua. According to Kidd's own deposition, the Quedagh Merchant was left "at St. Katharine on the South East part of Hispaniola about three leagues to Leeward of the Westerly end of Savano," 7 where anyone may still search for it if he so chooses. Rumor in the West Indies had it that Kidd had gone to the new Scotch settlement at Darien. But he sailed for New England in the well-laden sloop Antonio, bought from Bolton. H e touched at Delaware Bay en route, where some of his men went ashore both from the Antonio and from Captain Giles Shelly's Nassau which had just preceded him bringing others of Kidd's men who had deserted him at Madagascar. Such a route home and such a transfer of goods was not only in direct violation of the terms of his commission, but conversely was quite customary in the illegal New York-Madagascar trade. In the meantime the Earl of Bellomont had come over to the Colonies as Captain General and Governor-in-Chief of his Majesty's Provinces of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. When Kidd dropped anchor off Gardiner's Island in June, 1699, Bellomont was in Boston. Kidd's position was difficult. H e had taken no pirates, but he had booty to the value of £100,000 or so; and he had two French passes taken from his prize ships, which he knew were worth more than gold in his defense. When he left England, Admiral Russell and others had promised to support him.8 But now that he was proclaimed a dangerous pirate, should he give himself up and prove his innocence or should he disappear? H e seems to have believed firmly in his own innocence. Either this or he was something of a fool. H e communicated with the Earl at Boston through his friend James Emmot, the leading Admiralty lawyer of

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New York who was none too scrupulous, and whom the Earl hated. Another friend, Duncan Campbell, the Boston postmaster and bookseller, came out and visited him aboard his sloop. In the meantime he unloaded some of his goods at Gardiner's Island, also against orders, and sent two loaded sloops in to New York. Bellomont coyly returned the answer that could Kidd demonstrate his innocence, he, Bellomont, would "undertake to get him a King's pardon." So Kidd, who had been joined by his wife, went ashore and first lodged with his friend, Campbell, in whose elegant home the Earl also was being entertained, but he was quickly and perhaps dramatically arrested and taken to Boston jail. It was the most exciting and significant event in the history of piracy along our coast. Kidd had displayed and had given up his French passes to Bellomont and he .never saw them again. Bellomont went quickly and thoroughly to work seizing Kidd's treasure at Gardiner's Island, his goods in New York, and some humbler things in the hands of Mrs. Kidd still in Boston. Every person suspected of having been with Kidd or having any of Kidd's goods was indefatigably pursued. Robert Livingston hurried over from Albany demanding the bond he had put up for Kidd and in so doing he helped Kidd's case not at all. For that matter, the Earl's suspicious glance seems to have included him. No English law provided for trial of pirates in the Colonies at that time. Accordingly, though Kidd was put in irons on July 6, 1699, the lengthy correspondence necessary (and Bellomont's own precaution to document his way through events which became increasingly difficult for him) dragged the time out so that he was not sent to England until February 16,1700. Kidd wrote several protests to the Lords stating and restating his case. Arriving in England

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on April 8, aboard the Advice, he fell ill, drew up another protest, made a feeble effort to kill himself, and saw taken from him what papers he had left. Sick and discouraged, he was examined before the Board of Admiralty and the House of Commons, being imprisoned in Newgate for over a year. Kidd's trial at the Old Bailey was of considerable interest. As far back as 1698 knowledge of the identity of Kidd's noble backers had leaked out and these gentlemen were called in question for permitting the great seal of England to lend authority to acts of piracy. A Parliament resolution was introduced in December, 1699, censuring the W h i g Lords, but it was not passed. Early in 1700 impeachment proceedings on thirty-two counts against leading Whigs were begun but were stalled successfully by the Whigs. Kidd was the hope of the Tories, and there is every reason to believe that they exerted pressure on him to implicate and discredit the noble adventurers, but, as has been echoed often recently, Kidd said nothing. Numerous persons of high and low degree visited him in prison. Kidd's trial was on six counts, one for murder and five for piracy, and its procedure can be considered in few ways fair. The murder charge and the trial were sprung upon Kidd as a complete surprise. H e was denied counsel. His French passes and all his other seized papers were suppressed. Witnesses for him were paid scant attention. T w o of his men turned King's evidence, repeating a monotonously consistent and damning story. The murder charge was the first count to be dealt with and Kidd had no opportunity to prepare a defense. Captain Kidd was publicly hanged along with seven others at Execution Dock, May 23, 1701, and his body remained suspended in chains

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plainly to be seen until it rotted away and was no more a public warning to erring mariners. These are the pertinent facts in the life of Kidd, "a man neither very good nor very bad, the fool of fortune and the tool of politicians, a pirate in spite of himself." 8

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A R T O F T H E REASON FOR T H E P H E N O M E N A L G R I P C A P -

tain Kidd took on the imaginations of all is to be found in the thoroughly, though quite accidentally, prepared fertile ground he rooted in. His name had become legend even before the exciting and colorful last days when the famous ballad of Captain Kidd was written, despite some printed comment now to the contrary. How tamely wicked he was has been shown in part, without any yielding to the temptation either to crusade or to champion, and without comparing him too pointedly with his contemporaries. The record is little more than a bare skeleton of fact and is colder and less interesting than armchair readers might wish. But persons in both England and the Colonies very early talked otherwise—just how early it is impossible to say, but probably as early as the September day in 1696 when Kidd set sail from New York in the service of the King to take pirates. From that indistinct moment until the famous ballad was composed four years and eight months later, people whispered and shouted and wrote and gossiped and protested and latterly damned the name of William Kidd. When we think of the stir Kidd made, we cannot but applaud the first composer of the

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ballad for his adherence to facts rather than a departure from them. But more of that later. Captain Kidd appears to have been unluckily sucked into the vortex of a raging storm of controversy in which it was necessary for both contending elements to paint him as black as could be. Part of this story concerns itself with the general state of trade and piracy in New York at the time, part with the Whig and Tory battles in British politics, and part with the Leisler troubles in New York. The first and last of these converge upon one another and so may be dealt with together, a tale almost wholly political and historical, the telling of which calls for a momentary departure from the immediate affairs of Kidd. New York from 1690 to 1700 was a poorly governed, raw, Colonial port of four or five thousand persons, its harbor full of trading ships and its streets full of sailors and merchants. Its one thousand houses, the historian Oldmixon reported, were "handsomely built by the Dutch, of Brick and Stone, cover'd with red and black Tile; and the Land being high . . . an agreeable Prospect to the Spectator at a Distance." 1 However, the spirit of reckless commercial adventure it enjoyed in its violation with impunity of the pinching British trade laws must have been roughly comparable to the spirit of the American West a century and a half later. Philadelphia and Boston were little better despite the account of their apologists. A Philadelphia pamphlet of 1703, complaining of the times, said, "Quakers have a neat way of getting money by encouraging the pirates, when they bring in good store of gold, so that when Avery's men were here [about 1696], the Quaking justices were for letting them live quietly, or else they are bailed too easily." William Penn insisted upon his right as Lord of the soil

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to a share in pirate treasure found in or near Philadelphia but he was summoned before the Lords of Trade to explain away complaints that he was protecting pirates. The Admiralty Court in Charles Town, Carolina, was "a regular sharper's shop." 2 Piracy was practiced so openly, and known pirates were so aided and abetted by citizens of the three principal cities, not to mention other less inhabited places scattered along an often hospitable coast from Nova Scotia to the West Indies, that the state of affairs stank in the nostrils of decent citizens and harried the British Lords of Trade. New York was such a political and commercial cauldron that an honest businessman traveling through, with letters to deliver and gentlemen to confer with, was forced to slip about and do his business by night. In 1695, the year before Kidd was commissioned, His Majesty's Chaplain in New York, the Reverend John Miller, wrote to his bishop of the continuous open breach of social, religious, and moral laws. The inhabitants lacked nothing, he reported, to make themselves happy except those things "to which either themselves do contribute or which their ill settlement, or worse government, has introduced." Merchants commonly made 100 to 400 per cent profit on English goods. Their shops were so stuifed that His Majesty's Chaplain wondered where all the buyers for all the goods would be found. And, he added, "as to their way of trade and dealing, they are all generally cunning and crafty, but many of them not so just to their words as they should be." 3 The resident merchant was furthermore often very little different from a fence or distributer of goods brought in by smugglers, privateersmen, or out-and-out pirates. The Philipses and DeLanceys of New York grew rich in this traffic. So did Peter Fanueil, Andrew Belcher, and Captain Gough

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Boston.4

of One Baldridge seems to have been a principal manager of the flourishing illegal trade between the New York merchants and the Madagascar pirates. M r . Baldridge, like Defoe not much later, proposed the legal establishment of a colony on the Island of Madagascar and the advantages of a legal trade with the pirates.5 Arabian gold and East India goods were so common that late comers from England raised an eyebrow.6 A fortune could be made in a single voyage to Madagascar. Pirates went in and out of harbors not singly, but by fifties and sixties and the hundred. In 1699, two hundred to four hundred pirates threatened to remove to New York en masse "taking the King's pardon" and several hundred were at one time known to be concentrated near Providence Island, Rhode Island. That was the year Manasseh Minor, diarist of Stonington, Connecticut, attended "pirate cort" and wrote on the line for November 9, " I bought my pirat gun." The tip of Long Island was long a rendezvous and cache for them. Block Island was the same. Major Salleck (or Selleck), who had a warehouse at Stamford "close to the Sound" was famous for storing pirate goods. T h e famous Boston judge and diarist, Samuel Sewall, for some time had operated a free mint in Boston which attracted pirates as a place to melt down their foreign gold and silver. During the great public fast of May, 1697, Boston's greatest divine, Cotton Mather, preaching on "Humiliations Follow'd with Deliverances," called off a list of twenty public and private delinquencies, among which "Scandals of Pyracies, call for much Lamentation." Broadsides appeared on the streets of London proposing the causes and cures of piracy in the Colonies.7 Times were easy. Governor Benjamin Fletcher of New York winked his eye and took protection money from hun-

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dreds, rivalled only by his private secretary. If proceedings were started against any pirate, the sheriff or the jailer was likely to release the culprit—if he were arrested at all. Fletcher gave commissions on his own authority for desperate men to arm as privateers against the French. When they returned, few questions would be asked, and Captain Evans of H.M.S. Richmond, which itself may have been manned by pirates, was restrained from cruising against them. It was openly known that Governor Fletcher could be bought for one hundred dollars, and his notorious Collector of Customs, for a relatively appropriate amount.9 Fletcher had dealings with the most notorious men of the time. The ship Fortune, for example, was publicly laden in New York with goods for the Madagascar pirates. Under the signature of Governor Fletcher she was given a commission to take French ships. The Collector and Receiver of His Majesty's Revenue gave her clearance papers. She sailed on purpose to receive East India goods from the well-known Captain Hore, who also had a commission from the Governor. W'hen the Fortune returned in May or June, 1698, the Collector of Customs would not seize her; and the goods were concealed in the house of the sheriff of New York. One Thomas Weaver, Agent for New York, was sent to England to urge the case against Governor Fletcher before the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, charging piracy, illegal trade, exorbitant grants of land, official corruption, embezzlement of public money, interference with elections, false muster rolls, and neglect of troops.10 Against such a background Kidd's mild actions seem to fade into relative unimportance. The life of Captain Thomas Tew offers an informing parallel to Kidd's. 11 Armed with one of the familiar and

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easily obtained Colonial commissions, he sailed as a privateersman. H e did not go to Gambia on the Western coast of Africa to destroy the French factory there as planned, but on the high seas called all his men on deck and is said to have addressed them on the subject of turning pirate. We are commissioned to do a job full of risk and only for the private gain of our backers, he said. I can see little in it for us. Men fight bravely for only two things—money and public good. Neither of these is in the enterprise. On the other hand, if the men so wish, I can lead you to ease and plenty by one bold push. You might return home rich forever "not only without danger but with reputation." The crew all cried out, " A gold chain or a wooden leg, we'll stand by you." Accordingly, they elected a quartermaster to represent their voice in all matters and sailed with such will to the Red Sea that they, like Kidd, took a great ship though it was heavily armed and manned by three hundred soldiers besides seamen. Like Kidd's crew, they retired to Madagascar and shared their booty, £3,000 sterling to each man. Tew and part of his crew determined to settle permanently in Madagascar with their quartermaster. Indeed, after meeting with the restless French freebooter Captain Misson and the rhetorical unfrocked former priest "Captain" Caraccioli, two picturesque vagabonds who made war on oppressors but not the oppressed, the rest quite willingly joined his thriving settlement of "Libertatia," where money and property were all in common and government by election was enjoyed. Tew became their admiral and made surveying and piratical voyages out and back. When Libertatia, however, was wiped out by a concerted attack of natives, Misson, the governor, and T e w , the admiral, found themselves discussing a plan of getting a commission from " a lawful government" to found a legal

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colony, to wipe out "the odious appellation of Pirates," and bring advantage to England. Tew's old quartermaster, who was something of a statesman, had drawn up plans and proposals and was the chief agitator of a return to America to make negotiations. But their own liberty was more precious than all else. "Twas ridiculous to think we will become subjects to greater rogues than ourselves." 12 Everything was shared again, and Tew came home to Rhode Island with thirty-four men, rich enough to return to their owners fourteen times the value of their original sloop. "Not being questioned by any," Tew "lived in great tranquillity," as Avery before him had hoped to do, near Boston. Tew's men, however, having spent their money, finally prevailed upon him to leave his retirement and rove again. H e died in desperate action against another of the Mogul's ships in the Red Sea. Had Kidd had less vacillation and more of Tew's tact, he might have done no otherwise than Tew or Avery and could have come home not only without danger but with reputation. Tew was one of dozens of desperadoes whose faces were familiar in New York. H e was wined and dined in the Governor's mansion, "received and caressed," as reported to the Lords of Trade, 13 even as Blackbeard was a few years later by the Governor of North Carolina.14 But the very freedom with which these men moved and the certain refuge afforded them in the Colonies indicated a situation which when viewed realistically, then or now, showed only a hairline's difference between the lawful trade with privateersmen and an unlawful trade with pirates, between a commissioned privateer and a pirate. The privateer of war time found it not a little difficult to keep from piracy in times of peace. "The transition from fighting for plunder and plundering unlawfully," wrote James Fenimore

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Cooper of these times, was "very trifling in remote seas, where testimony is not easily obtained, and the law is impotent." 15 The principles of Colonial trade had culminated in the Act of Trade of 1696, which provided that such trade should be carried on only in English ships. But no one paid much attention unless someone attempted to enforce the Act. And to attempt to patrol the whole American coast was out of the question. A l l this had a good as well as an evil commercial effect. The British East India trade suffered, but the New York trade flourished. Much money was circulated and prices of real estate leaped ahead.16 The merchants were back of Governor Fletcher and lost no time in protesting any individual (like a Captain Kidd) or any circumstance that interfered with or restrained their mushroom activity. Some feeble attempts were made, it is true, to reform the government, invoke the " L a w of Nations," or make public the British law. Proclamations against piracy, long in England a conventional though futile means of scaring the wicked and ridiculed delightfully in Washington Irving's Knickerbocker History of New York, are among the earliest known pieces of printing to come from the presses in Philadelphia and New York, and before them in Massachusetts.17 Thus piracy and political corruption thrived. Honest folk suffered increasing shocks and fears as the pirates made more and more audacious descents upon the coast. The Lords of Trade and the Lords Justices wrote letters 18 from England and commanded the laws to be enforced, but they did nothing beyond that. Not even when King William expressly sent out the Earl of Bellomont to displace Fletcher, to unite New York, the Jerseys, and New England, and to suppress piracy as well, did they strengthen his hand in any

26 Pirate Laureate way. "Piracy does and will prevail in the Province of New Yorke," Bellomont complained, until the Crown is able to get good judges, an honest and able Attorney General, a man-of-war with an honest, capable commander, and both pay and recruits for four companies of soldiers. "Captain Giles Shelly who came lately from Madagascar with 50 or 60 pirates has so flushed them at New York with Arabian gold and East India goods, that they set the government at defiance." When Bellomont arrived in 1698, the Council of New York had purchased four barrels of powder to salute him, but the merchants only growled. Captain Kidd had been away a year and eight months, and was due back any time; in fact, he was suspiciously overdue. If his name had already been whispered in connection with that of the new Governor, it was not yet publicly bandied about. Chosen by King William as "a man of integrity" more likely than any other he could think of "to put a stop to the growth of piracy," the Irish Earl gave early promise of being the first honest British Governor New York had had. Cried the merchants after the first month, "He has ruined the Town by hindering the privateers from bringing in £100,000 since his coming." They had been getting ready for him for two years. Simultaneous with his arrival they started whispers. Cried the Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, "The Merchants here are so accustomed thereto, that on a small seizure I ordered to be made, just after my arrival here on some East India goods imported in an unfree bottome, the whole city seem'd to be in an uproar, and lookt on it as a violent seizing of their property." Nothing, of course, could have infuriated them more than this "interference." For many years the cry continued. London merchants, having joined now their New York fellows, were

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still keeping up the cry as late as 1700, listing thirty-two items of accusation against the Earl including even excessive ardor in pursuing men suspected of being Kidd's men or of having Kidd's goods. Fletcher and his followers openly say they will have me "turn'd out of this government," he wrote. " T h e y do not stick to say it openly in this Towne and have spread it the country over." T h e Fletcher crowd have threatened to murder Graham, the Attorney General and Weaver, the New York Agent "upon an imagination that I consulted them in the businesse of their unlawfull trade, and the male administration of Colonel Fletcher." These enemies played the rogue a dozen ways. T h e y intercepted his mail and kept the Earl ignorant of the wishes of the Lords of Trade sometimes for almost a year. T h e y beat his messengers. A sea captain entrusted with a package for the Earl, abandoned it in a London coffeehouse, perhaps by accident, perhaps not. Sent to oppose the Fletcher regime and to clean up the Province, Bellomont was naturally a proclaimed enemy and anyone sympathetic with him, or actively working for him, like Kidd, would as naturally be also a proclaimed enemy. " W h e n he included an attack on piracy in the scope of his activities," writes James Truslow Adams, "he aroused a dragon from the slime of colonial commercial life against which he was powerless." 19 Long after his death, the Earl of Bellomont was still being blamed for a low state of trade in New York, "even to that degree, that it will be some years, before they retrieve their former Trade; which is a great Misfortune." Besides this, the Earl of Bellomont, a backer of Kidd and the unwelcome prosecutor of smugglers and pirates, came as a partisan to a province still in the grip of a bitter and long standing warfare among political factions: the

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Leislerians and their opponents. H e had already conferred in London with sympathisers of the long dead, former revolutionary usurper and de facto Governor Jacob Leisler,20 and had got a foretaste of Governor Fletcher's methods. An investigation of the election feud of May, 1695, was held before the Board of Trade. Kidd and several other New Yorkers then in London were present as witnesses. Kidd testified that John Tutall, the sheriff of New York, told him "to get his people from on board his vessell they being Inhabitants of New York to vote at the elections for such persons as the Governor desired should be elected." H e also testified that Governor Fletcher was said to have threatened to pistol any man that would choose the Leislerian candidate Peter De la Noy who had formerly been elected by popular vote to be mayor of New York under Leisler. Fate cast Bellomont against Fletcher; the Leislerians therefore flocked to Bellomont. Jacob Leisler was the rock on which New York politics split for many years. The Leisler troubles date back to the time of confusion and shifting authority when the Stuarts were ejected, in 1688, from the throne of England forever. Former British officials in Boston and New York were also ejected within a year. In New York the people had seized the government and turned to Jacob Leisler, a rich and reputable New York fur and tobacco trader, to lead them through the intervening time until a new Governor should be sent out. A Committee of Safety had appointed him Captain of the Fort, but he had proceeded to perform as de facto LieutenantGovernor, later as Governor. H e had "suppressed riots, constituted courts, struck a seal, signed commissions, collected taxes, and called an assembly," though never officially recognized by the British government. H e was of

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plebeian origin, though married into an old and wealthy Dutch family, and often displayed a stubborn mind and an uncouth manner. Vindictively, he had caused a hated political opponent to be carried through the fort in a chair bound in chains. In time a new Governor and two companies of soldiers had been officially sent out after the usual British delay. Unfortunately the soldiers arrived before the new Governor himself and their commander, Ingoldsby, demanded the surrender of the fort. Leisler naturally refused. Shots were fired, and New York for two months seethed with the makings of civil war. When the new Governor finally arrived, Leisler reluctantly and too tardily relinquished the power he had enjoyed for so many months. Charges of treason were brought against him and a trial was held. His unscrupulous aristocratic opponent, Colonel Nicholas Bayard, who was Secretary of the Province and nephew of Peter Stuyvesant, contrived to move the drunken hand of the new Governor after dinner one night in May, 1691, to sign death warrants for Leisler and his son-in-law. The two were promptly and forthwith executed for treason—the first two political murders in the New World. 21 The Leislerians were forced out of the Council, and their cause célèbre, in many ways an assertion of the popular will of possibly two-thirds of the Province, became a locally famous Lost Cause. Soon the new Governor died and was succeeded by Benjamin Fletcher, who we have already seen was thoroughly corrupt. H e pursued, intimidated, and persecuted any and all Leislerians with a zeal worthy of the pen of Dryden. H e found the political hatreds useful to his corrupt ends and actively fomented them. Though Parliament in 1695 had reversed the attainder against Leisler and had ordered the restoration of his estates to his heirs,

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Governor Fletcher either refused or neglected to execute the act. Instead, with full approval of the New York Council, he published a book reviving the old story. By the time Captain Kidd springs to notice in New York, specially commissioned under the Great Seal of England, the Leislerian cause seemed firmly under Fletcher's heel. But when the Earl of Bellomont came tardily on the scene, a kind of political crusader aiming to clean up a rotten aristocratic administration, a tremendous resurgence of feeling took place and the bolstered Leislerians took heart. Indeed, some of Bellomont's first acts were to shake up the Council. H e dismissed the diabolic Colonel Nicholas Bayard and seven other anti-Leislerians. Another resigned,—the famous merchant Frederick Philipse, who owned one of the four famous Madagascar ships. Bellomont executed the reversal of the act of attainder on Leisler's estate infuriating the Fletcherites. T o the almost hysterical delight of the friends of the martyred de jacto Governor, he drew ten charges against Bayard, numbers two, three, and nine of which shed further light on the times. These charged that Colonel Bayard connived at illegal commerce with foreign ships; that he connived at Governor Fletcher's granting commissions to pirates manned here for the Red Sea, procured protections from the Governor, received a reward, advised that a piratical ship be admitted to port with her spoils, and connived at Fletcher's receipt of presents from pirates; that he applauded Fletcher and upbraided the Earl for discouraging commerce a few days after the Earl's arrival; and that he raised "scandalous reports to misrepresent his lordship's government, and assisted in forging several false and groundless articles against his lordship." Furthermore Belldmont suspended Fletcher's Collector of Customs who confessed receipt of £800 for protection, and required him

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to "enter into a recognizance in £2,000 for his conduct." T h e Reverend William Vesey, rector of New York's new Trinity Church, and Domine Godfriedus Dellius, of Albany, poured out abuse upon the new Governor because he vacated Fletcher's extravagant land grants. Chafing friends of Fletcher still sat in the Assembly when the Earl addressed it in May, 1698, in a clearly detectable, though perhaps quite natural, holier-than-thou tone: I cannot but observe to you what a legacy my predecessor has left me in a divided people, an empty purse, a few miserable naked half starved soldiers . . . the fortifications and even the governor's house very much out of repair, and in a word the whole government out of frame. It hath been represented to the Government in England, that this province hath been a noted receptacle of pirates, and the trade of it under no restriction, but the acts of trade violated by the neglect and connivance of those whose duty it was to have prevented i t . . . It would be hard that I that came among you with an honest mind and a resolution to be just to your interest, should meet with greater difficulties in the discharge of his majesty's service than those that have gone before me.22 This speech was immediately made public, printed at William Bradford's famous press. At the same moment the long over-due privateer, William Kidd, was sharing booty at Madagascar, was presenting the notorious Captain Culliford with a brace of pistols, and was giving the pirates assurance that he "had rather his Soul should broil in H e l l , than do them any harm." 23 And rumor back home was entangling the name of Kidd with that of Bellomont. In August, 1699, when Bellomont placed before the New York Council a bill sent by the Lords of Trade that would make piracy in the Colonies a felony punishable by

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death, he was astonished at the resistance it met. He wrote to the British Lords that the bill "would not go down with the Council by any means." What did the laws of England have to do with themy demanded the "sour" members. There was no mistaking their attitude that the Madagascar trade was their own affair and no one could tell them what they must or must not do in it.24 Thus Captain Kidd, in choosing to go out for Bellomont, the champion of the people's cause and the St. George of good government, allied himself with a man who, however zealous and upright he might be, was sure to be villainously assailed, and upon the merest smell of a fault to be implacably ruined by a ring of foes. In going out against pirates, he lost his standing with the New York merchants who would do their utmost to discredit him in order to discredit Bellomont—a thing which we may be sure they did. Kidd had personal friends on both sides of the political controversy over which he showed such small concern that on the very day of Leisler's execution he married a rich widow. Neverthless, he was drawn, an undeclared partisan, to the very center of the whole whirling cesspool. He was lost whether his maritime venture succeeded or failed.

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H E R E W E R E GOSSIPS IN OLD N E W Y O R K . R U M O R DID

its work in 1698 as in every other year—and, as always, with some justification. It must not be forgotten that Kidd set forth in 1696 upon his great and unfortunate voyage in special circumstances, and that to all serious and honest folk and loyal subjects of the King, his subsequent breach of faith was a breach of public faith and trust. It should be repeated that Captain Kidd was unlike the commissioned privateers who preceded him. His integrity was well known; he definitely had a good reputation in trade and in battle; and he carried no mere Colonial governor's letter of marque but the King's own. Some idea of how low the granting of commissions had fallen is gained from the century's greatest navigator, Captain William Dampier, who records that the famous buccaneers, Davis and Swan, were offered blank commissions in 1685 signed by the Governor of Petit Guavres. Captain Gronet, a new acquaintance whose favor they had won by a kindness, carried such blank commissions in his pocket to give, willynilly, to his friends.1 How much more lawful was Kidd's royal charge!

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In 1695 and 1696 Kidd's star was rising. He was not then "the most notorious pyrate" but still, as on his marriage license, "Captain William Kidd, New York, Gentleman," man of property, well-married neither above nor below him, twice rewarded for public service. With the exception of the merchants and politicians who were fattening on a black market, few persons in New York would have hesitated in choosing him themselves or in applauding the choice, as the Whig peers in London did. There was a large element of truth in the story of Kidd's apostasy, a good man gone wrong. The Earl of Bellomont had not given him up even as late as 1699. H e wrote to the Lords of Trade just before going up to Boston in May, I am in hopes the several reports we have here of Captain Kidd's being forced by his men against his will to plunder two Moorish ships may prove true, and 'tis said that neare one hundred of his men revolted from him at Madagascar and were about to kill him because he absolutely refused to turn pirate.2 When the bad news broke, the now disgruntled Fletcherites could safely wag their heads and say, " W e told you so." There had been an air about Kidd's recruiting that smelt familiar. Kidd had sailed into New York harbor in 1696 with a French prize and great news. H e was a King's privateer and needed fifty men or so. Everyone knew Kidd —a good man and a good fighter. A good man. What terms did he want? No purchase, no pay? What about the rest, the old "articles"? A man should sign articles in the regular way. Eight hundred pieces of eight for the loss of an arm or a leg, four hundred for a joint. No man would go abroad without articles. And so Kidd was "constrained" to put them up in public places 3 and in all likelihood to

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distribute them in handbills about the streets. T h e y must have brought many a satisfied grin and gleeful eye to rough readers crowding about. As recorded in 1701 by Joseph Palmer, 4 slippery-tongued member of Kidd's crew, they had consisted of fifteen articles, among which were the following: 1. Captain Kidd and his shipe to have fourty shares and any man that would come aboard the said shipe should have share of such Treasures as should be taken. 2. If any man should Loose a Leg or Arm in ye said service, he should have sex hundred peices of Eight, or sex Able Slaves. 3. If any man should Loose a Joynt in ye said service, he should have a hundred peices of 8. 4. If any man shippd himself aboard ye said shipe and should offer to go away from her, he shall suffer what punishment ye Capt. and ye Company Quarter-Master shall think fitt, and shall have no share. Other articles treated cowardice, mutiny, drunkenness, obedience, and further details on sharing. Obviously to the man in the street and in the tavern, Captain Kidd was going out as many adventurers both good and bad had gone before. N o purchase, no pay. Hearts of oak. Brave lads all. F i f t y men joined him. Treasure was their goal, even as it was for the secret movers of the enterprise. Seasoned and undoubtedly tough New Y o r k sailors, they were ready to blink at or forget the fact that pirates were to be taken. Youngsters joined for adventure. John Barleycorn, who joined from Carolina, was fifteen. Joseph Palmer from Rhode Island was a young man of good connections. Gabriel L o f f e , a youth from L o n g Island, was apprentice and

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servant to Kidd. William Jenkins, a mate's apprentice, was eighteen. If the Reverend John Miller was not too far wrong, the New York taverns rang all night with the oaths and songs of hard drinking sailors; and wild young merchants set at defiance all law both civil and divine. Foremastmen and mere apprentices were flush with coin dropped into their hats at the sharings "by the List" at Madagascar or at gaming. Besides the deeper crimes boasted of, it would be known that a good haul at the dice could win for a man two thousand four hundred dollars in a single game en route home amid such company—an experience which one Garret Van Horn had on Captain Shelly's ship. That was twenty-four times the cost of a paid passage home from Madagascar, if one denied himself the luxury of a cabin. The Adventure Galley to adventuresome minds seemed to be properly named. The general excitement caused military recruiting in New Jersey to be seriously impaired. Governor Hamilton could not raise his quota of twenty men for the detachment at Albany to defend the frontier. Young men must be "soothed into" the service, so comfortable were they at home, so well paid; and besides, he wrote to Governor Fletcher, "Severall of our youth [have] gone to the Southern Colonies to be free from detachments, and several, so I am told, gone aboard Captain Kidd. That there is not a probability to prevail with them to continue in garrison, and indeed very difficult to effect anything." 5 Too much has undoubtedly been made of Kidd's pirate or buccaneer articles. Though they may have been in the hinterland of honesty, so also was much of New York's ocean trade. And it should not be forgotten that the practice was not only common among navigators but was also

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used to lure soldiers into the much needed and perfectly proper frontier defence aforementioned. A public notice in Boston "for the better encouragment of such as shall voluntarily list themselves" offered the volunteers equal shares with officers "by the act of the Generall Court} as to Scalp money, prisoners or plunder." This notice was dated July 14, 1696, only ten days after Kidd's arrival from London in his new but undermanned vessel. Governor Fletcher wrote to the Lords of Trade in June, 1697, with perhaps the intention neither to applaud nor to discredit Kidd, When [Kidd] was here, many flockt to him from all parts, men of desperate fortunes and necessitous in expectation of getting vast treasure, he sailed from hence with 150 men as I am informed great part of them are of this province; It is generally believed here, they will have money p r fas aut nefas, that if he misse of the design intended for which he has commission, 'twill not be in Kidd's power to govern such a hord of men under no pay. 6 It is easy, however, to imagine that Fletcher, soon to be displaced by Bellomont, laid special emphasis on this cunning doubt. T h e summer of 1696 passed before Kidd sailed—time enough to talk. Time enough to count unhatched chicks or build Spanish castles.7 Some said Kidd had given Governor Fletcher £1,000 protection money. Some said Fletcher would get £10,000 upon Kidd's return. Some said that Kidd had no legal authority to drum for men in New York. Others predicted a mass flight of pirates from Madagascar to the Colonies and advised what might be done about it. One report was that Kidd said that he would return to New York, not Boston—and that, in eighteen months.

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This may have been a tavern boast for Bellomont later charged that Kidd spent the summer dissolutely. In eighteen months, instead of the pirate taker himself, came the reports of his piracies—reports and rumors that stretched out for another eighteen months. Eventually, the man himself arrived. First advice of his return to American waters came from the President and Council of the Isle of Nevis in the West Indies. Now he was at St. Thomas where none would protect him. Now he was at Antigua, and now nearer, at Hispaniola. Later he was at Cape Fear, later in Delaware Bay, still later at Gardiner's Island, and now at last safe in Boston jail. His men were reported almost everywhere. H e went out with considerable éclat. H e came back uncertain of his next move, aided by a few, but hated and feared by more, the amount and location of his treasure a subject of infinite speculation. Journals, letters, and diaries, both English and Colonial, traced his movements. Narcissus Luttrell, English recluse, indefatigable annalist, and master of hearsay, copied out paragraphs from the public prints and reflected common gossip. Entries in his Brief Historical Relation give a fair picture of England's wagging tongue.8 On November 24, 1698, Luttrell reported the action of the Old East India Company acquainting the Lords Justices with "the action of Captain Kidd" who was sent to suppress pirates, but who "joyned them." The news leaked out, furthermore, that "several great lords are concerned in sending him out . . . to be sharers of what he should take." Five days later, " A proclamation is ordered to be publish't to pardon all the pyrates settled at Madagascar, except capt. Kidd and 3 others, provided they submit by a certain time." On Tuesday, August 1, 1699: " W e have a

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report that Captain Kidd, who some time since turn'd pyrate in the Adventure gaily, and took from the subjects of the great mogull and Others to the value of 400,000£, is taken prisoner by a Fr. ship, the commander of which sent him in irons to the great mogull." T w o days later, letters deny Kidd's capture. " T h e y " say the Adventure Galley is sunk and that Kidd has boarded a Portuguese "and sail'd directly for Darien, where the Scots received him with all his riches." Still another two days later: " W e now hear [Kidd] was lately at Nassau Island" [Long Island] where he proferred 30,ooo£ to give the owners . . . and 20,000£ for his pardon." T e n days later, he records a tale from the West Indies, "Letters from Currasau say, that the famous pyrate, captain Kidd . . . offered the Danish governour of St. Thomas 45,000 pieces of eight in gold and a great present in goods, if he would protect him a month, which he refused." The news of Kidd's surrender to Bellomont came on August 22. In the entry for September 7 the value of Kidd's gift of jewels to Lady Bellomont is fantastically put down, "esteem'd at £10,000." Exactly two weeks later Luttrell noted the sailing of H . M . S . Rochester for New York to fetch Kidd at the same time the Old East India Company was petitioning the Lords Justices that "Kidd the pyrate may be brought to a speedy trial before the high court of admirality" and "all his effects unjustly taken from the subjects of the great mogull sent back to them." T h e second of November the diarist knows that the trial of some other pirates is to be put off waiting for Kidd, whose effects are valued at 200,ooo£. The next three entries pertaining to Kidd (November 23, December 2, and December 28, 1699, and January 4, 1700) have to do with the worries of the East India merchants suffering from acts of reprisals from the Great

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Mogul and what can be done about the horrible and still continued bad state of piracy in the Red Sea. In April, 1700, "Kidd, the notorious Pyrate" has finally arrived with thirty-three others at Bristol, ten days later to be examined and committed to Newgate. Soon "Captain Kidd, upon his petition, has got his irons off" though he is "kept close prisoner till the sitting of Parliment, to the end they may have the examination of him." The many entries of more general pirate news from this time (April 27, 1700) to the time of the examination and trial of Kidd (March-May, 1700) show how closely Luttrell kept informed: Today this ship turned pirate; another, Newgate and Marshalsea were crowded with pirates; another, one hundred pirates were on trial, or fifty-two received the death sentence and about the same number were acquitted. In December, 1699, the sober antiquarian, John Evelyn, who the year before had entertained at dinner the buccaneer-author, Captain Dampier, recorded confusingly the stir in Parliament made by efforts to set "the Greate Seale to the pardon of an arch fir ate, who had turn'd pirate againe, and brought prizes into the West Indies." 9 This was Kidd, about whom Evelyn seems to have had no doubts and few facts. On July 23, 1700, London talk estimated the "Jewels taken on board the ship of Captain Kidd" to be worth £30,000. It was along the American coast, however, quite without the aid of newspapers of any kind, that news and rumor surrounded Kidd like a cloud. H e was the first pirate of parts to visit Delaware Bay, then a part of Pennsylvania, where he provisioned, and where some of his men went ashore. This was sometime in May, 1699, only a few days after Captain Giles Shelly, also back from Madagascar, had

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dropped anchor there, with twenty-two "passengers," most of whom had deserted Kidd at Madagascar and were therefore "Kidd's men." Shelly was one of four captains who had openly fitted out ships in New York the year before with goods for Captain Hore and other Madagascar pirates. This defiant and profitable enterprise was carried out under the orders of Stephen Delancey and John Barbary, as an intercepted letter from Shelly to Delancey shows.10 Shelly was also a resident of New York, a neighbor of the Kidds and a family man. His owners included one Hackshaw of London as well as the New York merchants. He had appeared before the Board of Trade and Plantations as a witness, along with Kidd in 1695. The accidental arrival of Shelly and Kidd at the same time made an impact the shock of which was kept fresh in mind for twenty years. Government officials first sounded warning, and among them none sooner than Colonel Robert Quarry of Philadelphia, a fussy little man, judge of the admiralty in New York and Pennsylvania, former governor of South Carolina, and a member of the Councils of five different colonies at the same time. Rumor had it that he had flagrantly encouraged the Carolina pirates at one time previously. He was a kind of roving general agent for the Lords of Trade, a reporter without portfolio, a busybody extraordinary. He had had his experiences with pirates farther south, but now manifested such zeal that one might almost believe he had reformed. Instantly he went to work, sending out the alarm by letter and hiring men and boats to arrest the pirates. He wrote to the Lords of Trade several times the first week of June, full of zeal but able to show little success. Sixty pirates, part of Kidd's gang, he said, have "arrived into this Government" in Captain Shelly's ship direct from

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Madagascar and loaded with goods purchased directly from other pirates. Twenty of them have come ashore near Philadelphia and sixteen at Cape May in the Government of West Jersey. The ship lies at anchor off Cape May waiting for sloops from New York to unload her rich cargo of East India bale goods and money. " I quickly seized two of these pirates and conveyed them safe to Burlington jail in the Province of West Jersey where they will be secure. Had I brought them to this Government, I could not expect but that they would have been set at liberty . . . I went in pursuit of two more of those Rogues and followed them so close that I lodged them in Philadelphia." How long they would stay there Colonel Quarry vouchsafed no promise. H e complained against the Lieutenant Governor, who was completely unmoved by Quarry's boast: " I f he would press me one of the Vessels that then lay before the Town and raise me forty men, I would immediately Seize and bring her and all in her up to the Town or forfeit my life." But this was not the half of his activity. H e sent an express to the governors of Virginia and Maryland, and others to the northward. The Governor of the Jerseys was very ready and active, too, having fitted out a sloop already to go to Cape May. " I go down with him on the next tide," wrote Colonel Quarry. " I have in my hands 2000 pieces of eight which I took from the first two pirates." 11 The good judge, who hated Quakers, goes on to say that the indifference to British law in Pennsylvania was due to William Penn's influence at court, that as for himself he felt "easy enough." For if "this place be allowed to be a free Port I shall receive as much advantage in point of Trade as any man." However, he concluded with a final complaint

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that if something were not done soon, "no man can be got to serve the King." "Kidd's gang" was now followed by the proclaimed pirate himself. In five days Colonel Quarry was impatiently dispatching another freely composed and chaotically spelled document to the English Lords. Several of Kidd's men surrendered to the zealous Governor of the Jerseys, Jeremiah Basse, thinking to "come in under the King's pardon." Colonel Quarry's gratitude for Governor Basse's prompt aid was no less than his contempt for his own Pennsylvania's failure to act. There was not even a proclamation at home, he cried, but on the contrary Pennsylvanians have entertained the pirates, conveyed them from place to place, furnished them with provision and liquors, given them intelligence, and sheltered them from justice so that at the time of writing the greatest part of them had been conveyed away in boats to Rhode Island. Every man he hired to search for and apprehend them was abused and affronted and called an enemy of the country for disturbing and hindering honest men, "as they are pleased to call the pirates," from bringing their money and settling amongst them. Before he sealed the letter he added, "Since my writing this, Captain Kidd is come into this Bay. H e hath been here about ten days. H e sends his boats ashore to the Hore Kills in this Government where he is supplied with what he wants, and the people frequently go on board him. H e is in a sloop with about forty men with a vast treasure." H e ended in deep disgust at the frustration of justice on all sides and hurled a final and characteristic blast at the Quakers who coddled the captured pirates, allowing them in Philadelphia the freedom of a tavern and in West Jersey not suffering even the Governor to put them in jail.

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Let us see how Governor Basse fared. First informed of the pirates by Colonel Quarry's express to Burlington, he made a prompt descent upon them, took four with their chests and made an itemized report of their treasure to William Popple, Secretary to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantation: "7000 Rix dollars and Venetians, £30 melted silver, a parcell of Arabian and Christian Gold, necklaces of amber and corrall, sundry pieces of India silks." Furthermore, Governor Basse saw Kidd's "large sloope" and gave chase, but Kidd was too swift for him. Hundreds of men are at Madagascar (the Island of St. Laurance), he wrote, "desirous of Returninge to spend their ill-gotten goods." Those who escaped him he pursued, anxious to win the favor of the crown, and in part compensate for his antagonism to the New Jersey proprietors. Thus he caught up with Captain Shelly's letter to the New York merchant, DeLancey, wherein it must have pleased him to read of the pirate's uneasiness for fear of discovery. Though Colonel Quarry's eye was green when he looked toward the supposedly law-abiding New Jersey shore, the New Jersey Governor at times fared no better than himself. It took three warrants and the personal appearances of the Justices of the Peace of Perth Amboy to enlist Customs Collector Charles Goodman and his constables in breaking down Mathew More's door in order to seize some of the pirate Shelly's goods deposited there. This, too, ultimately failed in the face of not only abuse and denial of authority but mob rule. Twenty persons, "disguised, armed with Clubs, Pallizadoes & other Weapons of prodigious biggness," threatened Goodman's life and wrested away the goods while the collector waited vainly in a friendlier home for a wagon to convey them to town.

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At New York, when Lieutenant Governor Nanfan sent for Mr. Hungerford, a collector of customs, directing him to go after Shelly, Hungerford could not be found. By the time he was reached, Shelly had run his empty ship ashore on Long Island "near Mr. Johnson's house" and abandoned her. These were but the events of a few days, but they were close to the people and tremendously exciting. Here were actual "pirates" scattering into the woods as they touched the shore. The Lords of Trade, at a great distance, saw things growing worse instead of better and made urgent recommendations to their superiors. The best encouragement they could offer the Earl of Bellomont late in August, 1699, was "by threats and promises to some that are apparently guilty, to induce them to give evidence against their accomplices." This was but cold comfort indeed. Philadelphians felt the first shudder of pirate scares that were to become more and more intense until the time when the frequent and truly terrifying Blackbeard boldly threatened the town in 1 7 1 7 with one hundred and thirty men. By then it was time to shudder, for a whole colony of pirates with a governor had formed at Cape Fear, 12 and the gazettes teemed with pirate news. But in 1699 it was Kidd. Proclamations came out in Pennsylvania and the Jerseys. 13 The long-feared pirate exodus from Madagascar that Livingston expected had begun. Gossip in Philadelphia had it that "one Shelly, from New York, has greatly infested our navigation with Kidd's pirates." Mrs. Jonathan Dickinson, of Philadelphia, read in a letter from her husband then at Port Royal, Jamaica, "Many pirates are and have been on this coast. About two days since came news of Captain Kid's being upon our coast, being come from the East Indies with a great booty,

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but wants provisions . . . There is gone hence, two days since, Ephraim Pilkerton, in a sloop well manned, to go and take him." One wonders whatever became of Captain Ephraim. One Isaac Norris wrote: " W e have four men in prison, taken up as pirates, supposed to be Kid's men. Shelly of New York, has brought to these parts some scores of them, and there is a sharp look out to take them. W e have various reports of their riches, and money hid between this and the capes." In October Penn issued his proclamation in time to congratulate the Assembly that they did not have to be told to do so. H e was later to reproach the once excited Colonel Quarry for permitting the bailing of pirates. In 1700 one Wessell Alricks was paid £9 for bringing in four pirates. "Partisans in his [Kidd's] name were often named and dreaded," wrote the nineteenth century antiquarian, John F. Watson, in his Annals. One man in Jersey, who hoaxed the credulous by declaring he had hid money on Cape May, was arrested and then released. By 1701 there were such apprehensions along the Delaware River that watchers were appointed to give alarm in Sussex." Thus early fact and fancy mixed and fear quickened imagination. William Penn reported to the Lords of Trade on February 28, 1701, that some of Kidd's men had settled in Carolina as planters with one Rayner as their Captain. Kidd's fame immediately absorbed that of Shelly, and eyes rolled at tales and rumors of buried treasure. Kidd's name had begun to become generally known. The news spread astonishingly. At the same time (June, 1699) that Basse and Quarry were addressing the Lords of Trade, Duncan and John Campbell of Boston were dispatching their apparently regular weekly manuscript news

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letters to Governor Winthrop of Connecticut and the other Colonial Governors. One of these almost unknown documents concerns Bradenham, Kidd's drunken doctor. "Philadelphia, June y e 5th 1699. About y e Middle of Last Week a Sloop, belonging to this place, arrived from Carrolina, brought in w th y m two Privateers that Came Last from Madagascar. One of w ch went out Cap! Kidds Doctor from New york, but left Kidds Vessell many months since at Madagascar. They were both Taken and sent to prison y e Same night they Came vp, and their money secur'd; two more were Taken at New Castle . . . They w th a great many more Came passengers from Madagascar w th one Capi Shelly . . . Severall of y m are disperss'd about our Bay, especially about Cape May. . . The Privateers have made great shares of mony, Capi Shelly plys of and on, expecting Vessells from New york. A messengr sent from Cape May for N : York w th Lett™ to Shellys owners (as is said) vpon advice was persued & Taken, and his Lett™ Taken and open'd, and he Secured at Burlington, the Lett™ forwarded by an Express to Gov. r Bass." T h e next week Kidd was near Rhode Island, where his skirmish with the Collector was described by the Campbells' news letters as follows: "Boston, June y e 19, 1699. Last thursday Capt.' Kid came into Road Island harber; y e Governour sent y e Collector in a boat w th about 30 men well armed in order to goe on board, but Kid shot 1 great Guns, w ch caused y e Collector to retreat. Kids Sloope has j o . Guns, 8. Patterareos. I shall be able to give a further acco.' by y e next. "tis Gouvernour Bass Intercepted the letter to Shellys Owner & broke itt Open, as itt is said in New Yorke."

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A year later this news agency sent out information of Kidd's safe arrival in England and a comment on the action of Parliament in postponing his trial. We have only twelve of these interesting letters,15 bristling with maritime news, this ship going out, that ship arriving, or (significantly newsworthy) no ships this week in Boston harbor at all; yet we know from the character of the Campbell agency, flowering as it finally did in the first established newspaper of the American continent, The Boston NewsLetter, that the Campbells followed Kidd's actions with not only the journalist's sense for news but with some special personal interest as well. It is John Campbell who is given credit for writing the first piece of reporting in America, the exciting public hanging in 1704 of the pirate Quelch.16 Endorsement of the letters, furthermore, seems to indicate a development of the mere news letter to something like a news organ with a name. They read as follows: "Copy of Letter of News" " M . r Campbell May 28th 1700" "Publick occurrances May 3d 1703" " M r John Campbell's Newes Oct. 4.'4 1703." The two Campbells, under special patent, were successive postmasters17 of Boston. This gave them the time-honored access to the latest news and the privilege of franking it out to all parts. Both were prominent men. John Dunton, on his famous bookselling visit, found Duncan a brisk young fellow, sought by the best gentlemen and a snare for the female eye:

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From the Dutch, I went to the Scotch Bookseller, one Duncan Cambel, he is very industrious, dresses a-Ia^mode, and I'm told a young Lady of a very Great Fortune, is fall'n in Love with him.18 Duncan had one of the best houses in Boston, where the first real earl (Bellomont) ever to visit the city was entertained with fitting splendor. H e sat with Livingston and Bellomont at conferences on Indian Affairs. John also moved in these social and political circles. A dinner for nineteen at Samuel Sewall's found him present.19 Captain Kidd, it is evident, was a good friend of Duncan —a fact which Bellomont exploited to the fullest extent. James Emmot, a shrewd New York lawyer, and Campbell, the fashionable Boston bookseller, visited Kidd's sloop as it lay off Block Island before Kidd dared go ashore. These two acted as go-betweens as good friends should. Yet their friendship and good offices hurt Kidd beyond remedy. When Bellomont wrote to the Council on Trade announcing the capture of Kidd, he said, I was a little pussil'd how to mannage a treaty of that kind wiif Emot a Cuning Jacobite a fast ffriend of ffletcher's and my avow'd enimie . . . I sent my letter to [Kidd] by One Mi Campbell of this Town and a Scotch as well as Kid and his acquaintance . . . [Kidd] and his friend Livingston . . . and Campbell aforesaid began to Juggle together and Imbezle some of the Cargo. H e congratulated himself on keeping Secretary Vernon's orders to seize Kidd a close secret, "for his Countrymen . . . would have made sure to Caution him to shift for himselfe and would have been well paid for their pains." 20 Yet Kidd not only sent Campbell with letters of protestation and negotiation to the new Governor; but, sensing

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that things were black, proposed that Campbell be sent to London to bear official letters and to "explain" j and Emmot was entrusted with the delivery to Bellomont of the irreplaceable and doomed French passes. Furthermore, it was the "extremely charming" Duncan Campbell and his wife who shared his generosity and had thus an inkling of, if not a peep at, Kidd's treasure. Campbell described to the Earl, even as he must have described to his journalist brother John, and their friends, his several visits to and conversations with Kidd. "Captain Kidd's company promised me £500 value for my trouble and pains, if they had their liberties." 21 Here was a touch beyond mere friendship, pleasing no doubt to a New England Scot. Kidd made valuable presents of money, goods, and a Negro boy to both Duncan and his wife. It was Campbell who "Ingaged body for body" for the safety of Kidd and ten of his men who were "fearful of waiting or Coming into any harbour" because of the "Clam", and fals Stories" spread about them.22 It was Campbell whom he intrusted to buy rigging for his great ship. It was into his luxurious home that Captain and Mrs. William Kidd and their maid were allowed to go after stepping ashore under a "safe conduct" from the Earl. Nevertheless, Boston, for all this, gave Kidd a cold reception. Massachusetts offered no Delaware Bay. Kidd had powerful friends high and low everywhere, but he was just as much in the dark about Bellomont's purpose in "Wheedling" him in as were the New York and Boston Councils, Judge Sewall,23 or anyone else. H e was lulled into a false sense of security by the shrewd promises and encouragement of Bellomont, and by depending on his friends, his French passes, his booty, and his backers to bring him off from the darker accusations. H e may not have sensed how

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high the feeling against pirates was running. Boston, for all of Duncan Campbell, was a trap and it was quickly snapped shut. It popped into sixteen-pound irons not only the bewildered Captain Kidd but most of the persons suspected of being members of his crew, and put under heavy bond any person suspected of having dealings with them,24 although in the trial proceedings it did appear that Gabriel Loffe, a servant with Kidd, was intrusted by the Keeper of the Boston jail with the keys for four or five months. Kidd's guards, however, were later strengthened. T h e general caution and severity were partly due to the orders of Secretary Vernon, under whom Bellomont acted secretly, but more to the temper of godly New England minds and to another local occurrence that created a scare and a scandal at the very moment, causing all hope of leniency toward Kidd to be lost in the face of a pious New England's public disapproval. This was the affair of Captain Bradish. Among the notorious pirates who came back to New England in the summer of 1699 were a Cambridge man, Thomas Bradish, and a one-eyed companion, T e e Wether ley (Witherly). These adventurers and their crew sailed in a ship called, like Kidd's, the Adventure. T h e y were in the end shipped to England on the Advice along with Kidd, Gillam, and others. Coming home from Madagascar, they unloaded their ship on L o n g Island, sank her, bought horses, and scattered. Soon after, Bradish and oneeyed Wetherley were captured in Massachusetts and placed in the stone jail in Boston. Caleb Ray, the jailer, however, was a relative of Bradish, and the maid, Kate Price was not too puritanical. On "Midsummer Day 1699 at 9, at night, Bradish and Witherly [got] out of prison and [made] their escape with the Maid that helped them out." T h e Earl of Bellomont, present to reform Boston as well as

52 Pirate Laureate New York, was angry. He discharged the jailer, offered rewards, sent out a hue-and-cry, raised the salaries of constables after all three midsummer night's dreamers were apprehended in October, and swore never to free a pirate on bail no matter what the circumstances. All that summer, especially in June and July, Bellomont seized suspicious persons and witnesses to piratical acts, and took sworn deposition after deposition from them. The respective captures of the escaped Bradish and Wetherley and of the notorious Gillam illustrate with what energy and thoroughness the Earl of Bellomont combed the forest, the shores, and the seas for pirates. Not only did he follow routines like issuing proclamations and writing letters to Colonial governors up and down the coast, including the Governor of Canada, but he quickly capitalized upon fortunate and unexpected circumstance. Through his door one day in that summer of pirate worries walked the Indian Sachem Essacambuit. Essacambuit had come to submit to the British and to bring in with him the Kennebec Indians. Bellomont accepted him immediately and put him to work. He offered the Kennebec Indian two hundred pieces of eight for the capture of Bradish and Wetherley. In a matter of weeks Essacambuit took the picturesque pair at Saco Fort in Maine. The Earl made his word more than good by paying him three hundred pieces of eight.25 It was one thing to capture a pirate, the Earl found, another to hold him securely, and yet another to dispose of him. Boston jail was now fairly crowded with pirates, and the town simmered with rumor. He had more than once admitted his nervousness. "What to do with Bradish's crew and w'\ Kidd [and his] men, I know not," he wrote.26 He could not get them off his hands soon enough. Thus all one

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summer the names and persons and deeds of Bradish and Gillam and Kidd were associated and popularly confused until a whole treasure legend of Kidd developed out of one of Bradish's acts, of which more will be said. It was easy to think of them all and to fear them as "Kidd's men." Samuel Sewall, New England's Pepys, gave valuable assistance to the Earl of Bellomont in the Kidd affair, although his Diary has disappointingly few entries concerning Kidd. He, who would be "wise as a Serpant and harmless as a Dove," found himself appointed to the Commission, whose difficult and ticklish task it was to ferret out Kidd's treasure and appraise it for the Crown. Between Sewall and Bellomont the job was done with thoroughness, as we might expect. But we know that this Boston gossip, like the Earl, had no relish for it. Their detective work showed that the most notorious renegade, murderer, and pirate Gillam was close to Kidd. The infamous Gillam had turned Mohammedan and had been circumcised, the latter fact having been verified by well-known depositions taken from witnesses, "a surgeon and a Jew." Consequently, affairs took on a dark and desperate Oriental air. In Gillam's house was found a letter from Mrs. Kidd to an old Rhode Island pirate, one Pain, who had some of Kidd's money. Sewall sighed when "Kid, Bradish, and Gillam (who basely murder". Cap*. Edgecom)" were put in irons; and he wrote to a friend out in Fort St. George, " I long for the time when the Earth and Sea shall be cleared of such professed enemies of God and man." H e nevertheless followed the dictates of his legal mind and cast one of the three negative votes against the plan of his friend, the Earl, to hurry the pirates aboard H.M.S. Advice. There seems no reason to doubt that Sewall, recorder of New England trivia, knew as much about Captain William Kidd as any-

¿4 Pirate Laureate one besides the Earl of Bellomont, even to the removal from one warehouse to another of Kidd's treasure, undoubtedly a great secret. Long after Kidd had forlornly left the shores of Massachusetts Sewall was following the "case." Thus Kidd's reputation gravitated toward a second radiating center, first the Boston News agency, next the age's "mirror of hospitality" and great gossip. The total effect on the New England mind of Kidd's actions cannot be known. The severe logic of Calvinism can make much of sinners in the hands of an angry God. A pirate scare of the proportions of this one of 1699-1700 offers possibilities for speculation when we think how the famous Salem witchcraft frenzy worked its havoc only six years before. That the zeal of the Reverend Cotton Mather extended to the cells of Boston jail we know from his Diary, but especially in 1717 and 1724 when the curse of the pirates and the "singular afflations" of the preacher's prayers made the Boston divine the first man of the hour. How he walked and talked with pirates, how he moved vast audiences and spoke with the tongue of prophecy, how the printers sought his sermons on these occasions (unsolicited) is now well-known matter from his unblushing admissions. These activities extended back in the divine's life at least to April 16, 1697, when he wrote, "After the other public Services of the Day were over, I visited the Prison. A grate Number of Pyrates being there committed, besides other Malefactors, I went and pray'd with them, and preach'd to them . . . I hope I shall have some Fruit of these Endeavours." His text was " T h e Thief is ashamed, when hee is found." It could not be that Cotton Mather should pass by a field so ripe for the harvest. And he did not. Though he might preach a sermon a day for five consecutive days, he would

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not overlook Kidd, Bradish, Gillam, and the others in Boston jail. On Sunday, January 21, 1700, he wrote of the sermons of the week, "One of them (yesterday) was to Prisoners and Pyrats on Jer. 17, 1 1 . Hee gets Riches and not by right; leaves them in the midst of his Dayes and in his End shal be a Fool. And these Labours, do not oversett me: tho' indeed they afford one Reason, for my recording so little in these Memorials." 27 To the Governor, the roving factor, the newsman, and the magistrate is added the divine. Thus did the clamors and the stories of Captain Kidd, true and false, spread and multiply. Kidd was exalted to infamy with nothing left to sharpen the features of his portrait but a host of diabolic treasure legends.

4-

The "Kidd Business"

K

IDD'S LAST VOYAGE WAS F O R L O R N . I N D E L A W A R E BAY

he had had brief sanctuary. At Boston he had . been dramatically trapped despite the efforts of friends. Crossing the Atlantic he lay chained with thirtytwo fellow-pirates, and in the Downs he was met by a naval yacht and a military guard especially sent out by King William. H e was now a mere outlaw, hunted and brought in. No former virtue could save him. England and the East India Company had made up their minds. No voice rose in his behalf. No Bellomont hoped to the last that "the severall reports" of his "being forced by his men against his will . . . may prove true," 1 and no lawyers, postmasters, or government officials were his go-betweens. H e was from now on to be Kidd the notorious or archpirate, the greatest liar and the greatest thief in the world.2 The public mind was hostile, picturing him as an old-time pirate sent out to take others on the principle of setting a rogue to catch a rogue and taking its cue from the language of the aroused Tories 3 who soon pressed impeachment proceedings against four Whig lords: William, the Earl of Portland} John, Lord Somers; Edward, the Earl of Or ford; and Charles, Lord Halifax.

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The Tories had already exposed the secret partition treaties of 1698 and 1700 whereby King William connived at the seizure of the inheritance of Charles I I of Spain. They had forced the retirement from the Lord High Chancellorship of Lord Somers, who, they felt, was the heart and soul of the affair 4 and who was their principal target. They had connected him with Kidd and had made a stir in Parliament about the abuse of the Great Seal. They had, like politicians, burned with indignation at the picture of private profit gained at public expense.6 John Evelyn was annoyed that negligence of "the country party" caused the vote in Parliament on these complaints to be lost in December, 1699." It may be that some of the Tory gentlemen had gone to see a tiger baited by dogs, a circumstance that had cost them the vote on the East India Company merger only a few days before. They had narrowly failed on April 10, 1700, to pass a motion in the House of Commons for an address to the King perpetually excluding Somers and others from the King's councils and presence. They had harried the accomplished and vain Lord Halifax until he resigned from the Exchequer and the Treasury. Party papers followed every stroke. Slow and blind indeed would the Tories have been had they not seized the good fortune of Kidd's arrest and arrival home to capitalize their advances against these Whigs and to revive the Kidd scandals in an explosion of the impeachment proceedings. As the historian Bishop Burnet wrote, Kidd's action put a heavy load on the ministry, "chiefly on him who was at the head of the justice of the nation." These proceedings ran virtually parallel with the examination and trial of Kidd. On the day Kidd was committed in irons to Newgate, the King sent a warrant to the Lord High Chancellor, and the latter surrendered the Great

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Seal. It is commonly understood that the postponement of Kidd's trial (though Parliament sat at the time of his arrival) and the further noticeable delays were brought about by the Tories simply in order to make use of Kidd. Kidd needed extra time, too, in order to prepare his defense and try to recover his papers. On March 27 and 31, 1701, Commons sent for and examined Kidd. The next day the first of the impeachment messages went to the House of Lords. Side by side these two famous cases appear on the calendar, and also down through the many items in Narcissus Luttrell's famous diary. This day (March 27, 1701) the Commons twice examined Kidd. Tomorrow the legality of patent commissioning Kidd was to be debated. On March 29 the Commons were ready and issued an address to the King "for the speedy tryal of capt. Kidd." But there were still delays. Kidd was sent for. Kidd was visited. On March 31 "he confessed nothing material." The Keeper of Newgate was dismissed because he let Lord Halifax in to confer with the pirate. The impeachment and piracy affairs converged on May 8 and 10. Ten articles against the Earl of Portland, V and V I of which named complicity with Kidd, were read before and debated by the Lords the very day Kidd was found guilty of murder and of one of the piracy counts.7 Kidd was now condemned but languished in prison until May 23. On May 14 Portland's defense was read. On M a y 19 fourteen articles against Somers were read in the House of Lords, one of which dealt with Kidd. On May 23 Kidd was executed and by June 24 all the Whig Lords, despite the careful timing of the House of Commons, had been acquitted.8 Burnet declared that the Tories insisted so much that they merely convinced all people that they lacked matter to back up their charges.

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"When one design failed, another was set up." The "Kidd affair" engaged the pen of no less a person than Jonathan Swift, who made his debut in political controversy by defending Somers and the others in a closely and well argued pamphlet, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (London, 1701). His argument warned against the abuses of the power of impeachment of the great and undoubtedly contributed much to the acquittal of Somers. It is curious that in so doing the great English satirist allied his talents on the side of Captain Kidd. Tories deliberately vilified Kidd, and common gossip had it that they offered to spare his life if he would accuse his W h i g employers.9 Whigs were embarrassed by him; and though in the impeachment proceedings they denied Tory charges that Kidd was known to be a rogue from the start, nevertheless they did nothing to clear his name nor to restore his papers. Yet neither did they sell evidence against him, and in return he revealed absolutely nothing. Kidd may have been either a stubborn fool or a man of considerable integrity. His destruction was a foregone conclusion. " I suppose the examination of Kidd was not very strict," wrote high Tory Sir Christopher Musgrave to Robert Harley on April 25, 1700.10 Neither party relished a complete and thorough sifting of the facts. Kidd became a political football and "the subject of all conversation." His doubtful acts became monstrous. A l l London talked. Bellomont was an Irishman and his friends in London kept his kinsmen in Ireland informed by letters, two of which were publicly printed in 1701. It was the principal subject of discourse "in Ireland for a great while." Kidd and Livingston were Scots. Kidd was said to

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have had dealings with the ill-fated Scotch settlement at Darien, where rumor had it he intended at one of the last moments to fly. Scotland talked. Everyone down to the merest tavern haunter and pressed seaman knew that great things were astir, great men were desperate, and the mighty might fall. T h e impeachment proceeding was commonly referred to as "Kidd's business" or "Kidd's affair." T h e attack was led by Lord Howe, Sir Simon Harcourt, and Sir Edmund Seymour, whose tongues may not have dropped gall and poison as pictured by Macaulay, but who certainly pursued their political enemies with implacable hate. Public imagination was fired with the scandal from the start, and not a little because of rumors of fabulous treasure. W h e n H . M . S . Rochester, setting out in September, 1699, for Boston to bring Kidd home, had been driven back by hard weather, Tory tongues had it that all was collusion between the adventurers and the ministry, who were confederates in "the notorious piracies" and did not want Kidd any nearer. T h e captain pretended to meet great storms, they said, made much of his ship's defects, and laid her up at Plymouth, though she might have been repaired in a fortnight. 11 There is nothing "too hard for Malice, Faction and Interest," explained a person of quality in two public letters to an Irish friend; and he proceeded to tabulate the T o r y lies whispered about and "affirm'd with great assurance": 12 Kidd was commissioned with full knowledge that he was a notorious pirate. Kidd's commission gave him power to act piratically, even to treat with and pardon pirates. T h e Admiralty had never heard of Kidd. T h e Commission was granted contrary to law. Bellomont was sent to New York to continue piracies, and insurance rates consequently had

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bounded up. Sending out the Rochester was only a pretense. The letters patent, for appropriating instead of returning captured pirate booty, were unlawful, contrary to the Bill of Rights, full of specious words that served only to cover up justice, and contained no check or accounting to prove embezzlement. If they were ever proved so, nothing harsh would be done. The suffering East India merchants had nowhere to turn for compensation for losses. Kidd was the only judge of who the pirates were. Kidd had another unrevealed commission. Somers long ago had set the Great Seal to Kidd's pardon. More shocking disclosures were forthcoming. Kidd and Bellomont signed private articles of agreement. Such were the stories told, "fit to make a Noise with," said Whig sympathizers, "and to be used in order to impose on the Ignorant." Whig counter charges were circulated: All was a deliberate perversion of justice. Kidd was definitely made to understand both before and after the trial that he had only one way to save his life. "Charge two lords by name with somewhat that was Material." Kidd was being trained for the trial. H e was visited in prison only a few days before his execution and reminded of two lords who were "soliciting to have him Hang'd." Everything was done to confuse things and thwart justice. Evidence was tampered with. Private correspondence was opened and even exposed in the House of Commons. Kidd was examined in the absence of persons concerned, before no sworn officers, and the findings sealed j and a year later he was examined again, when all papers were opened, turned over, and mixed up. Tricks were played. Kidd was summoned in response to a supposed letter from him declaring he had something to say. Then the Tory, Sir E S r (obviously Edward

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Seymour) was caught in private, and presumably persuasive, conversation with him. Taverns buzzed. Tales multiplied. Kidd was said to have stolen his cabin boy's share of booty. Back and forth from Newgate to Commons, and from Commons back to Newgate, crowds by the hundreds followed him. Returning from the trick rendezvous, Kidd and his keeper stopped in a tavern near Charing Cross for a drink, and Kidd told the keeper and the mistress of the tavern what had transpired. Kidd owed money to one Kitsdale, a coffeeman near by the House of Commons. When Kitsdale came into Newgate to collect his eight shillings, he brought his son to see the pirate, and told Kidd that he was a fool. " I will not hang for anybody," said Kidd. This was the only basis for the notion that he had something to say to Sir E S r. One Stockdale, a tavern waiter and brother of a maidservant in Lord Halifax's house, told one Symmonds that Kidd had been spirited out of Newgate by Halifax. If one chanced not to hear the common talk in taverns and coffeehouses, he could read it in several editions of A Full Account of the Proceedings in Relation to Captain Kidd in Two Letters. Written by a Person of Quality to a Kinsman of the Earl of Bellomont in Ireland, printed and sold in the same year by the booksellers of London and Westminster.13 The "Kidd business" brought out a crop of anecdotes, true or false. According to one he was arrogant, boastful, and obscene. In 1699 Edmund Dummer, a sharp critic of abuses in the navy, told of the great impertinence in the Thames. According to this story, which must have been told often, Kidd in 1696 had boasted of his power in vain "rodomontades," and swore "he should pay no respect to the King's colours, wherever he met them."

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"A captain of a yacht," taking notice, gave orders to his men that should Kidd pass at Greenwich and not strike his colors, they should fire a shot into him. Kidd, "having a front wind, did as he said, showed no respect. But being shot, believing the yacht out of danger of call, Kidd's men in the tops turned up, and clap their back sides." The captain of the yacht protested his offended dignity to the Admiralty. Kidd proceeded on his ribald way enacting the same tableau for the benefit of "the ship" at the Nore, whereof he was sent into Sheerness but "through strange passiveness from all sides" was let loose. The obvious incorrectness of much of this story (what happened at the Nore was the pressing of Kidd's men by Captain Stewart) betrays its origin in the imagination, however "diversely and upon good authority" it came to the knowledge of Edmund Dummer. 14 More than one person tried to make money exploiting Kidd and his men. " I am a brother of the quill; I should be glad to drink a glass with you," said a loquacious Mr. Say to Kidd's surgeon when Say stumbled onto some of Kidd's men in Marshalsea prison. "Here is a mighty noise about Captain Kidd." 15 H e testified in Kidd's favor at the trial, but what journalist Say actually wrot? is not known. Kidd wrote Robert Harley, Speaker of the House of Commons, on May 12, 1701, as follows: I humbly have leave to acquaint your Honor that I was not privy to my being sent for up to your house the second time, nor to the paper lately printed in my name, both which may justly give offence to the House, but I owe the first to a coffeeman in the Court of Wards who designed to make a show of me for his profit; and the latter was done by one Nevvy, a prisoner in Newgate, to get money for his support at the hazard of my safety."16

64 Pirate Laureate The paper, "lately printed in my name," he said, may have been a broadside.17 It was up to the Keeper of Newgate whether to admit visitors to see Kidd or not. Kidd had friends and relatives in London, and the Keeper traditionally took in extra fees exhibiting notorious offenders in his charge. So many came to visit Kidd that anonymous letters were sent to the Navy Board, hinting at prison laxness and expressing fear that the pirate might escape. Among the visitors that normally might be expected to call upon him were Sarah Hawkins, a kinswoman, and her husband; the wives of Mead, his shipmaster, and Beck, his quartermaster; as well as several officers of the ship that brought him back from Boston.18 Though many a condemned man has made a more picturesque figure than Kidd on the scaffold and en route to it, certain happenings rendered the occasion of his execution memorable to minds easily impressed. His expectation of reprieve was generally known. From the Newgate chaplain's hurried account, printed as was the fashion almost simultaneously 19 with the public execution while the fervor of public interest was high, the world knew that the condemned Kidd "was not serious and devout as became a person in his Circumstances; but whether it .proceeded from a Heroick temper in not seeming in any way terrified or afraid at the approaches of Death (tho' in a violent manner), but being naturally of an undaunted mind and resolution, or from conceited hopes of obtaining a pardon, there being great endeavours (tho' in vain) used for that purpose, is yet unknown." One could believe what he wished from this. Since no one spoke a good word for Kidd, we may assume the general public believed his "conceited hopes"—if, indeed, it thought at all. Today it is disclosed from Paul Lorrain's Only True Account of the Dying

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Speeches of the Condemn'd Pirates what all the wide-eyed folk who witnessed the execution saw and reported to those less fortunate: But here I must take notice of a remarkable (I hope most lucky) accident which then happened . . . the Rope with which Capt. Kid was ty'd, broke, and so falling to the ground he was taken up alive, and had an opportunity to consider more the Eternity he was launching into. He was brought up and again Ty'd to the tree. Kidd died hard. This sort of happening naturally would quite obliterate any impression of Kidd's steadiness and calm. The chaplain's account was not made public in print until the next day. Especially would it seem right and proper for a hardened, dissolute Red Sea pirate if, as Chaplain Lorrain declared, Kidd came to the scaffold in an ill frame of mind "inflamed with Drink." 2 0 The actions and sounds of the elbowing thousands in the ribald and roistering Cockney crowd can well be imagined. The legendary significance of the double hanging of Kidd travelled to the New World, where it flourished long and was finally congealed in printed anecdote by the antiquarian John Watson in his Annals of New York.21 In a few days the body of Kidd was removed to Tilburypoint, farther down the river, where one pirate historian said it was suspended for many years.22 John Cheeke, the Marshall, did his job well. Into his £154 expense account for trial, hanging, and exposure, we note as others have, the 19s. 3d. "Paid at a Taverne at Wapping and at the H o m e Taverne, after our Retourne." 23 Cheeke and his men at government expense built their part of the legend. As soon as Kidd was dead, notations to that effect went

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into diaries, letters, and the London newspapers. The Tories, having failed to make good use of Kidd while alive, pressed their futile impeachment proceedings against the Lords. And a crop of Kidd books, broadsides, and pamphlets appeared. Which publication appeared first cannot be determined now, but very likely it may have been the broadside ballad, "Captain Kid's Farewel," written if we may judge by analogy, by some professional ballad writer, to be sold on the streets on or about Friday, May 23, 1701, very likely all day (Kidd was hanged at low tide, 5:00 P.M.) and all along the route customarily travelled by the three carts from Newgate and Marshalsea to Execution Dock. This ballad lived long and travelled far, and so rates special attention. The next afternoon, after an apologetic advertisement regarding its tardiness in the Post Boy of May 24, appeared the Newgate chaplain's Only True Account, already mentioned. Sometime thereafter, in the next few years, public interest warranted the publication of broadsides and pamphlets: 1. The Arraignment, Tryal and Condemnation of Capt. William Kidd jor Murther and Piracy upon six Several Indictments at the . . . Old Bailey, . . . May, ijoi. To which are added Capt. Kidd's two Commissions. Folio, London, 1701. The Same. Small octavo of 27 pp. London, 1703. 2. Articles of Agreement, made the 10th day of October . . . 16Q5. Between Richard, earl of Bellomont of the one part, and Robert Livingston, esq.; and Captain William Kidd. A folio broadside, printed on both sides. London, 1701. 3. A Full Account of the Proceedings in Relation to Captain Kidd. In Two Letters Written by a Person of Quality to a Kins-

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man of the Earl of Bellomont in Ireland. A 51 p. quarto. London, 1701. 4. A Full Account of the Action of the Late Famous Pyrate, Capt. Kidd. With the Proceedings Against Him, and a Vindication of the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Bellomont, Lord Caloony, late Governor of New England, and other Honourable Persons from the Unjust Reflections cast upon them. By a Person of Quality. A 41 page reprint of the London quarto. Dublin, 1701. A Full Account of the Proceedings, etc. Second edition. London 1701. Reissued, London, 1705. T h e Full Account itemized the tales spread by Tories, yet it was restrained in manner and its plain statements are corroborated now. It could only have been leered at by Tories, however, and there was a rumor abroad twenty years later that it was Bellomont's "justification of himself." 24 But this could hardly be, for Bellomont was already, before Kidd's trial, dead. 5. A True Account of the Behaviour, Confession, and Last Dying Speeches o f . . . W. K., and the rest of the Pirates that were Executed . . . 23rd of May, IJOI. A folio broadside. London, 1701. 6. The Proceedings of the King's Commission of the Peace . . . held for the Tryal of Captain William Kidd and Nine of his Men . . . May, IJOI. A four-page folio. No date and place of publication. 7. Various accounts more or less digested, selected, and abridged, in: New State of Europe. 8. A Complete History of Europe, or a View of the Affairs Thereof, Civil and Military for the Year IJ 01 . . . to be Continued Annually. Octavo, London, M D C C I I . p. An Exact Abridgement of all Tryals . . . relating to High Treasons, Pyracies, etc. (during the reigns of William and

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Anne) . . . Together with their dying Speeches. Octavo. London 1704. Contains the Kidd Trial abridged. 10. This brings the factual story down to the moment when Kidd takes his place forever alongside other "most notorious pirates" in Capt. Charles Johnson's famous collection of criminal biographies of 1724. His biography from thence to modern times is another part of the story. 1 1 . One other item indicates that at a very early date Kidd was imaginatively conceived. In 1702 was published a folio broadside called, A Dialogue Between the Ghost of Captain Kidd, and the Napper in the Strand, Napt. This is a dialogue followed by a set of verses in which Kidd and the Napper answer each other in alternate three-line rhymed stanzas, each ending, "Which nobody can deny." With the printing and reprinting of the trial proceedings the world could read what it had learned formerly only by hearsay. It might be erroneous to assume now that inflated tavern tales were punctured and that a partial restoration of fact made. The amazed modern reader of the text, however, is very soon impressed quite otherwise. The trial itself, with all proper allowances for differences in legal practice and phraseology then and now, can be viewed only as a monstrous combination of persons and events deliberately calculated to crush the blocked and frustrated Kidd. It is quite true that the indictment for murder came as a designed surprise, but surely too much has been made of this. From that day in the Downs when Kidd saw his last remaining papers taken from his sea chest and his pockets, he knew he was doomed to die. He said so. He tried to borrow a knife in order to kill himself.25 It is thus logical and easy to fall into the conventional modern position of berating English justice and feeling sorry for Kidd. Without going over the two days' trial proceedings, which are all of one color, certain parts may prof-

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itably be set down in a new connection, that of language— words and phrases, oratory and platform tricks, shrewdly if not perhaps artistically devised to create a definite, preconceived picture of a man. The trial, especially the printed account of it, set before all eyes the figure of a ferocious, barbarous, incorrigible pirate. This court-conjured, Torytinged, bad man conception was definitely another one of the early factors in crystallizing out of this retort of mixed affairs the Captain Kidd of legendary ill repute. Kidd's sturdy and persistent appeal for counsel and for postponement of the trial until he could get his papers back again was hopelessly overridden by his sneering prosecutors. " I beg your lordships that I may have counsel admitted, and that my trial may be put off} I am not really prepared for it," he said. "Nor ever will, if you can help it," came the law's replyA few examples will show the nature of the oral attack upon him. First the indictment for murder, read aloud in the court: "That William Kidd, late of London, Mariner, not Having the Fear of God before His Eyes, but being mov'd and seduc'd by the Instigation of the Devil, the 30th Day of October, in the Ninth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord, William the Third . . . by Force and Arms, &c. ufon the High Sea, near the Coast of Malabar, in the East Indies . . . then and there being, feloniouslyy voluntarily, and of his Malice aforethought, then and there did make an Assault, in and ufon one William Moore, in the Peace of God, md of our said Sovereign Lord the King, to wit, then md there being, and to the Shif aforesaid calVd the Adventure Galley then and there belonging; and that

jo

Pirate Laureate the aforesaid William Kidd, with a certain wooden bucket, bound with Iron Hoofs, of the Value of Eight Pence, which he the said William Kidd, then md there had and held in his right hand did violently, feloniously, voluntarily, and of his Malice aforethought, beat and strike the aforesaid William Moore, in and ufon the right fart of the Head of him the said William Moore, a little above the Right-ear of the said William Moore . . . giving to the said William Moore . . . one mortal Bruise, of which mortal Bruise the aforesaid William Moore, from the said 30th Day of October . . . did die . . . That the aforesaid William Kidd, feloniously, voluntarily, and of his Malice afore-thought, did kill and murther the aforesaid William Moore."

Kidd maintained that Moore was mutinous; Bradenham, the ship's doctor, and Palmer (who had turned King's evidence) said he was not. Kidd declared that it was not done by design but in passion, as many a captain had mortally disciplined his men, for which he was heartily sorry; the Crown said otherwise. The Lord Chief Baron Ward's addresses to the jury, occupying a folio page and a half, magnified the "malice prepense" of Kidd, his murderous intent, his unreasonable and unjustifiable act where there was no mutiny, no heat, no scuffle;—just William Moore, gunner, in good health and the peace of God, grinding a chisel on the deck, and his murderous commander calling him "Lousy dog" and hitting him over the head with an ironbound bucket. The perversion of fact in this speech gains its effect by not being offset by a rebuttal, however plain or exaggerated, for Kidd. " I have witnesses," shouted Kidd. "You should have spoken sooner," said the Lord Chief Baron.

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The partiality of the murder trial, however, pales into insignificance before the harsh light of sarcasm, innuendo, rhetorical question, and patent falsification of the five trials for piracy, especially the first. Dr. Newton, Advocate of the Admiralty, began it. His long and partial account in the indictment of Kidd's voyage was studded with remarks like the following: "In that Place [New York] this number quickly increased to 155 Men: a Force sufficient, if he had meant well, to have made him useful to the Publick; and to prove as mischievous, if his Designs were otherwise: and what those are will quickly appear." "And now, instead of Taking Pirates, he becomes one himself, and the greatest and the worst of all." "And there [off the coast of Malabar] accordingly, for several Months, he committed many great Piracies and Robberies, taking the Ships and Goods of the Indians and others at sea, Moors and Christians, and torturing cruelly their Persons, to discover if anything had escaped his hands; burning their Houses and killing after a barbarous manner the Natives on the Shore; equally cruel, dreaded and hated both on the Land and at Sea. "These Criminal Attempts and Actions had rendered his name (to the Disgrace and the Prejudice of the English Nation) too well known, and deservedly detested, in those remote Parts of the World; and he was now looked upon as an Arch-Pirate, and the common Enemy of Mankind; and accordingly two Portuguese Men of War went out in pursuit of him, and one met with and fought him for several hours." "This, Gentlemen, is the Crime he is Indicted for, Piracy; the growing Trouble, Disturbance and Mischief of the Trading World . . . the scandal and reproach of the European Nations, and the Christian Name, (I wish I could not say, that the Kidd's and Avery's had not made it more particu-

72 Pirate Laureate larly so of the English) amongst Mahometans and Pagans . . . This is the Person that stands indicted at that Bar, than whom no one in this Age has done more Mischief, in this worst kind of Mischief; or has occasioned greater Confusion and Disorder, attended with all the circumstances of Cruelty and Falsehood, and a Complication of all manner of 111. "If therefore these Facts shall be proved upon him, you will then, Gentlemen, in finding him Guilty do Justice to an Injured World, the English Nation, (Our Common Country) . . . and, lastly, to your selves, whom the Law has made Judges of the Fact." Bradenham and Palmer continue to provide evidence for the King; Kidd's witnesses, who have seen his French passes, continue to fail to make an impression. So does Captain Hewson, his old friend from West Indian days, who testified as to Kidd's good character and firm intentions despite his original hesitation at entering the private venture at all. The Lord Chief Baron Ward and Mr. Coniers, another prosecutor, are not above rather persistent bullying. At last, long after Kidd cried out in protest "It is vain to ask any questions," the Lord Chief Baron Ward moves into his classic for the day, his second address to the jury, covering two folio pages when printed. The trial is for "Piracy and Robbery on a Ship called 'the Quedagh Merchant.' " Oratorical coloring sets off his description of Kidd at New York. "Now, you see what Way they went to work, and what Measures they took. Capt. Kid goes out, and goes to New York and when he was there, he has a project in his Head of setting up Articles between himself and the People." H e subtly inflates with, "Now this is the great Case that is before you." H e harps on the French passes. H e even twits Kidd by saying they never existed because Kidd cannot produce them.

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The next day, a similar mock trial goes on with, however, a somewhat soberer address to the jury by Mr. Justice Turton. Whether or not one now has feelings for or against Kidd in his predicament, the fact remains that readers in 1701 and on, who must have taken the trial proceedings principally at face value, read harsh and violent words of condemnation coined in the heat of vindictive political warfare and calculated to do just what they did, blacken Kidd with Satanic darkness forever.

5 Octavo Kidd

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IMPLE FOLK SANG BALLADS AND BELIEVED T H E " V I L -

lainies" of Captain Kidd. What of the serious reader, the skeptic, and the scholar? What of reposeful gentlemen surrounded by their own books, who looked questioningly though tolerantly at ballads and broadsides but who with the smell of oil and old leather around them loved to settle down to bespectacled hours with solid dependable books—histories, travels, accounts of the old days? Did they, like the American antiquarian, Watson, graduate from the terror of the nursery to the amused delight of the library? They did. "Kidd the most notorious pirate" was their Kidd, too. No scholar disturbed the legend until it was far too late. Supposedly authentic accounts in cumbrous folios and demurer octavos, often adorned with woodcuts not many degrees removed from the crude art of the broadside, rested upon their shelves; but even the most conservative historians of the time, like Oldmixon (1708) and Burnet (1724-1734), 1 accepted without question the Kidd story; and the best pirate histories played up Kidd's atrocities. They all contributed their share in fixing legend by repeating it, or at least, as in Smith's History of New York

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(1757), by not examining or questioning what was already general belief. It is true that in 1839, when Americans were reviving an extraordinary interest in Kidd's buried gold and historical societies in New York and Pennsylvania were beginning to collect memorials of olden times, James Fenimore Cooper detected a discrepancy between fact and fiction regarding Kidd. In the History of the Navy 2 he saw that Kidd was guilty of "those acts that have since given him a notoriety that would seem to be altogether disproportioned to his deeds." Cooper's voice was faint and alone. Against him were writers like Thompson, who in the History of Long Island, often reprinted since 1839, wrote more characteristically of a Kidd who lurked "like a shark" at Madagascar darting out at will to ravage the shipping of all nations, and the U. S. Criminal Calendar (1832 and on), which declared the African natives found all pirates to be honest traders except the murderous Kidd. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century when Joseph B. Felt sent back his notes from London to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register and E. B. O'Callaghan began publishing his reprints of documents relating to Colonial New York 3 was there made public the material for any sober historical writing on Kidd. John Campbell in The Lives of the Lord Chancellors (1848) and W. W. Campbell in Robin Hood and Caftain Kidd (1853) s a w the political issue clearly as others had, that Kidd's trial was but a step in the move against the Whig Lords. The first Campbell accepts the fact that Kidd was the wretch of popular belief; the second Campbell does not. But by 1853 ^ w a s already too late. Not even the recent extravagant swing toward exonerating a martyred Kidd has uprooted the folk-consciousness of Kidd as the

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pirate-monster. Macaulay, allowing that Kidd may once have intended to follow instructions, assumes in the History of England that he turned to deeds of rapacity and shameless cruelty. Nineteenth-century historians of New England and of Madagascar likewise perpetuated the old notion.4 Criminal "Calendars," bearing about them an official air, only increased and extended the popular concept. T w o of these, The Newgate Calendar (1810-?) and the U. S. Criminal Calendar (1832-1840), ran through numerous editions between 1810 and 1850 in America. Instead of being authoritative and factual they were given to hearsay and the semi-lurid. The Newgate Calendar made much of "John" Kidd's trial and execution and the "public clamour" at that time, summarizing his character as ruled by the passion of avarice and duplicity. Henry St. Clair, in the extremely erroneous and often reprinted U. S. Criminal Calendar, presented one of the few freshly rewritten accounts to be found in the century. His Kidd was a vacillating, dishonest, cruel turncoat who became "the terror of the Indian Seas" and "infamous all over the civilized world," a name "familiar to every American." St. Clair is unable to account for all the stories of Kidd but reflects their influence on his own story. The whole book "compiled from the best authorities" neglects historical accuracy for the then fashionable moral purpose of presenting An Awful Warning to the Youth of America, being an Account of the most horrid Murders, Piracies, Highway Robberies, &c. &c. Sin is ably held "up to abhorrence" by the fifteen engravings scattered through this popular book, especially in a Tarquinized "wither'd Murder" on the cover and on the title page supported by a quotation from Shakespeare's Rafe of Lucrece.

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In speaking of Kidd, "the earliest name of terror along our coast," Watson remarked in 1844 that though he had never seen William Bradford's History of the Pirates (New York, 1724), he had a "conception of it and its terrifying pictures, as once seen and read by my mother when a child. It had every character of the marvelous surely." * No wonder this charming old antiquarian, who believed that several deposits of Kidd's treasure had been made on Long Island, regretted the disappearance of all the old pirate ballads! Most of these lurid accounts go back originally to Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Most Notorious Pirates (1724 and 1726), which was indeed the very book Bradford had printed. This famous work is pre-eminent in the realm of pirate lives. It is to Avery, Kidd, and the pirates of the first quarter of the eighteenth century what Esquemeling's Buccaneers of America was to Henry Morgan and the buccaneers of thirty to fifty years earlier. The first part of this collection of lives, intending to deal only with pirates who flourished from 17x7 to 1724, emphasized the exploits of the spectacular Avery $ the second, expanding the field, featured Kidd. Johnson's guiding principle in compiling both parts was purely journalistic. His eye and ear responded to popular taste. London readers in 1724, after a preliminary essay on piracy, were lured to the first pirate-biography of Part I with the following: "None of these adventurers were ever so much talked of, for a while, as Avery; he made as great a noise in the world as Meriveis does now." 6 Noise was a criterion. When, through immediate popular acclaim, Johnson doubled the size of his book, he added among some twenty new lives of "the most notorious" the life of "Captain Kid and His Crew," accompanying it with the second largest noise-puff

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in the whole book. In it we find today the first statement by any one of any supposed literary authority ranking Kidd with others of his cloth. It is true that Alexander Smith, also a "Captain," at least as early as 1719 had included a life of Kidd in his often reprinted History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, but this wild agglomeration is really neither fact nor fiction. Mostly it is generous theft from Esquemeling's Buccaneers of America, from which were taken verbatim whole paragraphs of the deeds of Henry Morgan along the Spanish Main, unblushingly attributed to Kidd as one of Morgan's men. Fortunately or no, this chaotic account took no root, and Johnson remained the legitimate founder of Kidd biography. Johnson was ordinarily a blunt writer. H e characteristically began each short biography with a plain statement of necessary fact. Here, however, he abandoned for a second time his habitual abrupt beginning. " W e are now going to give an account of one whose name is better known in England, than most of those whose histories we have already related. T h e person we mean is Captain Kid, whose public trial and execution here rendered him the subject of all conversation, so that his actions have been chanted about in ballads. However, it is now a considerable time since these things passed, and though the people knew in general that Captain Kid was hanged, and that his crime was Piracy, yet there were scarce any, even at that time, who were acquainted with his life or actions, or could account for his turning Pirate." 7 Avery's much longer puff aims to disprove fanciful false rumors, Kidd's to supply little-known facts. In Johnson's eye their reputations seem about equal. Compared with some, Johnson's account of Kidd is quite restrained and surprisingly factual. It follows very well the

Octavo Kidd 79 trial proceedings. At no time, however, does it doubt Kidd's guilt, nor does it, despite Johnson's hints, explain Kidd's turning to evil ways. The most Johnson says for him is that he had short-lived fits of penitence, an echo, it would seem, of the ballad. Without qualification he lays the blame on Kidd himself for turning pirate, saying erroneously that, like Tew, he had persuaded and lured his men. He pictures Kidd infatuated with his successes, engaged in robbery and pillage,flatteringhimself that his good connections at home would get him off safely. Johnson's life became the standard, and the source for many later ones. It is still cited as an authority. It undoubtedly reflected the sober and accepted general notion in the eighteenth century and later of this New York pirate-captain. The whole big rogues'-gallery book not long after was mixed in with Smith's analogous History of the Highwaymen. At a still later time (18x4) Part II of Johnson (including the life of Kidd) split off from the parent work and was published separately at London and Norwich. But on the whole Johnson's History of the Most Notorious Pirates has remained intact—the great English pirate library, probably doing more to give form and substance to our notions of pirates and piracy than any other book. It has the additional literary interest of being, within good reason, the possible work of Daniel Defoe under the frequently employed device of a pseudonym.8 If this should become the accepted view, it will be Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and famous pamphlet lives of other criminals and the father of modern journalism, who in the future may be said to have first crystallized and seriously set for us the official, if unhistoric, character of Captain Kidd. A hundred years later Johnson's General History was

80 Pirate Laureate generously copied from, most often under a disguised title like The Pirates' Own Book. Johnson's account of Kidd was perpetuated with only minor changes in two such pirate books published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1829 and 1835.® In 1845 Henry Brooke's Highwaymen and, Pirates' Own Book, appearing in Philadelphia and New York, ignored Kidd altogether, but this was an exception. The Pirates Own Book of Boston and Portland (1837 anc^ 1859), 10 luridly illustrated in the best shilling shocker and dime-novel manner, padded out Johnson with fictitious details of ravaging and gore, and posed for an undiscriminating public a "Robert" Kidd that was "no better than a nondescript animal of the ocean," who buried his Bible and set out on a deliberate career of crime. This work, which ran through eight editions in twenty-five years, appears to be the work of Charles Ellms, a Boston stationer and compiler of almanacs and other popular books, and Samuel N. Dickinson, the Boston printer who produced the famous Boston Almanac. The effect of the illustrations in these books, especially on the young, should not be underestimated. Philip Gosse reproduces three from the Pirates Own Book of 1842 (Philadelphia) in his modern History of Piracy. This then was the Kidd of history and biography to the middle of the last century, villainous, brutal, unquestionably a most, perhaps the most, notorious pirate. Colorful popular beliefs remained current and dominated even serious historical attempts that might have been to the contrary. In our time such a book as Howard Pyle's Buccaneers and Marooners of America reprints Johnson verbatim, though this may be justified on the ground of artistic interpretation of folk material. But when William McAdoo dedicates his Procession to Tyburn (1927) to "all persons

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with open and receptive minds to substantiated facts about crimes and criminals," yet reprints an account of Kidd from the absurdly incorrect and quite unsubstantiated Criminal Recorder . . . by a Student of the Inner Temfle (London, 1804), we find ourselves still under the overpowering spell of legend. People think what they wish to think, and regardless of the findings of modern historians to the contrary it is extremely unlikely that Kidd lore will change much or ever die out.

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P

EOPLE READ, BUT PEOPLE ALSO CONTINUED TO SING OF

Captain Kidd and his wickedness. N o journalist or historian has left any description of the actual crowd jammed against the rails and ropes to see Kidd die on M a y 23, 1701, although Kidd's behavior at that moment filled the columns of two folio broadsides prepared by the Ordinary of Newgate and an unknown author composed fifty lines of doggerel couplets called an Elegy}

W h e n a criminal went to execution in London in those .days, he travelled across the city by a prescribed route from Newgate, Marshalsea, or the Fleet to Tyburn or Execution Dock. T h e crowd made holiday, howling, laughing, quarreling, swilling beer and gin, hurling impudent and ribald jests, picking pockets, hawking wares, elbowing for the right of way along the wall, singing ballads, reading broadsides, eluding or engaging strolling strumpets—one continual fair all the way. T h e hangman swore at delays. T h e condemned was more often than not drunk or drinking madly, uttering blasphemy and vilification that turned, however, to moral speech and dying confession on the scaf82

T h e Road to H e l l and Heaven 83 fold. Professional journalists often had such a dying confession written out and printed, which the condemned would pronounce, sign, and hand to the sheriff or attending chaplain. Such a moral confession was an invitation to take the road to heaven and shun the road to hell. Then the crowd would buy. If the prisoner were spectacular and a favorite, like the prison-breaker Jack Sheppard, they cheered and threw nosegays. If he were otherwise, like the king of the underworld Jonathan Wild, they jeered him, pelted him, and spat at him. W e do not know their actions or emotions that afternoon, whether there were cheers or jeers for the doomed Captain as he stood with the noose about his neck riding backwards in the cart along the relatively short way to Execution Dock. From a rather extensive knowledge of other execution scenes of the time, it is safe to guess that the citizenry hooted and jeered by the thousand. Kidd had done nothing like Daniel Defoe in the stocks to endear himself to the London mob. Like Jonathan W i l d he went to a public death that was the just end of a public enemy, "a most notorious pirate" among many in the mass executions then going on. Or, as wrote the unknown author of the Elegy on the Death of Caft. William Kidd that appeared but a day after the execution, The Devil (ready for him) Goal'd and Hang'd him, To no One's Sorrow, rather Joy display; Who weeps to see a Conquer'd BEAST OF P R E Y ? A much gayer little piece of moral warning was the "Dialogue between the Ghost of Capt. Kidd, and a Kid-napper," which has been archly included in Poems on Affairs of State (London, 1704). It went as follows:

84

Pirate Laureate Dialogue between the Ghost of Capt. Kidd, and a Kid-napper.

Kid. From the Boat of old Charon in the Stygian Ferry, From my Ship I am come again to my Wherry, And from thence, my old Friend, with you to be merry; Which nobody can deny. Nap. Stand off, thou grand Pyrate, I have nothing to do With such plund'ring Rogues and Robbers as you, H a d I been of your J u r y , I had hang'd you too; Which, &c. Kid. How now Brother Nap per, why in such a Fury ? I t could not have been worse, had you been of my J u r y ? B u t I left you in better Temper I assure you: Which, &c. Nap. B u t you and the Devill still ow'd me a Shame, And now with a Vengeance at last it came, And it has quite ruin'd my honest good N a m e ; Which, &c. Kid. B u t Brother, you know that was pretty well gone; For tho the Seeds of your Honesty often were sown, I never yet heard that any were grown: Which, &c. Nap. Thou Son of a Boatswain, begot in a Skuller, Thou Dunce of a Pyrate, my Head is not duller; T h o you got your Wealth faster, my Pocket is fuller, Which, &c. Kid. B u t be not so haughty and angry, good Brother, I f we two Kidnappers understand one another,

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There will be no occasion for all this pother: Which, &c. Nap. A Kinsman, but no Cater-Cousin I had; And of such you know I oft ship'd you a Lad, But this last and the Law have almost made me mad: Which, &c. Kid. I hope you took warning by my woful Condition, For that good Advice I gave with Contrition, To take care how you acted beyond your Commission; Which, &c. Nap. \ A Commission they told me I had of the Peace, But not to send People away to the Seas, Which makes me almost melt in my Grease: Which, &c. Kid. It is time I confess, now you're taken thus napping, To take care lest you coach it with me to Wapping, Since you see me trapan'd, some are as good at trapping; Which, &c. Nap. 'Tis true, Brother Kid, that I live in the Strand, Where the Low-water Mark is the nearer at hand, You are Pyrate at Sea, as I Pyrate at Land; Which nobody can deny. Also at this time was written a ballad, now famous, "Captain Kid's Farewel to the Seas." This was a characteristic piece of eighteenth-century yellow journalism, the sort that was often nicely timed for the day of execution. At least one copy of this ballad has existed to our day, and it has often been reprinted wholly or in part. It was the first and truest fiction of Kidd. The anonymous author notes the capture of or the attack upon the correct ships, with one ex-

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ception only. H e properly associates Captain Kidd with Captain Culliford, an actual person among those whom Kidd was supposed to seek out and capture. Culliford is brought into the ballad even in the first person. T h e ballad writer tosses off twenty-two, five-line stanzas of rough verse, reciting the personal confession of Kidd's lawless acts, his pious regrets, and his moral warnings to others. "Captain Kid's Farewel" was a good job of ballad making and was destined to go far and live long. It was blessed with catchy, familiar ballad tunes. It came to the Colonies almost immediately, where it was so popular for a hundred years that its rough rhythms were worn down to easier smoothness and its narrative nonchalantly reworked. I shall refer to these two versions, the early and the later, as the English and the American. T h e English version, a folio broadside 2 probably selling for tuppence, went as follows: Captain Kid's Farewel to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament,

1701.

T o the tune of Coming Down M y name is Captain Kid, who has sail'd [who has sail'd], M y name is Captain Kid, who has sail'd; M y name is Captain Kid What the laws did still forbid Unluckily I did while I sail'd [while I sail'd, etc.]. Upon the ocean wide, when I sail'd, [when I sail'd], Upon the ocean wide, when I sail'd, Upon the ocean wide I robbed on every side, With the most ambitious pride, when I sail'd.

The Road to Hell and Heaven

My faults I will display while I sail'd, [while I sail'd], My faults I will display while I sail'd, My faults I will display, Committed day by day [A line lost.]

8j

Many long leagues from shore when I sail'd, [when I sail'd], Many long leagues from shore when I sail'd, Many long leagues from shore I murdered William Moore, And laid him in his gore, when I sail'd. Because a word he spoke when I sail'd, [when I sail'd], Because a word he spoke when I sail'd, Because a word he spoke, I with a bucket broke His scull at one sad stroke, when I sail'd. I struck with a good will when I sail'd, [when I sail'd], I struck with a good will when I sail'd, I struck with a good will, And did a gunner kill As being cruel still when I sail'd. A Quida merchant then while I sail'd, [while I sail'd], A Quida merchant then while I sail'd, A Quida merchant then I robbed of hundreds ten, Assisted by my men, while I sail'd. A banker's ship of France, while I sail'd, [while I sail'd], A banker's ship of France, while I sail'd, A banker's ship of France Before us did advance: I seized her by chance, while I sailed.

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Full fourteen ships I see when I sailed, [when I sailed], Full fourteen ships I see when I sailed, Full fourteen ships I see Merchants of high degree; They were too hard for me when I sailed. We steered from sound to sound while we sailed, [while we sailed], We steered from sound to sound while we sailed, We steered from sound to sound, A Moorish ship we found; Her men we stripped and bound while we sailed. Upon the ocean seas while we sailed, [while we sailed], Upon the ocean seas while we sailed, Upon the ocean seas A warlike Portuguese In sport did us displease, while we sailed. At famous Malabar when we sailed, [when we sailed], At famous Malabar when we sailed, At famous Malabar We went ashore, each tar, And robbed the natives there, when we sailed. Then after this we chased, while we sailed, [while we sailed], Then after this we chased, while we sailed, Then after this we chased A rich Armenian, graced With wealth, which we embraced, while we sailed. Many Moorish ships we took while we sailed, [while we sailed], Many Moorish ships we took while we sailed, Many Moorish ships we took; We did still for plunder look; All conscience we forsook while we sailed.

The Road to Hell and Heaven

I , Captain Culliford, while I sailed, [while I sailed], I Captain Culliford, while I sailed, I , Captain Culliford, Did many merchants board, Which did much wealth afford, while we sailed.

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Two hundred bars of gold, while we sail'd, [while we sail'd], Two hundred bars of gold, while we sail'd, Two hundred bars of gold And rix dollars manifold We seized uncontrolled, while we sailed.

St. John, a ship of fame, when we sailed, [when we sailed], St."John,a ship of fame, when we sailed, St. John, a ship of fame

We plundered when she came, With more than I could name, when we sailed.

We taken was at last, and must die, [and must die], We taken was at last, and must die, We taken were at last And into prison cast: Now, sentence being past, we must die. Tho' we have resigned while we must die, [while we must die], Tho' we have resigned while we must die, Tho' we have resigned awhile, While fortune seemed to smile, Now on the British isle we must die. Farewel the ocean main, we must die, [we must die], Farewel the ocean main, we must die, Farewel the ocean main: The coast of France or Spain We ne'er shall see again; we must die.

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Pirate Laureate

From Newgate now in carts we must go, [we must go], From Newgate now in carts we must go, From Newgate now in carts, With sad and heavy hearts, To have our due deserts we must go. Some thousands they will flock when we die, [when we die], Some thousands they will flock when we die, Some thousands they will flock To Execution Dock, Where we must stand the shock and must die. Typical of its kind, this ballad combines the vigor of narrative, the pleasure of internal rhyme, repetition and refrain, and the emotional release of moral condemnation. It is, however, roughly constructed. There seems to be no trace of the original tune, "Coming Down." In order to clear up present confusion concerning Kidd ballads, and because Kidd emerges with some definiteness as a figure in American folklore, I wish to give special attention to the American version, taken from extant American broadsides. Mr. Philip Gosse, well-known English collector and compiler, prints some stanzas from this version, without noting its American differences and with unexplained variations in Kidd's name.3 The musical notation that he gives 4 came from Mr. J. C. L. Clark of Lancaster, Massachusetts, indicating a possible American source for the tune. On the other hand, the American historian, J. F . Jameson, prints only the English version. Elliott's New England History and Hale's New England History in Ballads, American books also, print the American version.5 H . T. Wilkins, English explorer and treasure-hunter, prints stanzas from both. So much for the general confu-

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sion. Wilkins and Jameson come near the truth by suggesting variations.6 Only Wilkins ventures the assertion that the English version was the original. Had the law provided for the trial and execution of pirates in the Colonies in 1699, Kidd would not only have met his fate on this side of the Atlantic, but in all probability the first version of a Kidd ballad would have been written in Boston. Even so, of course, its later history might still have been approximately the same. The ballad became American, anyway. The American version, taken here from the examination of a dozen broadside copies, goes as follows: The Dying Words of Cap.

Robert Kidd

A noted pirate who was H A N G E D at Execution Dock, in England. YOU captains brave and bold, hear our cries, hear our cries, You captains brave and bold hear our cries, You captains brave and bold, tho' you seem uncontrol'd Don't for the sake of gold lose your souls, lose your souls, Don't for the sake of gold lose your souls. My name was Robert Kidd, when I sail'd, when I sail'd, My name was Robert Kidd when I sail'd My name was Robert Kidd, God's laws I did forbid, And so wickedly I did when I sail'd. My parents taught me well, when I sail'd, when I sail'd, My parents taught me well when I sail'd, My parents taught me well to shun the gates of hell, But against them I did rebel, when I sail'd.

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Pirate Laureate

I curs'd my father dear when I sail'd, when I sail'd, I curs'd my father dear when I sail'd, I curs'd my father dear, and her that did me bear, And so wickedly did swear when I sail'd. I made a solumn vow, when I sail'd, when I sail'd, I made a solemn vow, when I sail'd. I made a solemn vow, to God I would not bow, Nor myself one prayer allow, when I sail'd. I'd a bible in my hand, when I sail'd, when I sail'd, I'd a bible in my hand when I sail'd, I'd a bible in my hand by my father's great command, But I sunk it in the sand when I sail'd. I murder'd William Moore as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I murder'd William Moore as I sail'd; I murder'd William Moore, and I left him in his gore, Not many leagues from shore, as I sail'd. And being cruel still, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, And being cruel still, as I sail'd; And being cruel still, my gunner I did kill, And his precious blood did spill as I sail'd. My mate took sick and died, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, My mate took sick and died, as I sail'd; My mate took sick and died, which me much terrified, When he call'd me to his bedside, as I sail'd. And unto me did say, see me die, see me die, And unto me did say, see me die; And unto me did say, take warning now I pray, There'll come a reckoning day, you must die.

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You cannot then withstand, when you die, when you die, You cannot then withstand, when you die; You cannot then withstand the judgements of God's hand, But bound in iron bands you must die. I was sick and nigh to death as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I was sick and nigh to death as I sail'd! I was sick and nigh to death, and vow'd at every breath, To walk in wisdom's ways as I sail'd. I thought I was undone, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I thought I was undone, as I sail'd; I thought I waf undone, that my wicked glass was run, But my health did soon return, as I sail'd. My repentance lasted not, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, My repentance lasted not, as I sail'd; My repentance lasted not, my vows I soon forgot, Damnation's my just lot, as I sail'd. I steer'd from sound to sound, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I steer'd from sound to sound, as I sail'd; I steer'd from sound to sound, and many ships I found, And most of them I burn'd as I sail'd. I spy'd three ships of France, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I spy'd three ships of France as I sail'd. I spy'd three ships of France, to them I did advance, And took them all by chance, as I sail'd. I spy'd three ships of Spain, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I spy'd three ships of Spain as I sail'd; I spy'd three ships of Spain, I fir'd on them, amain, Till most of them were slain, as I sail'd.

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I'd ninety bars of gold, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, I'd ninety bars of gold as I sail'd, I'd ninety bars of gold and dollars manifold, With riches uncontrol'd, as I sail'd. Then fourteen ships I see, as I sail'd, as I sail'd, Then fourteen ships I see, as I sail'd, Then fourteen ships I see, and all brave men they be, And they were too hard for me, as I sail'd. Thus being o'ertaken at last, I must die, I must die, Thus being o'ertaken at last, I must die, Thus being o'ertaken at last, and into prison cast, And sentence being past, I must die. Farewell to the raging main, for I must die, for I must die, Farewell to the raging main, for I must die, Farewell to the raging main, to Turkey, France & Spain, I shall ne'er see you again, for I must die. To Newgate now I'm cast, and must die, and must die, To Newgate now I'm cast, and must die; To Newgate now I'm cast, with sad and heavy heart, To receive my just desert, I must die. To Execution Dock, I must go, I must go, To Execution Dock, I must go; To Execution Dock, where many thousands flock, But I must bear my shock, and must die. Come all ye young and old, see me die, see me die, Come all ye young and old, see me die; Come all ye young and old, you're welcome to my gold, For by it I've lost my soul, and must die.

T h e Road to Hell and Heaven 95 Take warning now by me, for I must die, for I must die, Take warning now by me, for I must die; Take warning now by me, and shun bad company, Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die; Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die. [device] Printed and sold at No. 26, High Street, PROVIDENCE, where Shop Keepers, Pedlers and others, can be supplied by the quantity (to sell again) at reduced prices. Imprints on some of these broadsides indicate that they were printed in, and of course hawked about the streets of, Boston, Providence, and probably New York. The late Professor George Lyman Kittredge, of Harvard, suggested dates for them as late as 1810 to 1820. The oldest one of seven in the library of the American Antiquarian Society, however, is identified by the librarian, Clarence Saunders Brigham, from the Bible and Heart imprint, the old woodcut, and the type as pre-Revolutionary, "some time between 1730 and the Revolution." 7 The others are early nineteenth century. Such extant American ballads of Kidd are nearly identical one with one another, variations throughout being minor matters of title, spellings, and substitutions that do not materially change meanings or meter.8 Versions taken down from the lips of American people vary too, but even so, clearly show their relation to this twenty-five stanza norm. Placed side by side, the English and American versions of the same ballad provide an interesting exhibition of the growth of a folk ballad. The earlier version, less fanciful but yet sensitive to popular demands of 1701, presents a narrative confession to be sung to a familiar tune. It corre-

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sponds to that original composition that we must assume was the basis or starting point of each old popular ballad, but long since lost in anonymity and the passing of time. I n this instance we still have it. And when differences between it and its survival a hundred years later in America are pointed out in that survival, they are seen to be elements dear to the folk and familiar in popular ballad practice. The matter that has fallen away is minor, non-folk matter of fact; and all stanzas or lines retained from the first composition are those that suit the traditional atmosphere. Some of these are reworked and elaborated upon, usually with the purpose of intensifying the wicked character of Kidd, now "Robert" instead of William. For example, plain statements in the earlier ballad, such as "most ambitious pride" and "my faults I will display," are stretched later to four stanzas dyed many shades blacker. First singers never heard that Kidd rebelled against his parents, cursing his father and mother dear, vowing solemnly to God to abandon piety and prayer forever, and translating his vow into the act of burying his Bible. Three rather awkward stanzas in the first ballad on William Moore shrink ultimately in the American version to two, one of which is the excellent one turning upon the idea: I murdered William Moore and laid him in his gore not many leagues from shore. A more circumstantial account was foregone in order to emphasize the word "murdered" in the first three lines with tremendous increase in effect. Thus a concept of deliberate and diabolic cruelty was built, a picture obviously reflecting eighteenth-century popular notions. T h e Elegy already referred to, contemporaneous with the first composition of the ballad, goes the diabolic limit at once, including such lines as,

T h e Road to Hell and Heaven He'd face Hell Gates, and all the Devils in it, Were't possible to S T E A L .

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and, As th' D E V I L is Mankind's Great Enemy, And K I D D his Humble Servant chose to be. Another instance is the matter of ships. In the London news ballad of 1701 all the ships mentioned are real in Kidd's experience, all but the St. John. A l l but the fleet of fourteen are dropped out as the ballad changes. These fourteen are used as a beginning of the finale in the later American form, the turning of the tide against Kidd that led to his capture and execution. Though the chronology be contrary to fact, it was useful in the evolution of the ballad. The "Full fourteen ships I see" stanza thus drops down from its original position as the ninth to the nineteenth. Furthermore, the captured ships become apocryphal "ships of France" and "ships of Spain," duly satisfying patriotic feeling against traditional enemies and crystallizing them in groups of the magic number three. This is perhaps the clearest indication of all of the power of tradition in the folk mind. The slight liberty taken by the original English author in saying, Farewel the ocean main The coast of France or Spain becomes for what reason I cannot imagine, except for color and euphony, Farewell to the raging main, to Turkey, France and Spain The very beginning and ending of the American version, finally, are worth a word. The original London ballad,

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clinging to an almost factual or news account, had begun, " M y name is Captain Kidd." In time, however, additions both at the beginning and end gave it the moral dyingconfession and dance-macabre touch so familiar in the ballads of much older times, and suitable always to the temperament of simple evangelical piety. A beginning stanza, in the meter and manner of the Irish "Come all Ye's," exhorts, "you captains brave and bold" not to "lose your souls" for the sake of gold; and eight later stanzas fill out the moral, ending with an address to all and sundry, "Take warning now by me, and shun bad company" and so avoid the fires of hell. So the rather accurate news ballad of 1701 became the almost completely fictitious cry of a lost soul by 1801, horror mounting to a climax and the emotions and senses engulfed the while in the multitudinous repetition of the melancholy "as I sailed." Simple American folk appropriated the ballad, adapting it to the art, tradition, and etiquette they knew. Thanks to the recent activities of professional and amateur collectors of ballads, it is now quite possible to trace the ballad of Captain Kidd over most of the eastern half of North America, and possibly into the American West, and certainly again onto the high seas. "The Dying Words of Captain Robert Kidd," or more simply "Captain Kidd" or "Kidd's Lament," has been (and in some places still is) sung from Mississippi to Nova Scotia, in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in the woods of Maine and the highlands of Carolina, in the fo'castle of ships, on the lone prairie, in the southern peninsula of Michigan, and in Pennsylvania camp meetings. It popped familiarly into Thoreau's mind at Walden Pond. Well into the twentieth century it has been heard on the lips of old seamen and of negroes on the Mississippi. Recent recordings, however, are

The Road to Hell and Heaven gg often fragmentary, telescoped, or corrupted through faulty memories and the passing of folkways.9 "We have so often sung 'Captain Kidd' that it seems American," wrote J . A. Lomax, the well-known ballad singer and collector, recently. Without doubt the folk of America made it, so that it is an American ballad on an American Colonial figure. "Captain Kidd" came to mean first and foremost the tune to which it was sung, so that more than once other words were set to it. The famous ballad of Admiral Benbow, "O come all ye seamen bold, lend an ear, lend an ear," was sung to "Captain Kidd," as was also the ballad of Sam Hall. Most of what we know, however, dates from practices and records of the nineteenth century. That "Captain Kidd" sang its way through its own century we adduce from indirect comment and the ballad conditions in general. The unsettled state of affairs in the Colonies in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when American songs centered so much on psalmody and patriotism, may have been something of an interval, at least in the centers of population. But "Captain Kidd," nevertheless, had taken firm root in the folk mind, because, as already noted, by the turn of the nineteenth century the ballad appears in its most highly perfected form, and antiquarians of that time look back with a significant glance. A description of one method by which it was unquestionably circulated and perpetuated is given in Douglas Gilbert's Lost Chords.10 Old men and women, known as "song sheet men," stood on city street corners with racks of penny broadsides beside them. When a customer paused and chose a ballad for its words, the hawker would hum or whistle the tune until the buyer had memorized it. Apparently the practice went beyond city street corners, for back in 1713 the Reverend Cotton

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Mather cried out in protest that "the minds and Manners of many People about the Countrey are much corrupted by foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey." 11 His contemporary, the Reverend Thomas Symmes of Bradford, recommended singing schools in New England parishes in order to divert young people, "who are most proper to learn, from learning idle, foolish, yes pernicious songs and ballads, and banish all such trash from their minds." 12 Thomas Fleet, printer, who flourished in Boston from 1712 to 1758, is said to have made no little part of his fortune by the printing and the sale of ballads, at one time ingeniously utilizing the reverse side of Papal Bulls taken by the bale from prize ships.13 And an early practice of another Boston printer, James Franklin, was to set his young brother Benjamin to the composition, printing, and distribution of ballads on events of the day. Only an accident of time prevented Benjamin Franklin from writing a ballad on the capture of Kidd, as he did a little later on the capture of Blackbeard. 14 As Watson the annalist turned the pages of "the old gazettes" in the first years of the nineteenth century, preparing notes for his Annals of Philadelphia and New York, he recollected the revival of the "pensive tones" of "Captain K i d d " in 1844 "in much bad taste" in camp meetings; and he wondered "that in so many pages . . . there should be so little reference to a former age, of traditionary accounts and reminiscences, nothing for instance in any form, about the former pirates, nothing of Blackbeard or K i d d ; and nothing of all the ballads!" If Watson is at all typical, it is clear that the fictitious ballad of Kidd was not only taken for fact, but contained probably the only facts people for a long time knew. Watson, for example, insisted that Kidd "was called Robert and was

T h e Road to H e l l and Heaven 101 executed as Robert" and refers unspecifically to an "old London edition account." Again, he put down, " K i d had been sometimes called William K i d , " and refers to the inventory of goods left with the Gardiners. Obviously to him Kidd was Robert Kidd, the Robert Kidd of the American ballad. 16 W h e n in 1814 Isaiah Thomas presented to the American Antiquarian Society his three-hundred-odd American broadside ballads, among which were two copies of " T h e Dying Words of Capt. Robert Kidd," he made several interesting observations. Bought from a Boston printer and seller in 1813, all the ballads had been printed sometime between 1810 and 1813 and had been aimed at seamen. They were being given to the American Antiquarian Society for preservation to show "what articles of this kind are in vogue with the Vulgar," though they were not so well printed as they had been seventy years before (1743) in Boston.16 "Captain K i d d " was so widely known in 1797, so fixed in its familiar phrase and form, as to suffer in certain Maine and New Hampshire newspapers a parody called "Capt. Kidd's Successor," a stanza of which reads: I purchased Georgia land, as I sailed, as I sailed, I purchased Georgia land, as I sailed, I purchased Georgia land, made up of rocks and sand; But I paid in notes of hand—and I jailed.11 N o record of all the ballads! Ballads there were. Back when the early papers had space for little more than military and maritime news and excerpts from books and other journals, back when the old almanac, "split to the core, flyblown and tattered" as it smoked above the fire, was the most thumbed and perhaps the only book in many a home,

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then "Captain K i d d " was indeed sung. It very likely did lodge in the brown columns of some old almanacs long since worn or cast out; there were "pirate almanacs." A melancholy narrative, it was wedded somewhere to a plaintive ballad tune in a minor key, the kind perhaps that Hetty sang in The Deerslayer, "one of those natural melodies that find favor with all classes, in every age, coming from and being addressed to the feelings." Students of folk song now recognize the metrical pattern as a variant of a well-defined old Welsh ballad known as "Venture Gwen, or the Plaint of the W i d o w " (Mentra Gwen, neu Cwynfau y Wraig W e d d w ) .18 In searching for the origin of the ballad tune "Captain Kidd," I have found no positive knowledge. T h e name ("Coming down") of the tune to which the London news ballad of 1701 was sung provides no clue. It is impossible to say whether the American "Captain K i d d " is the same, though of course the stanzaic pattern is. W h e n the notes of "Captain K i d d " were first set down they were ascribed to "Nicholson"; but such ascriptions in the old song books are misleading, Professor George Pullen Jackson informs me, being usually the names merely of those who set notes and provided harmonic parts for the oral tunes. On the other hand, there is reason to think that "Captain K i d d " is very old. Miss Anne Gilchrist, a thorough student of English folk song, traces it back through an old Scottish ballad, " M y Luve's in Germanie, send him hame, send him hame," to the sixteenth century.19 A good ballad may die if not nourished on a good tune. "Captain K i d d " was unusually lucky in this, taking on a meter and an air tested by four centuries of singers, a tune absolutely appropriate to its melancholy theme. Watson's

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reference to its revival (in bad taste) as a hymn tune among the pious, though startling, is but proof of its popularity and vigor. One very well known notation goes as follows:

Among the variations to be found in print and still being recorded by collectors of folk song, this one received certain official sanction in community and "concert" singing and was in all probability the form sung and heard by more thousands of people than any other. The Great Revival of 1800 and after, spreading from Presbyterian camp meetings in Logan county, Kentucky, to the Cumberland district of Tennessee, to the Northwest Territory and to the Carolinas, from the Presbyterians to the Methodists and the Baptists, played a definite part in nourishing and perpetuating the old ballad of Captain Kidd, notably its tune. Of the year 1830, Woodbridge Riley wrote in a popular literary history a few years ago:

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" I t was a time not only of religious revivalism but of popular excitement about hidden treasures, the wonder of the West, and the origin of the Indians. Where were Captain Kidd's buried chests? What had become of the Spanish booty? Who were the lost ten tribes of Israel? These were live questions, and they met with various answers."20 In this ballad may be observed a curious area of common ground between the worlds of the camp meeting and of pirate lore. The predominant element of the camp meeting was the enthusiastic and at times tumultuous singing of stirring hymns. The older hymns, both the versified psalms and the conventional Protestant hymns since Watts, were naturally sober, if not sombre. " I t is a pity that the Devil has all the good tunes," John Wesley is said to have remarked. A quick feeling for a lively tune seems to have been generally if subconsciously entertained, for many a rude camp meeting song in rough and irregular couplets, in long common and short meter, was composed. And many old ballads like "Barbara Allen," "Lord Lovel," or even "O'Reilly on the rolling sea bound for Amerikee" were put to pious use. The closeness of ballad and hymn is a well-known, even an ordinary, musical phenomenon—this common metrical formula of 8-6-8-6 coming to be called "common meter." And the cult of the psalm tune and the ballad is a marked characteristic of American music in the early part of the nineteenth century, despite the springing up in Portland, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York of more ambitious music societies. Before 1820 the controversy over whether group singing, sacred and secular, should be done by rote or by note had ended in favor of the latter. As a result, singing schools, singing "teachers," and tune books sprang into being. When the newer, cruder hymns, their language

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a mixture of Scriptures and everyday speech and their tunes popular, took well, they not only passed from mouth to ear, but under the baton and notation of itinerant preachers and singing masters were taught to audiences. Within the first decade of this wildfire religious movement, camp meeting songbooks appeared, and the "camp meeting hymn" had appeared by 1811 as a distinct type of American song 2 1 —the spiritual folksong. These were individualistic, often dealing with the rescue of sinners, often being narratives of personal experience, and often utilizing a refrain as a predominating feature. They filled much or all of the space in "songsters," "tunebooks," and "harmonies" from Jeremiah Ingalls' Christian Harmony (Exeter, N. H., 1805) to Hauser and Turner's The Olive Leaf (Philadelphia, 1878).22 A t first the camp meeting books contained words only and were likely to appear under a tide like Hymns cmd Sfiritual Songs for the Pious of All Denominations as Sung in Camf Meetings. Singing masters, like Ingalls and others in New England, first set down the tunes.23 Hopeful, mundane saints gathered symbolically at a hundred different rivers, thumbed the familiar pages, and sang in their whole-souled fashion hymns to the tune of "Captain Kidd" from Thomas Hynde's Pilgrim Songster (1810), William Moore's Columbian Harmony (1825), or Richard Weaver's Tune Book (1861). From the first two they sang nine stanzas of a pantheistic song beginning: Through all the world below God is seen, all around. Search hills and valleys through, There he's found. The growing of the corn, The lily and the thorn,

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Pirate Laureate The pleasant and forlorn, All declare, God is there: In meadows dressed in green, There he's seen.24

From Richard Weaver's Tune Book they sang, Come ye that fear the Lord, Unto me, unto me. T h e Kidd hymn to which the annalist familiarly referred was, Farewell, ye blooming youth. iC Wondrous

L o v e " and "Remember Sinful Youth, you must die, you must die," of the same stanzaic pattern, were in the Columbian Harmony. G. P . Jackson notes four more in his Downr-East Sfirituals (1943). For seventy years or more Kidd was among the elect—or at least he was on the road to heaven. Over in Massachusetts in the x 850's another musical development was in full swing, of interest to the pursuer of the Kidd ballad and of American popular song in general. In Stoughton, Boston, Braintree, Chelsea, Reading, and many other towns singing societies flourished, the humbler sort being in this instance a kind of secular parallel to the camp meetings but many of them historically much older. Originally organized to sing psalms and divert young minds from pernicious ballad trash, some of them began before long to make terms even with ballads. Boston boasted a Haydn and Handel Society, but more of these organizations were of the "Billings and Holden School," simple folk under some enthusiastic tanner, carpenter, or farmer singing songs they loved to sing. T h e New York

T h e Road to Hell and Heaven ioj papers indicate that a concert leader by the name of Dempster was giving ballad concerts as early as 1844. Part of the movement may have been a reaction to "fashionable" music. One of the most famous leaders of these groups, strangely slighted in the histories of American music, was a shoe dealer of Wellfleet who retired from the salt air and fisher folk of Cape Cod to a farm north of Boston near Reading. Robert Kemp liked to sing the old church songs and had a knack of getting others to sing. People gathered at his home sometime around 1854 for the simple pleasure of group singing. Others came just to listen. The Reading Old Folks Musical Society was informally and spontaneously organized. Its members revived with such enthusiasm the songs of their fathers that the Reading Lyceum Hall was rented and a public concert given. Robert C. Kemp and his Old Folks Concert Troupe travelled to Lynn, Boston, Washington, and New York. In Washington they sang before President Buchanan. The plain man who was their leader came to be known as "Father Kemp" and enjoyed an international reputation, and in the United States considerable applause. H e said, "Although I have swung my baton before a large choir in upwards of six thousand concerts, my word on it, I never knew a note of music, and cannot distinguish a 'minim' from a 'demisemiquaver.' I flatter myself however, that I can beat time with the most accomplished impresario." 26 And by virtue of that astonishingly simple act he tapped the wells of emotional feeling of a large part of the nation, furnished the then rather rare pleasure of public entertainment, and withal made himself an outstanding if not an important figure in the American scene in the fifties and sixties. A seven months tour took him into the West. In 1861 he toured England

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with thirty of his Old Folks Concert Troupe, visiting with indifferent success such centers as London, Liverpool, and Chester but finally abandoning the enterprise. Back home he continued with Monday Popular Concerts at Boston and elsewhere. Within a few years he was compiling his own songbooks, on the covers of which he was pictured in grandfatherly spectacles, fatherly full beard, and ministerial Prince Albert coat. In a five-year period he had given over nine hundred concerts to more than a million persons. A simple soul, he appealed to common folk who loved old things and nothing too difficult. People pestered him with questions about where to find this or that old song; and he usually referred them to the Oliver Ditson Company's Continental Harmony, "designed particularly for 'Old Folks' Concerts' and the Social Circle." T h e book paid especial attention to secular songs "selected as the most beautiful and chaste among the popular melodies of the day." 28 Turning to it, we discover that the compilers did not include "Captain Kidd." However, so great was popular demand for it among Kemp's followers that when Father Kemp compiled his own selection of songs tested by his own extensive knowledge of old people's tastes and desires, he did include "Kidd's Lament" (both words and music), planting it in the midst of national and patriotic songs in the much-stressed secular section of the book. This collection, Father Kemf's Old Folks Concert Tunes, was revised and enlarged several times, even as late as 1917. " I have snatched several old songs," he wrote in the preface apropos of the secular ballads, "that were going over the chasm of forgetfulness . . . written in that happy vein, in which O l d Folks cheerfully adapted themselves to circumstances." 27 H o w many hundreds of thousands of America's old (or

T h e Road to Hell and Heaven iog young) folk sang the ballad of Captain Kidd under the baton of Father Kemp can never be known. In New York six thousand attended a single concert in the Academy of Music, and other thousands heard him at the Athenaeum, Niblo's Saloon, the Cooper Institute, the Brooklyn Winter Garden, the Brooklyn Tabernacle, and the Odeon. In concerts like these, some of which we know were devoted exclusively to ballads, "Captain Kidd" played its part in forming the evolutionary chain of American popular music.28 Certainly I do not question that American grandmothers and Father Kemp, the homespun choirmaster, did more than all others to perpetuate "Captain Kidd" to our times. Though it was the day of Knight, Russell, and Foster—of "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," ic Woodman Spare That Tree," and "Old Folks at Home," the stirring of America's musical consciousness was affected by the revival of the old as well as the composition of the new. Those who were denied the pleasure of hearing Father Kemp's Old Folks Concert Troupe, or some other, may have had on the parlor table any one of a dozen American songsters besides the Old Folks Concert Tunes in which the complete "Kidd's Lament" appeared. One of the most charming of these was the Forget Me Not Songster, dating from about 1840,29 from which Professor Thompson takes the eighteen stanzas of "Kidd" he reprints in Body, Boots, and Britches. No taint of piety or patriotism clings to Captain Robert Kidd here, for he consorts in a special pirate section with (shades of Defoe!) Robinson Crusoe, Paul Jones, Brave Lafitte, Bold Dighton, and Johnson, the Bold Buccaneer of the Lakes. Another collection entitled jRobin Hood and Caftain Kidd's Songster speaks for itself. No bass in the sixties, writes Mr. Douglas Gilbert, had to be coaxed at any gathering to sing "Captain Kidd." 30

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T h e camp meeting, the concert hall, and the more serious songsters were inevitably supplemented in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, by negro minstrel songs or "comic songsters," and the dime novel, those pulp ancestors of the modern pulps. With these we return from the road to heaven to a lurid and notorious Kidd, but not the notorious Kidd of old. As vaudeville and the music hall supplanted the old folks concerts of America, Kidd was metamorphosed to their needs. For fifty cents one could read Ingraham's Caftain Kyd; or the Wizard of the Sea, which DeWitt its publisher modestly declared was the sole work that did "full justice to this remarkable individual." One paid fifty cents for Kidd in such a series, but a mere dime for Black-Beard. For fifteen cents one could buy Ornum and Company's "romance," Caftain Kidd. But such behind-the-barn literature appears wellnigh respectable compared with the minstrel extravagances of Elehant and Hengler, reprinted in Ornum's Tricks in Love Songster. This music hall ballad, sung by one Gus Williams, is such a piece of grotesque foolery as to be interesting to those who do literary and musical slumming, and who might be amused to find a Billy Kidd, King of the Kikaroos. It is herewith reprinted in full: H i s H e a r t Was T r u e to P o l l Sung by Gus Williams I heard my aunt once sing a chant Which now perhaps isn't new, Of Billy Kidd, who, whatever he did, To his Poll was always true. He sailed away in a gallant ship, From the pretty port of jovial Bristol,

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And the last words he uttered, While his handkerchief he fluttered, Were, " M y heart is true to Poll."

Chorus: His heart was true to Poll, His heart was true to Poll, N o matter what you do, If your heart is ever true— And his heart was true to Poll. T h e y were wrecked, William to shore he swam, And he looked about for an inn, When a noble savage lady, of a color rather shady, C a m e u p with a cheerful grin; S a y s she, " M a r r y me, and a king you'll be, And in a palace loll, Or they'll eat you like a fillet;" So he gave his hand, did Billy, B u t his heart was true to Poll.

Chorus: So William K i d d a happy life led. As the King of the Kikaroos, H e had nothing but a hat upon his head, And a pair of overshoes, They made him a present of twenty wives, Which their beauties I cannot now extoll; B u t one d a y they all revolted, So he back to Bristol bolted, For his heart was true to Poll.

Chorus: I t would not be difficult perhaps to a d d a chapter on K i d d as a figure in American humor. Another Caftain Kyd, or the Wizard of the Sea will have his due in detail l a t e r —

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from it we know that stanzas from "Captain K i d d " were sung on the New York and Boston stage at intervals from 1830-1856 in the operatic horseplay of a comic character called Horsebean Hemlock. T h e anachronistic humor of John Kendrick Bangs's Houseboat on the Styx and the Pursuit of the Houseboat, wherein Kidd kidnaps a boatload of remarkable ladies, would have no connection with the ballad. Though the true old broadside is dead, the broadside atmosphere is occasionally, but rather too elegantly, perpetuated. In a series of eighty-four "Modern Broadsides," published monthly by E . C. Yeats at the Cuala Press, Dublin, No. 1 for the fourth year (June, 1 9 1 1 ) is a small folio, inside which, in the strange company of "Nelson Street" and a cut illustrating Italian marionettes in New York, is "Captain Kidd." T h e two stanzas, illustrated by a colored woodcut by Jack B. Yeats, bear only the faintest resemblance to the original ballad. Supposed to be the work of William Butler Yeats, they bring the wicked Kidd not only into our times but into literary and artistic associations and the smell of college libraries and private collections. Similarly, Kidd: A Moral Opuscule, a playful bit of modern artistic fooling, with mock-moral verses by Richard Walsh and colored illustrations by George Illian, is a collector's item in that it is designed by Bruce Rogers and printed by William Edwin Rudge. In the complete history of the famous old ballad of Captain Kidd we may notice one other extraordinary fact: N o version concerns buried treasure. Captain Kidd sank his Bible in the sand, but no gold. That legend is another story.

7-

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds

F

IDDLESTICK

WITH

YOUR

DUTCHMEN!"

CRIED

THE

half-pay officer in Irving's Money-Diggers} when someone had just remarked that because Dutchmen unearthed treasures Dutchmen must therefore have buried them. " T h e Dutch had nothing to do with them. They were all buried by Kidd the pirate and his crew." H e then proceeded to foist the bloody exploits of Morgan and Blackbeard and all the buccaneers upon Captain Kidd of New York.

Kidd's treasure! Was there any? Was it hidden? The Earl of Bellomont said that he "bad the Gaoler to try if he could prevaile with Captain Kidd to discover where his treasure was hid . . . but he said nobody could find it but himself and would not tell any further." 1 Real or fictitious, it set off what might be called the buried-treasure period in American history. D u g for, it was. Property owners near New York and Philadelphia for more than fifty years suffered the pockmarking of their lands by midnight visitants. In 1757 William Smith complained in his History of New York that there was scarcely

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a point of land or an island along the coast that did not show signs of digging for pirate treasure. "Some credulous people have ruined themselves by these researches, and propagated a thousand idle fables current to this day among our country farmers." 2 Fortune tellers and conjurors earned a livelihood and considerable reputation. Simple folk took special note of dreams and impressions, which they said always came to them thrice before a treasure hunt might go forward. Divination by means of the hazel stick, the sieve and shears, the Bible and key intensified the lust for lucre into a diabolic ritual often involving dogs, devils, and black sprites or disembodied voices. An aged man named Brower told Watson the annalist in 1843 that he remembered some of these conjurors himself. "Blackbeard's and Kidd's money," Watson paraphrased, "was a talk understood by all. H e knew of much digging for it, with spells and incantations, at Corlear's Hook, leaving several pits of upturned ground." 3 Faustian touches were sometimes added, as when one Jonathan Moulton, of Hampton, said he would sell his soul for riches, and the devil appeared. On Tuesday, March 27, 1729, readers of the Philadelphia Mercury learned about the gloomy "Titan Pleiades," who had dug in all the recommended places and practiced all the recommended arts including the "mercurial wand and magnet" of the ingenious Mr. "P-d-1" and yet found no treasure, and who had finally written a letter to "Censor Morum" of the paper. Censor Morum's answer was a scolding and a reminder never to dig deeper than ploughdeep. Gold is dug at places like the shopboard, with awl and hammer and plane. Thus Benjamin Franklin, in his rival's paper, made fun of deluded money-diggers. " Y o u

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds j / 5 can hardly walk half a mile out of the town on any side," he wrote in Busy Body Paper No. VIII, "without observing several pits dug with that design . . . there seems to be some peculiar charm in the conceit of finding money." A great number of honest artificers and laboring people go hunting hidden treasure by day and by night, "trembling through fear of certain malicious demons, who are said to haunt and guard such places." Not finding anything, they attribute it to witchcraft. Treasure of pirate money "has for several years been prevalent among us," with many idle stories going around and the country swarming with astrologers "very much caressed by the poor deluded money-hunters." 4 Familiar elements of money-digging legends are to be seen in this moral treatise by the young American printer and journalist: hidden pirate gold, the midnight rendezvous, witchcraft, guardian demons, and final frustration of the simple-minded seeker. It is a concept as old as the Rheingold, the Arabian Nights, and the pot of gold beneath the rainbow, to which common gossip of Captain Kidd was like a spark to tinder. Kidd's treasure was ubiquitous. His name was ubiquitous. Credulity and confusion have rolled up a list of dug-over places or places fit for digging that would touch the sky. There is even a story of Kidd's treasure on Salvage Island off the East African coast. We still dally with it. No religious camp on the Isle of Shoals or romantic picture map of Long Island or scientific excavation on Oak Island in Nova Scotia or advertisement for New Deal lands in the West Indies seems worth mention without Captain Kidd. In fact, any mention of buried treasure in the New World almost inevitably gravitates to Kidd. There were other pirates and other treasure, but Kidd came

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first and grew legendary before other fabulous Colonial figures came to rival him and long before fiction writers embellished him in our imagination. Legend easily springs from the extremes of human conduct. The violent and diabolic character quickly attributed to Kidd for reasons already set forth made him a prime subject for the gathering-up of almost any kind of bloody tale told about almost any buccaneer or pirate. This proselyting is a normal part of legend building among the notorious as it is among the saintly. But there is something more than just conventional tongue wagging, more than the familiar tarnished-halo effect, in the story of Captain Kidd. A combination and concentration of what Cooper called "striking incidents that accomplished [Kidd's] return" were extraordinarily favorable to the nourishing of this lusty and seemingly farfetched money legend which has elevated this unsuccessful pirate taker and middling pirate to the highest position imaginable. First there was the free-running fable of his enormous wealth. We have already seen how news of Kidd's movements ran up and down the American coast, how officials worried, how citizens became jittery, how other citizens protected Madagascar men and hid their goods, how tales of buried hoards and even of hoaxing the credulous instantly appeared, how Colonel Quarry of Pennsylvania and Governor Basse of New Jersey had taken from Kidd's men thousands of pieces of eight, Rix dollars, and Venetians, not to say anything of Arabian gold, amber and coral necklaces, and India silks. This was all real enough. If Colonel Markham of Pennsylvania reports the capture of two of Kidd's men and fails to mention their money, too, he is complained of to the Lords of Trade. 5 Ten pounds apiece was the reward offered for their capture, an amount suffi-

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds IIJ ciently high if compared with the thirty pounds offered for the notorious Captain Gillam. 6 Kidd's name was the most famous of many that were variously associated in the official correspondence streaming across to the Lords of Trade, as we have also seen. These pirates had money; and money freely spent easily suggested the proximity of pirates. But there was mystery as well as money, a prime feeder of the imagination. Samuel Sewall's official inventory estimated the value of Kidd's goods unloaded at Boston or taken up at various other places at £14,000. Yet the Earl of Bellomont accounted Kidd's cargo on the great ship Quedagh Merchant to be worth £70,000 and charged that Kidd had falsified his accounts. Where did the rest of this £56,000 go? Kidd had said there were twenty-one bales of India goods on board the sloop Antonio, but investigation revealed forty-one. Had he not also minimized the value of the ship left in the West Indies? Captain Kidd sent word to Bellomont from jail, proposing that he be sent, still a prisoner, to Hispaniola where he could "bring off fifty or three score thousand pounds which would otherwise be lost." Bellomont refused but turned his jailer loose upon Kidd to try (in vain) by persuasion to wrest the secret of the ship's position from him.7 T h e famous Admiral Benbow, instructed to seize Kidd and his effects in the West Indies, found neither. Equally as futile was the return under Bellomont's orders of the Antonio under Captain Carey to the West Indies. Rumor had it that the Quedagh Merchant had been burned, that its cargo had been sold, that the agent, Henry Bolton, had run off with it.8 The fate of this ship and its cargo, which gossips at the time of Kidd's trial liked to believe was worth £400,000, has remained a mystery to this day. It is the principal mystery and alone might have started a legend.

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Among the transcripts of Colonial documents to be found among the F. L . Gay papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society lies enough evidence to warrant a belief that Bolton and one Burke (another "agent" of Kidd's) with their accomplices made off with most of the Quedagh Merchants remaining cargo and enjoyed trading therewith among the Leeward Islands with impunity.9 Various kinds of contraband and loot were secreted in a hundred places in the Colonial world. Dreams of discovery and salvage were kept alive by several expeditions to raise sunken treasure ships. The memory of Sir William Phipps, who succeeded in salvaging £300,000 of silver from an old Spanish galleon wrecked on the Abrohlo Shoals, for which he was knighted in 11687, was still green. Phipps's hotheaded and arrogant administration as Colonial governor in Boston served only to keep his name and fame alive through and beyond the period recognized as the highwater mark of superstitious credulity in the New World, the New England witchcraft persecution of 1691 and 1692. Imagination was ripened for a good, thoroughgoing treasure legend. Kidd's portable possessions were also considerable and well noted in their time. Kidd carried enough money and other valuables about with him to impress both the sedate and the adventurous. The Earl of Bellomont regretfully had to allow the sheriff of Boston forty shillings a week to keep him incorruptible in the presence of Kidd's gold. In Kidd's lodgings in Boston £1,000 of gold dust and ingots in a bag, as well as a bag of silver, were discovered in two sea beds.10 Kidd prized a waistcoat adorned with valuable buttons which either he or the New England gossips hinted were diamonds but which the Earl of Bellomont found were stones of low degree, "Bristol stones" set in gold. A

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"diamond" lost in the seizure of Kidd's goods figures in the Gardiner Island legend. 11 Mrs. Kidd and her housekeeper, as has been noted, joined the Captain when he arrived off Block Island, and they not only assisted and comforted him there but received an undetermined amount of goods from him. Captain Thomas W a y of Boston was given various bags of money and goods for Mrs. Kidd. A letter from her to a Captain Thomas Pain, a retired pirate, was found among some belongings in the home of one Captain Knott, also a former pirate. Turn where he would, Bellomont apparently stumbled upon Kidd; for this incriminating letter was discovered at the time of the picturesque capture of Captain Gillam, who was ultimately lodged in jail along with Kidd and Bradish. This letter was an order to Pain to give Mrs. Kidd twenty-four ounces of gold, "but to keep the rest until further notice." 12 Naturally Pain's house on an island in Narragansett Bay was searched, but with little if any success, for the Earl of Bellomont complained that the wily Pain fled the province "with a deal more of Kidd's goods still in his hands." Thus Mrs. Kidd and Dorothy Lee, the housekeeper, were summoned and examined twice in ten days and everything of value taken from them. Mrs. Kidd protested vigorously that even her family silverware had been seized, and Bellomont ordered it returned. Kidd, furthermore, was lavish with gifts. The "cloth of gold" given to Mrs. John Gardiner is famous. The Lords of Trade were duly informed of a present of £1,000 in gold dust and ingots intended for the Earl of Bellomont's lady. 13 Duncan Campbell, the Boston postmaster and gobetween, was showered. On board the Antonio Kidd gave him one hundred pieces of eight, an enameled gilt box with four precious stones set in gold, another stone which M .

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Legarre, a French jeweler in Boston, valued at £55, and a Negro slave.14 Campbell's mansion did not escape search, and treasure found there consisted of five bags of gold, one bag of silver, and a handkerchief of gold. 15 The wide dispersal of Kidd's goods, actual or supposed, and the goods of Kidd's men, gave the authorities much trouble and kept active tongues alive. Several meetings of the New York Council in July and August, 1699, concerned themselves specifically with this subject. Not only were Mrs. Kidd and Dorothy Lee examined, but dozens of others. Bellomont followed every clue. John Tuthill, Justice of the Peace in Suffolk, was accused of concealing Kidd's treasure. The Council believed some of Kidd's goods had been taken from him off Gardiner's Island by one Carsten Luesten and one Hendrick van der Head. Various sloops were reported to have visited Kidd at his anchorage off Nassau (Long) Island. One of these was operated by a Captain Carter and a little black man who had formerly been Kidd's quartermaster. Another sailed under the hand of Captain Jacob Fenwick. These two, said John Gardiner, lay by Kidd for three days taking off goods. Another sloop, commanded by Captain Cornelius Quick of New York, who was assisted by Thomas "Whisking" Clarke of Setauket and by the father of a boy with Kidd, took possession of two chests and some goods. These were seen to turn out of Oyster Pan Bay (not Oyster Bay but a Bay near Shelter Island) the next day. Gardiner supposed they had landed goods. "Whisking" Clarke was a coroner of New York and a colorful character. His part of the Kidd treasure, valued at from £5,000 to £12,000, he whisked into Major Salleck's warehouse near Stamford and sent his defiance to the Earl of Bellomont, whose diligence in such affairs of friends he

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds 121 resented. Clarke was arrested, however, and was delivered with his goods into the hands of the Lieutenant Governor of New York. 16 So light was Kidd's sloop Antonio when she was inventoried in Boston harbor that her cargo had shrunk to a mere £286 value.17 It would be very strange indeed, then, if the most fantastic rumors did not attach Kidd's name to spots all along Long Island Sound; and it is quite short of the mark to content our debunking moments with saying that the only authentic Kidd treasure was captured, inventoried, and sent home long, long ago. There are plenty of reasons for the legends of buried gold still current concerning Haiti and other West Indian islands, Gardiner's Island, Block Island, the Thimble Islands, Cow Neck, the "Money Pond," "Kidd's Island," Oyster Bay, Southhold and the Shelter Island region, Great South Bay, Tarpolin Cove, Rye Beach, Martha's Vineyard, and at least two spots along the Hudson River. Not only the shore but the woods were believed to be stocked with Kidd's gold, left by his men who hurriedly scattered before the King's proclamation. Two of the three men who turned King's evidence against Kidd at the trial, How and Churchill, appear to have returned to the Colonies by one means or another and to have dug up in the woods of New England and Pennsylvania several caches of loot to the value of £800 to £1,500. Such an estate may have given the assurance to one of these adventurers to plan a marriage with the daughter of the Governor of New Hampshire.18 In the great roundup of pirates in 1699 and 1700 and during the continued pirate scares and captures for some years thereafter, it was easy to imagine how many hundreds of chests had been left temporarily in out-of-theway places by "Kidd's men." The amusing pursuit of one of these, who "came home

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with Capt. Shelly" and whose goods were wrested from officers of the law at Perth Amboy, already has been mentioned. A trial in Middletown, New Jersey, was broken up by an armed mob, and Kidd's man, the prisoner, was released.18 T h e story of the villainous Captain Gillam (alias Marshall or Kelly) made shudders as well as noises in the world. T h e circumcised Gillam, who, it was said, had served the Great Mogul of India, lay in the Boston jail with Kidd and Bradish and was far and away the wickedest pirate on the coast, "the most impudent, hardened Villain" the Earl of Bellomont ever saw. His long and close association with the Kidds leaves little doubt that people were almost justified in at least considering them birds of a feather, as Bellomont did. Gillam, coming home from Madagascar with Kidd, had gone ashore at the Horekills in Delaware with two chests, or one large heavy one, according to varying testimony. H e made his way to New England hoping, perhaps like Captain T e w of Rhode Island, to settle down. After Kidd's arrival on the Antonio, he was seen aboard her by Duncan Campbell, and then he temporarily escaped to the eastern end of L o n g Island. Bellomont was soon hot on his trail, and the flight and capture as seen in Bellomont's correspondence are like something out of Cooper. In August, 1699, Colonel Peleg Sanford, Judge of the Admiralty Court in Rhode Island and former governor, wrote to Governor Winthrop of Connecticut for aid. Haveing used my utmost endeavors for the apprehending of one James Gillam Some time belonging unto Capt Kid Just now received advice from Block Island by persons corned on purpose that Said Gillam comeing from Some part of Long Island in a Small boat, with one Block Island man meeting in the Sound with a dutch sloop being becalmed the

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master of Sd Sloop came on board, the said boat and informed Gillam that there was warrants out for to Seize him and that Capt. Coddington was sent on purpose to Block island for that and comeing unto Block Island and they went both on shore, but said Gillam left the man going into his house and went back againe unto the canoe and went on board the boat which he ran away with; it is supposed that he came directly to Capt. Paines to cononocut where it is reported he left mony and yesterday seene about point Judeh. . .*> In the margin of this letter he wrote that a small boat was seen "about 12 o'clock yesterday" going between Fisher's Island and the mainland. Gillam was thought to be one of Kidd's men, and Kidd's men were closely watched. Late one Saturday evening in Boston the Earl of Bellomont received a letter from this same Peleg Sanford of Newport, saying that Gillam had been there but had left a fortnight before and had gone to Boston. Bellomont sent immediately for the honest constable he had used to apprehend Kidd and ordered him to go the rounds of the Boston taverns and inns. At the very first place he found Gillam's mare tied up, and Gillam by report but fifteen minutes alighted from her. Gillam, however, could not be found. He was wary enough not to come back for his mount. A proclamation, hastily worded and printed the next day, offered two hundred pieces of eight for the capture of Gillam. The search continued for two days. Then someone brought word of Captain Knott, who might know where Gillam was. Bellomont had been watching this man for a year and already had depositions against him. Knott, being summoned, loudly protested innocence of any such knowledge. Bellomont knew how to deal with his kind, however.

124 Pirate Laureate Knott's wife was sent for, and she said that one James Kelly had lodged several nights in her house but was across the river in Charlestown. Knott then confessed he knew, and named the house of Francis Dole where Gillam (alias Kelly) was probably to be found. A half-dozen men immediately crossed the river, surrounded Dole's house, and searched it. But Gillam still eluded them. It was night. By chance two of the pursuers passed through a nearby field and there stumbled on their man returning from "treating two young women some few miles off in the Country." His money was never found. To the very end he continued to give trouble, having filed off the window bars of his cell in the Boston jail, and was prevented from escaping only by mere chance. A single folio sheet gave to the public "a full and true discovery" of all his notorious actions at the time of his death in London the next year. This dying confession adds, significantly for us, "With an account of his joyning with Capt. Kidd." Although William Maise was one of the "wicked and ill-disposed persons" that Kidd was sent out to arrest, his deeds and his reputation, like those of Shelly and Bradish and Gillam, gathered about the head of Kidd. Maise, too, came to the eastern end of Long Island in 1699 loaded with Red Sea goods. Bellomont kept his eye on him and lent an ear to Robert Livingston's story that " M a y s " and his partner "had to the value of halfe a million between 'em," that they were frightened out of attempting to come into Boston, and that, being angry, they complained that the government might have got £100,000 by it but missed the chance. Bellomont tried in vain to wrest from Livingston the source of his information, but that canny Scot refused to say.21 Out of such a mass of pirate excitements, concentrated in

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds 7 2 5 a few months of 1699, was bound to come a mass of tales to enrich American folklore and lay the groundwork of a later but still early American fiction. Treasure tales sprang up quickly and lasted long, enjoying a revival during the period from 1830 to 1845. Considered as a legend, Kidd lore may not be wholly to the legend-seeker's taste. The nearest thing to a unified popular narrative evolved from Kidd's life is the ballad, which has nothing to do with buried treasure, but which travelled halfway round the world. Tales of buried gold, though numerous, never fell together in a single, distinguishable Kidd legend. Emanating from the various spots where the treasure was said by the old ones to be, various surmises and more or less superstitious beliefs gained currency in certain restricted regions—often apparently a union merely of the mystery surrounding Kidd's treasure and the age-old supernaturalism attached to buried gold. In ancient legend a dragon may have guarded such a hoard. On the principle that the root of all evil is the lust for gold, any King Midas or any discoverer of a pot of gold might be cursed in some way. Dragons, death, and loss seem to be replaced in nearer times by devils or dogs or the "hogboy." Add a few touches of witchcraft to the latter kind of tale, and we have the sort of Kidd legend current on Manhattan Island and reflected in Irving's Tales of a Traveller. Three of these can be read with profit. First there is the Gardiner's Island legend, which is probably the most reasonable. Today in "Kidd's Hollow" stands a granite marker over the supposed treasure spot. It is true that Captain Kidd landed on Gardiner's Island and left valuables in the hands of John " L o r d " Gardiner, third proprietor of the island, who held it by patent from the

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Crown. Gardiner deposed before Isaiah Addington, Justice of the Peace, and other Boston authorities on July 17, 1699, as follows: Kidd appeared off Gardiner's Island and Lord Gardiner went aboard his sloop to see who she was. " H o w do you and your family do?" said the Captain, whom Gardiner did not know. Kidd then proceeded to requisition the services of the Lord of the Island, against which Gardiner knew it was useless to protest, because privateers before this time had used him similarly, threatening his life if he did not comply. Kidd asked him to take ashore three Negroes for him. Later he sent ashore two bales of goods and another Negro, and he asked for six sheep and a barrel of cider. H e also sent ashore some damaged muslin for Gardiner's wife. H e tipped Gardiner's men, who apparently assisted in this transfer of goods, in Arabian gold. Three days later he sent one Clarke (undoubtedly Whisking Clarke) to represent him while he himself stood off for Block Island. Through this Clarke he said to Gardiner, " I want you to take ashore and keep for me to my order a chest and a box of gold, a bundle of quilts, four bailes of gold cloth. This box of gold is intended for Lord Bellomont." Gardiner took them ashore along with two thirty-pound bags of silver delivered by two of Kidd's men named Parrott and Cooke. Gardiner duly gave a receipt for these things. Furthermore, for a gift of a sash and a pair of worsted stockings he was to keep as well "a small bundle of gold and gold dust," about one pound in weight. Before Kidd had finally gone into Boston, he sent Gardiner a barrel of sugar. " I did not know that Kidd was proclaimed pirate," declared Gardiner.22 T w o different itemized accounts of these treasures are extant—the official inventory showing a total of 1,111 ounces of gold and 2,353 ounces of silver, besides two each

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds 727 of cornelian rings, agates, and amethysts, some silver buttons, and a lamp. At best we can only call them goods left in trust. But Robert Livingston stated under oath that Kidd "had Forty pound weight in Gold which he hid and secured in some place betwixt this [Boston] and New York, not naming any particular place, which nobody could find but himself . . . Kidd did yesterday acknowledge to this Narrator that ye Gold aforementioned was hid upon Gardiner's Island. H e believed there was some fifty pound weight of it and in the same box with it there was about three or four hundred pieces of eight and some pieces of Plate belonging to his boy Barleycorn and his Negro man." 23 Kidd himself deposed with regard to a chest [not his box of gold and silver] left with Gardiner. According to this it contained flowered silks, muslins, calico, gold cloth, silk striped with silver and gold, a bushel of cloves and nutmegs, and three small bags of "Jaspar Antonio or Stone of Goa," all this colorful and aromatic mixture bought at Madagascar, he said, none of it being from the Quedagh Merchant. H e valued it at more than anything else he left there except the silver and gold.24 The fame of Gardiner's Island is based—and what fame could be more justified—upon the things revealed by these various depositions. As legend grew, of course, the hidden box of gold, the fabulous cloth of gold, and the precious stones naturally figured large. One historian of Long Island, with a friendliness toward family legend that cooler historians might disapprove, records that on a previous visit to Gardiner's Island [there was no previous visit] Kidd had presented to Mrs. Gardiner two small blankets of gold cloth, rich and beautiful. Pieces of this marvelous cloth were reported to be in the Gardiner family till very

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late—the mid-nineteenth century. Thompson the historian quotes from a letter from one member of the family to another, Mrs. Wetmore, mother of the wife of Captain Mather of New London, to the then present Mrs. Gardiner: "I remember when very young, hearing my mother say that her grandmother was wife to Lord Gardiner, when the pirate Kidd came to Gardiner's Island. The Captaine wanted Mrs. Gardiner to roast him a pig; she being afraid to refuse him, cooked it very nice, and he was much pleased with it; he then made her a present of the silk, which she gave to her two daughters. Where the other went, or whether it is in being, I know not; but this was handed down to me: and it has kept very nice, and I believe it is now as good as when first given, which I believe must be upwards of one hundred years." Thompson, who did not question the evil character of Kidd, and whose editorial successors as recently as 1918 refer to Kidd as the greatest sea robber of his age, goes so far as to imply Kidd's choice of Long Island for a burial place "as fittest for depositing ill-gotten treasures."25 Other elaborations of the story include Kidd's slashing of "Lord" Gardiner's hand in the dark with a cutlass when Kidd landed at night} destroying feather beds; scattering paper money about the house; staying several days during which he lived high, dropped pearls in wine, and ordered people sternly about; tying "Lord" Gardiner to a mulberry tree; burying money in a swampy place at Cherry Harbor and having shown Gardiner where he put it, threatening to kill him or his son if it was not there when he returned for it; and finally willing it to Gardiner if he never came back. One phase of the legend, as set down by J. G. C

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds i2Q Brainard in 1827 in the Fort Braddock Letters, reveals a conventionalized Captain Kidd who makes a man walk the plank because he knew too much about the treasure buried on Gardiner's Island. In this story Kidd is sailing on his great prize ship, the Quedagh Merchant, and is captured by H . M . S. Martyr after a spectacular battle off the island. From the Gardiner's Island legends sprang, no doubt, the many tales of families on Long Island who acquired sudden wealth, a type of tale that flourishes to the present moment despite all efforts to stop it. "To this day," wrote Watson in 1846, "it is the traditionary report that the family of J at Oyster Bay, and of C at Huntington, are enriched by Kidd's spoils they having been in his service, by force it is -presumed, and made their escape at Long Island Eatonneck . . . Both J and C became strangely rich." 26 Descendants of "Lord" Gardiner have worked both for and against the family legends. Curtiss C. Gardiner, the official historian of the Gardiner family, earnestly endeavored to explode them in 1890. Although he, too, had been given a tiny fragment of the cloth supposed to be a relic from one of the famous cloths of gold, he dispels all that by asserting that the only authentic account of what went on is given in the original Gardiner's deposition before the government commissioners at Boston. H e asserts firmly, though loath to disturb so picturesque a tale, that Kidd never went ashore at Gardiner's Island, never threatened anyone, never ate pig or drank a union, never gave out cloth of gold. On the contrary, he acted very civilly, became friendly with John Gardiner, who did not even know who he was, and fired a courteous salute of four guns as he bore off for Block Island and Narragansett Bay. Tales of intimidation, robbery, and bodily harm on

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Gardiner's Island seem to have come from a visitation of Spanish pirates in September, 1728, which was duly reported in the Boston News-Letter. However, the Gardiner's Island legend can never be stopped. It is one of the central Kidd stories, providing such popular features as buried and abandoned treasure, intimidation and threats against honest folk, plunder, and the suggestion of a curse. But we leave it temporarily and follow Kidd to the next focal point—Narragansett Bay. Here, up on the northern tip of Conanicut Island, lived Kidd's friend Captain Pain, whose eventful life is another skeleton of what Kidd's might have been—from privateering against pirates in the West Indies and some plundering of his own along the Florida coast, to citizenship in Rhode Island, where he served on the grand jury, became captain of a company of militia, was admitted as a freeman of the colony, and ultimately became one of the founders of Trinity Church in Newport. Captain Pain's adventurous days were ten or fifteen years behind him when Kidd came to his house in 1699 to disturb his now not dishonest repose. Pain deposed before two officials at Newport on September 26, 1699, fehat he could not remember the day or the month, but sometime "Last Spring" Kidd had "run up the Bay w'th his Sloops as high in ye Bay as my house and sent his boate on Shore to desire me Company aboard wch I did . . . After some tyme hee desired mee to secure some things for him. But I refused aleadging my house would bee Searcht and I could not doe it." 27 Nevertheless he did, and his house was searched—in vain—and we may assume he returned ultimately to the old farmhouse on Conanicut, part of which still stands. The Earl of Bellomont thought of him as an old pirate, and though not successful in the search of his house, the Earl was reasonably satisfied from

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds 1 3 1 the intercepted letter already mentioned that he had some of Kidd's gold and had escaped with more. So might we today and so did the Earl report it. This is the basis for the quite understandable belief that Kidd had deposited goods somewhere in Narragansett Bay. It was early written into the Colonial records.28 The Naragansett legend attached to Kidd a. familiar piece of villainy in buried treasure lore. This was the murder of a man, a helper it may be assumed, and the burial of his body along with the chest of money for the double purpose of keeping the location a secret and of casting a protective spell. Thirty years after the Revolution one Thomas B. Hazard, a reputable citizen of Peace Dale, saw from the house of his friend Greene of Warwick Neck the shore "covered with people digging in the sand along the beach in all directions." He tells us that a week before, a box holding a skeleton had been washed out by the tide. The people were digging for Kidd's money. Kidd had been "often at Newport and was finally hung there on Gravelly Point" with twenty-seven others, all on one gallows. The skeleton, says Hazard, was that of a man killed and buried to protect it.28 The Kidd fever endured around Newport where the Captain, it was said, had often been seen, and where such excitement would naturally be nourished by the ill repute of Rhode Island as a favorite harboring and retiring place for those who would go no more a-roving. The third legend deals with the Hudson River, a place that Kidd almost certainly did not visit in 1699. But the lower river was early a known danger spot. Albany records for 1696 show that "pirates in great numbers" infested the mouth. These were "sallees," rather than "rovers," who lurked in creeks and behind islands until they made their

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sudden dash upon traffic and then an equally sudden disappearance toward the mountains.30 Deep-water pirates, furthermore, at times ran their ships up its course, as might be expected, grounding, scuttling, or burning them, and sending their men off to the woods with what they could carry. Captain Bradish and Captain Shelly, we have noted, did thisj and the parts of their stories that relate to Kidd have already been told. There seems to be no question that the acts of Bradish, who sank his ship the Adventure on the western tip of Long Island, provide the basis of the myth that Captain Kidd, who sailed in the Adventure Galley, abandoned his prize ship, treasure and all, in the Hudson. It was said that Kidd was chased into New York and up the river, where he escaped only by running his ship ashore. It was said by others that he went up as far as Coeymans and Albany and buried money in the ground there. But most frequently it was said that he scuttled his craft (the Quedagh Merchant of course) at Caldwell's Landing near Dunderbergh Mountain, hoping to return to the precious metal in the sunken hulk at some later time. And finally, it was also believed by some that he killed a settler's child in sheer diabolic frenzy. Much digging for treasure went on along the Hudson; no one can ever know how much. In May, 1762, the New York Mercury carried a paragraph offering a reward of £5 for information concerning the person or persons who came by night to Nicholas Bayard's farm near the city and dug great holes in the land, to the damage of Bayard's people and cattle. If they be money-diggers, it said, Bayard would allow them the indulgence of a search if they would come to him personally and dig by daylight and fill up the holes again. H e generously offered further to give them two spades and one pickax left behind in their supposed

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds 755 fright. 31 This is the barest glimpse at the sort of thing that delighted Washington Irving. Corlear's Hook and the base of Dunderbergh Mountain were favorite digging places. Treasure hunting in this region on into the nineteenth century centered on the famous sunken vessel near Caldwell's Landing (also called Gibraltar Point a few miles above Ver Planck's Point). A fantastic legend produced but a disappointing reality. Kept alive by old settlers back in the highlands, it dallied with Spanish galleons but mostly reaffirmed the story that the vessel was Kidd's great ship. Sometime in the early 1800's, when the ballad of Captain Kidd was becoming acclimated to camp meetings inland, this Hudson River legend had gathered enough headway to cause various persons to go poking about and to lend a willing ear to old wives' tales. A descendant of the advocate of the Admiralty at Kidd's trial, Dr. Newton, came over from England in 1814, convinced himself, hatched a salvage scheme, but died in Boston en route home.32 In 1829 Abraham G. Thompson, a descendant of the Gardiners, attempted to forestall anyone else in the search by buying, with some others, a tract of one hundred acres along the shore and acquiring from the State of New York the water rights for two hundred and fifty feet out, comfortably beyond the hulk. Thus protected, this Thompson syndicate carried on its "experiments," pricking with long ironshod poles and boring with augers. The augers stopped on "something hard." The death of one member of the operating group apparently halted things at this tantalizing point. In 1844 diving was undertaken by means of an ingenious "diving dress" recently invented by one Sargent of New York. A new group acquired the property and the rights, and brought up from the muddy water a

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piece of timber, a fragment of some piece of ordnance, and an old-fashioned howitzer. Nine separate companies are said to have been formed in the nineteenth century to dig for Kidd's treasure. Fever was high in the forties. T h e Hudson River operators were convinced that Kidd's big ship, what was left of it, lay just beneath them in the silt. There was no resort to eighteenthcentury hocus-pocus. This was to be scientifically done by "improved and philosophical methods." Those involved announced that they might sink shafts and construct a cofferdam. Notices and comments appeared in the newspapers, news which must have been among the last items crowded into Watson's curious Annals.33 T h e American Jurist in 1842 recalled the trial of Kidd as an example of defective administration of criminal justice in former times; and papers like the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser and, Journal devoted a column to the same subject. In the New York Journal of Commerce (June 11, 1844) and the New Y o r k American (June 13, 1844) appeared identical paragraphs asserting, "Tradition says the celebrated Captain Kidd, the Flying Dutchman of the Western W o r l d " being pursued, ran his frigate of forty-four guns up the Hudson and "when off Caldwell, the frigate struck a rock and sunk." A f t e r a reference to contemporary activity "renewed with vigor and not in vain," the report ends: " T h e silver they have not touched as yet, though they came very near to it." Watson corroborates these details, adding only that some scrapings of silver were hauled up. T o add fuel to the fire of popular interest came a report from out on Martha's Vineyard that "a pot of eighteen hundred dollars was ploughed up," Kidd's money, of course.34 However, the voice of incredulity was raised. Jeremiah Hughes, Balti-

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds 7 5 5 more editor, gave space in Nilesi National Register in July, 1845, to a clipping from the New York Journal of Commerce, which said: The good people are still at work around Captain Kidd's vessel. They have enclosed her in a thick wall or dam supposed to be water tight. They have a steam pump in operation throwing out the water, with which they make considerable impression.—The first half hour they lowered it four inches. At any rate they will soon be rioting in great masses of gold which have quietly reposed in her hold for more than a century, far beyond the covetous grasp of man. A shaft has been sunk on the side of the mountain opposite the ship, from which specimens of gold are said to have been obtained.— This may be owing to the approximation of such an immense quantity in the hold of that ship.36 A whole literature on Kidd sprang up. A pamphlet brimming with legends appeared in 1844, summarizing and validating them. A woman medium away off in Lynn had a marvelous "mesmeric revelation." And a writer in Hunt's Merchant's Magazine (reprinted in Littell's Living Age) pooh-poohed these delusions. By far the most interesting to the student of Kidd lore is the anonymous, green, paper-covered pamphlet entitled, An Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments respecting Captain Kidd's Piratical Vessel.36 Though unsigned, the pamphlet appears from the notice printed inside the back cover to be a kind of apologia of the syndicate that had bought the rights of Abraham G. Thompson, rights extending to May 1, 1846, and that had organized a stock company offering one thousand shares to the public in the salvage venture. This notice is signed "Sargent and Co." With regard to the value of the cargo supposed to be in

136 Pirate Laureate the ship, the authors of the notice would "express no opinion" but nevertheless aimed at dissipating skepticism by concluding, "Various speculations have been made, varying from one to ten million. There is range enough at all events to suit the most speculative fancy. We expect to be able to commence operations before the first of July. Any communication on the subject may be addressed to William S. Pierson, Esq., No. 62 Wall Street." The contents of this rare little book are illuminating both for the legends retold and the attitudes revealed toward Kidd lore. Early American history, it declares, "abounds in events of extraordinary character . . . full of the most startling incidents, even till after the war of the Revolution." It is impossible to tell truth from fiction now, especially in the case of Captain Kidd, where superstition and belief in the supernatural are obstacles. So many and such incredible stories have been told of Kidd that some have recently denied he ever existed. It has been said that "his vessel was often seen streaking it away along the Sound everything set, while all other craft were double reefed or settled away . . . Whenever he was closely pursued by the English men-of-war that were sent out for his capture, he would be rescued by the interposition of some violent storm, or that the evil spirits themselves would come to his aid by some surprising manifestations." Ridicule of moneydiggers has led others to deny that any treasure was buried at all. We believe that little was buried other than that on Gardiner's Island. We believe the vessel in which Kidd last sailed was laden with treasure of immense value, that it still is in that vessel, and that the location of it is known. Probably the most interesting part of this is Kidd's metamorphosis into the Flying Dutchman of the new world,

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds 737 an intermixture of European lore that was becoming firmly fixed in Kidd tradition. It appeared repeatedly from 1824 to 1849 i n prose fiction and in J . S. Jones's melodrama Caftain Kyd (1830-1856). In Irving's Tales of A Traveller (1824) and in B. F. Judah's discursive, pseudohistorical novel The Buccaneers (1827) a rich display of Manhattan legends of Kidd is thrust before the reader. In addition to the Flying Dutchman attribute, these wild beliefs indulge in simple diabolism and horror, witches and witchcraft, and spirit-guarded treasure-trove. But to return to the pamphlet of 1844, the rest of it set forth reasons why the authors believed "such a terror of the seas" existed, and why "immense booty" might be recovered. First, a brief, error-laden biography, citing no proof "as being unnecessary," tangled Kidd up with Captain Avery and the long-famous story of the Grand Mogul's daughter. According to this confused legend, Kidd was protector of the princess in question but turned pirate, murdered the beautiful girl, and stole her vast treasure. After many later piracies he was driven up the Hudson as previously outlined here. Reference is made to two of Kidd's men who settled on the lower end of Long Island where the name of the family and the property purchased "will be pointed out but which for obvious reasons, we forbear to particularize." So the familiar beautiful-femalecaptive theme entered Kidd legend, and the Long Island fortune-founding story was prelude to the still flourishing Astor hoax, to be mentioned later. Next in the pamphlet came the Gardiner's Island tale, emphasizing, however, Mrs. Gardiner, her childish delight in holding an apronful of Kidd's jewels and her persuasive power over "Lord" Gardiner not to tell about the diamond

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they found on the floor. The full-apron story appears elsewhere along the Sound (Rye) and adds a hemp-and-homespun flavor. Using the ballad as authority for Kidd's supposed capture of Spanish galleons, the deluded authors now indulge in dreamy speculation regarding the "scarcely conceivable" amount of booty from that source alone. Following all this came seven local legends, repeated in corroboration of treasure-dreams. They may be summarized as follows: 1 . Glover's Story A gentleman of New York, over sixty, "on whom we place the utmost reliance, informs us" that on a trip to Vermont when he was young he was shown "a very pleasant house" said to have been built by one Glover, an officer on board Kidd's vessel. Glover was said to have stated that Kidd was chased up the Hudson, burnt his ship near the entrance to the Highlands, fled overland to Boston, en route to which Glover had left the others. 2. Cowles's Piece of Paper "From a source on which we rely" comes the story of a piece of paper in old-fashioned writing reported to have been long in the Cowles family, Quakers. A Quaker ancestor of Cowles gave relief to one of Kidd's men who lay sick in Boston jail. In return he received a paper describing a vaguely located place on Long Island where money was buried, and stating furthermore that Kidd's ship was sunk with her treasure in the Hudson River at the foot of the Highlands. Unfortunately neither the paper nor the family can be traced.

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds 739 3. T h e Van Tassel Story " F r o m a source in which we place confidence . . . a person to whom an old lady related it" comes a yarn about the Van Tassel boy who was given a chest by an old sailor living with the family. T h e Van Tassels lived along the Hudson near Caldwell's Landing. At the old sailor's death the chest was opened. Beneath the false bottom was found much gold coin. Young Van Tassel moved into the northern part of the State, bought land with his money, and became a great man of property and an officer of the county. T h e old sailor had told the Van Tassels that Kidd had been chased up the Hudson and had sunk his ship by burning it near Dunderburgh Mountain. Some money had been carried ashore in buckets and buried. The old sailor, further, could never forget the horrid sight of Kidd running a small child through with a sword rather than leaving it in a box to starve where it had been abandoned by a fleeing woman. 4. T h e Farrington Story An old lady named Farrington whose father lived to be very old said her father, when a little boy, had stood near Colonel Van Courtlandt's house and had seen a large vessel burning across the river a little above "where this vessel is found." This vessel exploded before it sank. 5 . T h e Story of Polypus Island An old man reports that years ago one of Kidd's men came into the neighborhood. People were afraid of him. H e told the old man's grandfather that Kidd and his men went up the Hudson after the ship sank and buried money on Polypus Island where the old sailor would go, if grand-

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father would go with him, and dig up the money and share it. Grandfather was afraid to go. So the old sailor went off alone, came back in a few days, paid ninety dollars in coin for some things in a Peekskill store, and rowed off down the river never to be heard of again. 6. T h e Michigan Indian An old Indian from Michigan came to this place with a young one and pointed out the spot where Indians had formerly seen a vessel burn, explode, and sink. Men came ashore and went into the woods. Some "staid among the Indians for some time," and they heard from these men that the vessel was loaded with gold. 7. D r . Newton The last legend is one already referred to—the visit of a supposed descendant of the Advocate of the Admiralty at Kidd's trial. It may even be no legend at all, but fact. Thus the Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments respecting Captain Kidd's Piratical Vessel preserved much of the old settlers' talk of the Hudson Valley. Though the book came late, the tales are mostly very old and constitute the largest related group known. Two years later a companion piece, The Wonderful Mesmeric Revelation of Mrs. Charles Chester, of Lynn, showed to what extent these tales worked upon the imagination, even in the improved and philosophical year 1846. Mrs. Chester, supposedly knowing nothing of the sunken treasure wreck before her trance, upon being mesmerized "saw" the following: A sunken vessel at the exact spot in the Hudson River then being explored} its captain, who had been a pirate, large, stout, of large chest, shoulders, and neck, who had, furthermore, a Roman nose, piercing

F i f t y or Three Score Thousand Pounds 1 4 1 eyes, and a very broad head, whose personality was characterized by great cautiousness, combativeness, and destructiveness, in fact, "the tout ensemble of a blood-thirsty filibustier"; treasure chests filled with bars of solid gold; decayed shot bags spilling with heaps of precious stones including diamonds; "gold watches like duck's eggs in a pond of water"; a diamond necklace; and the remains of a beautiful young lady. A fairly definite mold into which Hudson River legends of Kidd finally settled may be indicated by the twenty-one ballad stanzas of Arthur Guiterman's " T h e Storm Ship," written as late as 1907.37 In this the modern poet pictures the Storm Ship as a wraith operated by dead men, which is encountered by Captain Kidd rolling home laden with Eastern silks and gold, the guilty gain of red wrack and slaughter. Kidd fires upon the Storm Ship, then flees in panic up the Hudson, "glamor-haunted stream." T h e Storm Ship follows, coming ever closer, until Kidd is set afire at the foot of Dunderbergh Mountain. And he that escaped won only a felon's death and a blackened name. Sleepy Hollow folk had done their work. Taking the known exploits of many pirates and dim legends of devils and tainted money, spectre ships, and captive maidens, they fused them in their kindly way into Kidd legends. Kidd was theirs, and in their own Hudson River Valley his character took on a legendary stature not rivalled by tales from any other region. It is not generally recognized that Captain Kidd is a great rival of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. There is, of course, no end to Kidd stories. Some may be dignified with the word legend. A hundred others are but stray mentionings, false associations made by the unfettered folk mind and even now to be picked up from old

142 Pirate Laureate people and from odd corners of folklore journals, historical and antiquarian articles, and the extravaganzas of newspaper Sunday supplements. Buried treasure legends have continued to this day to be the commonest type of ghost story in New York State, where Captain Kidd's ghost may be stalked along the valleys of the Mohawk and the Hudson. And, though Kidd was never at the Isle of Shoals, it has been a kind of magnet for pirate legend. Both Kidd and Blackbeard have long been believed by fishermen to have left immense treasure there—Kidd's, on Appledore, being conventionally haunted by a slain man. Blackbeard's was taken there by one of his men, an unnamed Scot who settled on the Isle, of Shoals, it was said, with a great money-treasure and a beautiful female companion. Being sought, he put to sea, abandoned both treasures, and romantically blew up his own ship and the pursuing warship. It might be noted that this beautiful female captive, dear to the pirate tales of Lynn and Marblehead also, belonged to Blackbeard's Caledonian, not to Kidd. Kidd's name, coming to symbolize buried treasure and dark deeds connected with such ill-gotten gain, dallied somewhat less with soft romance than might be expected.38 That there is no end to Kidd stories is only another way of showing that Kidd's name became completely legendary. Most of us are brought back, time and again, to the position of Irving's absurd officer assuming that all treasures were "buried by Kidd the pirate, and his crew." As late as November 6, 1919, the New York World reported a minister of the gospel, directed by a dream, digging for Kidd's treasure. A glance at the last pages of the late Don Seitz's lengthy and chaotic list of Kidd references in his The Trial

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds 1 4 s of Captain William Kidd reveals how varied and scattered and perpetually interesting the story of this strange man still is. Interest may flare up temporarily from antiquarian poking about to strenuous vindications, but the legends and the subtle appeal of hidden treasure go on. The almost inevitable elevation of such a well-known body of folk tales into more imaginatively conceived and skillfully plotted tales and romances by serious writers, and the ultimate significance of Kidd in the consciousness of early Americans, soon will be revealed. Before proceeding to this phase, however, it would be a serious omission to overlook Kidd hoaxes, a kind of addendum to the buriedtreasure theme. In the Fairy Queen Spenser pictures little errors feeding on the blood of their dam Error. So legends beget legends, and the Kidd legends of buried treasure beget hoaxes. Very early there were claimants, impersonators, and jesters. Watson reported that a Jersey wag hoaxed the credulous in 1699 during the excitement incurred by the visit of Shelly and Kidd by declaring he had buried money on Cape May. In 1699 an arrogant, disfigured freebooter, John James, captain of the Providence Galley, a strong ship of twenty-six guns and one hundred and thirty men, fired upon an English man-of-war in Linnhaven Bay, Virginia, and declared to the captain of a Bristol merchantman whom he later pursued, " I am Captain Kidd." 39 In 1704 Samuel Lowman, Collector of the Port of Lewes, then in Pennsylvania, presented a claim against the government for expenses entailed in curtailing the illegal trade in 1700 with the Pirate, a ship said to be commanded by Captain Kidd.40 Also in 1704 one John Corso presented a false claim for £30,000, saying he had been robbed by Captain Kidd. 41 The most spectacular hoaxes, however, came later. First

144 Pirate Laureate there was the famous letter found in a field near Palmer, Massachusetts, sixty rods from the Boston road in the year of the California Gold Rush, 1849. Two boys, who were cousins named Shaw, came upon the letter sealed in a bottle and lodged .beneath a rock in a cave. This paper looked old and was written in an antique hand full of supposed antique misspellings. It purported to be written in some distress from Boston in 1700/1 and was signed "Robert Kidd." It read in part as follows: To John Bailey, Esq., New York. Sir: I fear we are in a bad situation. We are taken for pirates and you must come to Boston as soon as you get this . . . If I do not see you, I will tell you where my money is, for we have plenty of that if it will do us any good it is . . . buried on . . . Conant's Island in Boston Harbor on the northwest corner of the Island in two chests containing from fifteen to twenty thousand pounds sterling in money Jewels and Diamonds. They are buried about four feet deep with a flat stone on them and a pile of stone near by. There is no one that knows where it is but me now living as Dick Jones and I hid it when part of my men were in Boston and the rest asleep one night; it is about sixty rods up the side h i l l . . . I want you to see Col. Slaughter and John Nichols Esq. and James Bogard and Captain Houson and Edward Teach and all that can do me any good. . . They think I have got the money buried down at Plymouth or down that way somewhere, they don't think it is so near to Boston . . . Come quickly, if I am gone for England, secure money or diamonds and follow. It will buy a great many people . . . Keep dark . . . They keep me well here, this from your friend Robert Kidd. A postscript repeats his request to hurry, speaks again of the general location of the money, and urges Bailey to keep dark.

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds 145 There was a solemn reading of this letter to Palmer folk in one of the Shaw homes; and the publicity it created was prolonged by a quarrel between the fathers of the boys, Samuel Shaw and Gardner Shaw, over the possession of it, the paper at last being lodged in a bank vault for safekeeping. One man sued the other, and when the case came to court Samuel confessed to forging it.42 The two young discoverers had by that time followed the lure of other gold to California. The excitement must have lasted at least a year. The boys found the letter in February, 1849, and in the next year Gardner Shaw published in Palmer a life of Kidd and an account of this "discovery," The Life, Trial, and Execution of the Famous Pirate Ca-pt. Robert Kidd . . . Also, the letters of Kidd's wife to Lord Bellomont, and the famous Kidd Letter, Recently found, enclosed in a bottle, in a ledge of rocks in the town of Palmer, Mass. This work does not hint that the Kidd letter is a hoax and purports to be the first full account of Kidd, though it is well garnished with error, local legend, and three spurious documents. Gardner Shaw tells two local tales, one of which could easily have been suggested by the hoax, the other possibly being a source of the hoax itself. An old gentleman of West Warren, Massachusetts, a neighboring town, recollected his father as saying that a man once stopped at his tavern several days and made a search in the vicinity for a letter which he once attempted to carry from Boston to New York, and which he concealed among some rocks near Quabog. The other is a more conventional type of legend. One of Kidd's company, a Negro named James Marks, died in Warren in 1802 at the advanced age of 1 1 5 . People now living, wrote Shaw, remember him and recall his saying that he was twelve years old when Kidd was arrested

146 Pirate Laureate in Boston, and that he himself was spared because of his tender years. He and a white boy assisted Kidd in burying a chest of treasures on Long Island, and . . . after the hole was dug and the chest lowered to the bottom, Kidd said to the boys 'which one of you will take care of this money when I am dead and gone ?' The white boy instantly answered, 'I.' At the same moment Kidd severed his head from his body and tumbled him into the hole with the chest. This old man frequently accompanied money diggers to Long Island . . . but he was unable to identify the spot. It would be interesting to speculate what suggested to Samuel Shaw the idea of a Kidd hoax at all. Tales like these may have been common near Palmer. In addition there were the more generally known reports of the salvage operations in the Hudson four and five years earlier, and there was the excitement of the gold rush in California. Most flourishing was the famous Astor hoax. This was perpetrated in an after-dinner mood by a prosperous Chicago manufacturer and banker, Franklin H . Head, in 1894, for the amusement of the family of Frederick L . Olmsted, famous landscape architect of Brookline, Massachusetts. The Olmsted family were the real or supposed owners of Deer Island in the mouth of the Penobscot River in Maine. Head's hoax was done with such an air of legal exactness that it has been successfully hoaxing people ever since, especially people willing to believe anything of the famous Astor millions. From time to time notices of it have appeared in newspapers and magazines, and the Olmsted family have been so disturbed with inquiries that they have had to print a circular in self-defense, explaining the now fifty-two year old hoax. I have one of them before me, sent

Fifty or Three Score Thousand Pounds 1 4 J in December, 1939, to the librarian of the Grosvenor Library of Buffalo. It is identical with the "Commentary" appearing at the end of "Captain Kidd and the Astor Fortune" in Forum Magazine (July, 1931), possibly the last public printing of this interesting document. According to the tale told, the year 1801 saw the sudden increase in wealth of two people, John Jacob Astor, fur trader, and Jacques Cartier, a French-Canadian employee of Astor who lived along the Penobscot and bought furs from the Indians. In 1801 the latter bought a few acres on Deer Isle from Cotton Mather Olmsted, the original owner, and retired from work forever to live at ease with his Indian wife, indulging only in such pastimes as hunting, fishing, and drinking whiskey. Simultaneously, John Jacob Astor's deposits in a Manhattan bank leaped from $4,011 to over $500,000. Drafts and credits to Astor from a London dealer in precious stones amounted to $1,300,000 in the next two years. Checks written to Cartier for small amounts in settlement for furs leaped to $5,000. M r . Frederick L . Olmsted in 1894, according to the story, was led to formulate a theory that Cartier had found in a cave on the shore of Deer Isle, substantiated by markings and excavations, the buried treasures of Captain Kidd; that he had delivered the treasure chest to M r . Astor and received $5,000 for it; and that the treasure really belonged to the Olmsteds inasmuch as it was discovered on their land and not on Cartier's, which was only a few acres in the middle of the island. Mr. Olmsted continued his investigations, recovering Kidd's chest, which fitted perfectly the excavated imprints in the Deer Isle cave and was traced through a Brooklyn junk dealer to the Astor house, identifying the gems sold by Astor to be Kidd's plunder, discovering that a card handed by Kidd to his wife near the

148 Pirate Laureate end of his confinement in prison with the mysterious numeral 44106818 upon it showed the exact latitude and longitude of Deer Isle, and ascertaining that Kidd left no descendants to claim the fortune. Then he proceeded against the Astor family for a handsome settlement, ranging from one to five million dollars and the Astor real estate in New York City. The Astors refuted all such claims, and Mr. Olmsted went to the courts with the possibility of obtaining some settlement by one of several speciously legal methods. The case hung fire in 1894 "owing to delays at proceedings at law," and thus Mr. Franklin H. Head "summarized" A Remarkable JLcmsmt. In this manner have the Long Island rumors picked up by Watson a hundred years ago come to a logical refinement in our times. Though the editor of Forum hoped to "lay this ghost for all time," it may be safely assumed that such disclaimers are impotent before such formidable ghosts.

PART

II

LITERARY USES t

8.

Knickerbocker Kidd

I

T

IS A COMMONPLACE TO SAY THAT THE

AMERICAN

scene and spirit were first set forth with art and understanding by Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. If, for the moment, Edgar Allan Poe is included arbitrarily, it becomes clear that legends of Captain Kidd and his supposed treasure found their way into American fiction between 1824 and 1849, when the Kidd ballad was being revived and legends of his sunken or buried treasure were being recalled during the salvage operations at Caldwell's Landing. Irving, living in a kind of perpetual nostalgia, basking in the warm glow of local legends wherever he found them, is the author most naturally endowed to deal with Kidd. H e was brought up on the lower Hudson, and he possessed a mind unusually receptive to fable and romance. Gazing mistily back upon the old, old days, the creator of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane frequently remarked that no region was quite so full of tradition and superstition as was the Hudson. W e remember his Sleepy Hollow folk who, however wide awake they may have been before they entered the region, were sure "in a little time to inhale the witching influences of the air, and begin to grow

152 Pirate Laureate imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions." In the person of old Diedrich Knickerbocker, famous as the fictional compiler of the Knickerbocker History of New Yorkj he revealed the impress upon his boyhood mind of pirate tales in general, and Captains Bradish and Kidd in particular, in association with Corlear's Hook, Hell Gate, the Hudson River, the Catskills, Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and old wrecks about the island of "Manhatto." From the bulging notebooks of old Diedrich came all of Irving's Kidd legends. In 1824, while yet abroad, a distracted Irving threw together Tales of a Traveller, another "sketch-book" miscellany done at broken intervals of the chaotic year preceding. Afraid of not being able to reach again the heights of his Sketch Book, his mind excited by a thirteen-month sojourn in a legend-haunted Germany but his time torn to pieces by social diversions in Paris and London, he put together in a quite uninspired manner, during a spell of wet weather that forced him indoors, this mixture of retold tales. It was in four parts, three of them with English and Continental backgrounds and the fourth, as if tucked in for good measure, "The Money-Diggers." This part contained several garrulously told stories of treasure hunting, laid in the old, familiar, native, New World haunts that provided him in his best moments with those tales of extraordinary serio-comic charm that remain among the first American classics. Tales of a Traveller failed. The critics condemned it so that it served only to blur his reputation. However, although the telling of these Kidd legends is inept, and although Irving failed to see the significance of a figure like Kidd in early American life, as Cooper definitely did, he nevertheless reflected more perfectly than anyone else the

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local folk tales and performed the signal service of laying them out for later and greater artists to read and use. For read they were, being carried along in the wake of his Knickerbocker History, The Legend, of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and The Spectre Bridegroom. Longfellow, Poe, and Stevenson tell us so, and Cooper shows many signs of having been within the circle. Later, first in the Knickerbocker Magazine of 1839, and then in Wolf erf's Roost (1855), he returned to the Captain Kidd-smuggler-pirate-tavern scene, this time among the Dutch settlements along the Jersey shores of lower New York Bay. He called the story The Guests from Gibbet Island. There are, therefore, three main tales: The Devil and Tom Walker, Wolfert Webber or Golden Dreams (both in Tales of a Traveller), and The Guests from Gibbet Island. The first two are accompanied by some desultory explanatory matter, sometimes referred to as tales, entitled Hell Gate and Kidd the Pirate. Wolfert Webber is commonly broken into two sections, the latter being called "The Adventure of the Black Fisherman," but it is merely a continuation to a logical conclusion of the money madness of Wolfert Webber. An outline of these tales shows the state in which Kidd legends existed in Irving's time, mixed, of course, with a slight overlayer of fiction consisting of Knickerbocker drollery and the outworn machinery of Gothic romance. They are a nice confusion of Kidd, witchcraft, and neo-Faustian diabolism, the Flying Dutchman, and local scenery. Most of the conventional turns of the now conventional pirate or buccaneer legend are readily seen—and several conventional characters. Two of them were the first appearance in print of fully developed and conventionalized Kidd legends. Before getting down to the business of tale telling, Ir-

Pirate Laureate ving sets the scene and atmosphere of The Money-Diggers by "prosing on" about Hell Gate and its pirate fables and Captain Kidd. This prelude is a fair sample of Irving's description of his own mind at the time. "When I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot determine whether I have read, heard, or dreamt it, and I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories." 2 His twoand-a-half page account of Kidd's history depends almost as much on popular concepts as do his later remarks about the "innumerable progeny of traditions." Notably, he provides Kidd with something he probably never had, "a little rakish, mosquito-built vessel, that could run into all kinds of waters." Trees and rocks, he reports, were mysteriously marked to denote the places where the great treasures of gold and jewels of Kidd and other pirates were buried} and "in all the stories which once abounded of these enterprises, the devil played a conspicuous part. Either he was conciliated by ceremonies and invocations, or some solemn compact was made with him. Still he was ever prone to play the money-diggers some slippery trick." Thus the antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker delivered his learning. The introduction ends with a scene in which "several worthy burghers" of the city go fishing. One hooks onto an old rusty pistol; whereupon it is suggested that it might have belonged to Captain Kidd. At this, "an old iron faced Cape Cod whaler" sings two snatches of " M y Name Was Captain Kidd As I Sailed" and the original fisher of the pistol tells the first tale of Kidd's money. This is the story of The Devil and Tom Walker. The scene is near Boston in 1727. Tom Walker, a miserly resident, meets the devil in a swamp. The devil is a sooty black man, neither Negro nor Indian, and he has been cutting down a tree preparing to roast a noted, rich, retired buc-

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755

caneer who at that moment lay dying. Tom Walker, fearing neither man nor devil, holds easy conversation with "Old Scratch" and learns that Kidd's money lies buried on the ridge above the swamp and beneath some great oak trees. The Devil has charge over it and will give it to Tom Walker provided Walker uses it to further the Diabolic Cause. The grasping Bostonian demurs at this, first on general principles and next in revulsion against turning slaver and fitting out a slave ship. Finally he agrees to the sooty axman's proposition to become usurer. H e sets up a broker's office in Boston and does a flourishing business. H e builds a large house, waxes rich and old, repents of his ways, prays aloud in church, becomes a religious zealot, takes to carrying a small Bible, and in the act of foreclosing a mortgage with particular cruelty, is summoned and taken away by a black man who announces, "Tom, you're come for." This obviously Faustian story has strayed far from Kidd's wrecks and buried treasures in the Hudson. By the literary historian it is considered a weak imitation of German legend. To the follower of the Kidd legend it reveals Captain Kidd raised to fraternal association with Mephistopheles and the Walpurgisnacht dance. For the compiler of phrases and fables it fixes a celebrated American phrase of rebuke to bankers and brokers, "The Devil and Tom Walker." Irving now picnics with his worthy burghers who peep into a moldering family vault and think of "Ready Money Provost," another one of the suddenly and mysteriously enriched New Yorkers, whose name was connected with a rotting pirate wreck in Hell Gate. This sets the scene for the second and the longest of these tales, told by "the authentic John Josse Vandermoere." Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams has all the marks

i$6

Pirate Laureate

of its author's most characteristic style. The scene is New York in the early eighteenth century. The hero is a fat, pipe-smoking Dutchman whose foolishness consists of simplicity and naïveté mixed with paternal concern for keeping and increasing the family wealth. Wolfert Webber, like his fathers before ,him, raised splendid cabbages. As the city grew and crept close around his ancestral acres, he found himself growing poor in relation to the increasing prosperity of the city outside his garden wall. This gave him cause for worry and made his mind unusually susceptible to the events^ he witnessed and the tales he heard at an old Dutch inn on Corlear's Hook, a favorite Saturday afternoon rendezvous of Dutch residents of the city. At this inn an old Walloon, Ramm Rapelye, occupied the leather-bottomed seat of honor before the fire, a man so dignified, so large, and so rich "that he was never expected to support any opinion by argument." In this atmosphere of established order and awe for respectability Wolfert Webber shared a Saturday afternoon place in the outer circle. One blustery autumn day the landlord remarked, "This will be a rough night for the money-diggers." To this all present gave strict attention, especially a one-eyed English half-pay captain who had Goldsmith's Mr. Burchell's habit of saying "Fudge!" and who doubted that the pot of money recently dug up behind Stuyvesant's orchard, or any other, was anything but Kidd's gold. In the argument of Kidd vs. the Dutch as buriers of money, an old Dutchman defended the Dutch and maintained that the successful diggers always dreamt three times beforehand. Such talk sent Wolfert Webber home to bed with a heavy heart and a head so teeming with ideas that he dreamed three times of buried money in his garden. Aban-

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doning the solid pursuit of husbandry, he laid waste his garden by a series of fruitless midnight excavations. For long he stayed away from the inn at Corlear's Hook, brooding, digging, and giving his family and the neighbors good reason to think his mind was touched. Upon returning to the good old inn, however, he was shocked to find a bragging, foulmouthed, domineering buccaneer in the august seat of honor before the fire. This scar-faced mariner, who had appeared strangely out of a dark and stormy night seated on his sea chest, was something of a monster. Deep-chested, square, and muscular, he was strong. A knife slash across his nose and upper lip, double joints, and bowed legs gave him a fierce if not grotesque look. H e cocked his old hat at a rakish angle. H e roared and drank and ordered all persons about. H e was mysterious, too. For days he disappeared. For hours he sat in his pistolhung room with his stub of a pipe, his glass of toddy, and his telescope. With the latter he studied any extraordinary small craft like barge, yawl, or jolly boat that hove in view. Furthermore, he told hair-raising buccaneer tales, suffering no contradiction. The English half-pay captain was peremptorily silenced when he attempted to match tales, his being of his hero Kidd. Kidd sailed up the Hudson, said he, and landed his plunder secretly. With "a tremendous oath" (discreetly unrecorded) the scar-faced buccaneer denied it. "I tell you he did," said the one-eyed captain, "and he buried treasure on the Devil's Dans Kammer." Not so, roared the buccaneer. "What a plague do you know of Kidd and his haunts?" " I had the pleasure of seeing him hanged at Execution Dock." "Then, sir, let me tell you that you saw as pretty a fellow hanged as ever trod shoe leather." The buccaneer

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would brook no opposition and silenced the English halfpay captain by the blunt personal remark that many a landlubber might better have swung. Old Preechy Prauw now chimed in to agree with the bold, bad man, saying it was Bradish and not Kidd who buried money up the Hudson and elsewhere. When Preechy attempted to tell another story, the buccaneer cut him off, and with "the grin of an angry bear" ordered all and sundry to "let buccaneers and their money alone . . . They fought hard for their money; they gave body and soul for it, and wherever it lies buried, depend upon it he must have a tug with the devil who gets i t ! " Silence and white faces were all around. The swarthy bad man paid his reckoning in strange coin and then stamped off upstairs at ten by his pressed watch without a word to the cowed. Among the latter was Wolfert Webber, goggle-eyed yet envious. Preechy Prauw could now tell his story of the black fisherman to the accompaniment of one of those violent thunderstorms that are among the Gothic furnishings of dark tales and deeds. This was a tale of a Long Island Negro named Sam who by chance witnessed a weird burial on Manhattan, opposite Blackwell's Island. Having been fishing and driven to cover by a thunderstorm, he had slept. Upon awakening he had seen six men, five in red woolen caps, land a small boat at a place marked by an iron ring. They then heaved something heavy ashore and proceeded to bury it. Sam arrived at the spot just as they were finishing in the dawn. Sam thought they were murderers and narrowly missed being murdered himself. This was the story explaining the common superstition that Father Red-cap haunted the old burnt farmhouse in the woods near Hell Gate.

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This was all fudge to the half-pay captain, but to Wolfert Webber it meant treasure, not murder. His heated mind was only the more strained by the events of the next few minutes. There came musket shots and wild shouts from the shore. Up rattled the buccaneer's window above to let out the buccaneer's answer. Down came the horrid seaman, carrying his heavy chest. Out into the storm he lunged. After him waddled the Dutch tavern-haunters with a lantern. "Dowse the light!" roared a hoarse voice from the unlighted water. Then by lightning flashes they beheld a boat filled with men, bobbing about a rocky point. They saw the buccaneer heave one end of his chest onto the gunwale of the boat. They saw him take hold of the other. They were horrified to see the boat surge away from the rocks and the heavy chest go down, pulling the scarred veteran of buccaneer battles after it. They gave and heard shrieks upon the stormy air. Then all was hurried away by the tide. Back in the tavern the evening was terminated by discussion of the old Dutch legend of Skipper Onderdonk's boatswain who died at sea, was buried in his chest, and was seen every night thereafter like a Flying Dutchman, seated on his chest sailing after them, tormented, it seems, because no prayers were said over him. There was but one thing for Wolfert Webber to do. H e sought out the now aged local character, Black Sam, and relocated the spot. H e found that three crosses chiseled in the rock along the shore by the iron ring corresponded with three crosses at the burial spot. Upon leaving, however, he was disturbed by encountering the leering ghost of the drowned buccaneer of the inn at Corlear's Hook, wearing a red woolen cap and angrily shaking his fist. This temporarily unnerved Wolfert Webber. Next he sought out an old "High German Doctor" deeply versed, by virtue of

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green spectacles, old tomes, and the German language, in mysteries and rites. Dr. Knipperhausen completed the arrangements for proper invocations, incantations, burnings, readings, and manipulation of the divining rod. These men now returned to the scene. They divined. They drew a circle. They built a fire and burnt herbs and read aloud the Gothic print of both Latin and German. They dug. They struck against a chest. And just then they beheld the grinning face of the drowned buccaneer. All three scattered. Dr. Knipperhausen began to pray in German. Wolfert Webber, however, was pursued by the ghost. Just when he had given himself up for a lost Dutchman, suspended over a cliff by a thorn bush, a mysterious and friendly newcomer saved his life by stabbing the ghost! Thus ended Wolfert Webber's dreams. His savior was none other than the young suitor for his daughter's hand. Back home he repined and was about to die of discouragement when he learned of the riches to be gained by subdividing his ruined cabbage farm into city lots. Quickly he revived and, grown quickly rich in an unexpected way, he succeeded to the chair of honor before the inn fire, where his tale was often told among the tavern fraternity. Their summary conclusion was that the money-digging affair was still a great mystery, but that the mysterious and badmannered buccaneer who drowned was either a smuggler or "one of the ancient comrades of Kidd or Bradish, returned to convey away treasures formerly hidden in the vicinity." A "strange foreign-built" vessel "with much the look of a picaroon" was seen at dawn, after the moneydigging failure of Wolfert Webber, standing straight out of the harbor to the sea. All the things in this sprawling tale that seem to us now so tritely conventional are important in the history of

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Kidd legend. They were not trite in the fiction of 1824. And however much such trappings as ghosts haunting pirate spoil, treasure spots curiously marked, or sinister pirate-strangers bragging in seaside inns may have gathered from common fireside gossip with spore-like fecundity about the head of Kidd, they never had been worked into any previous artistic shape. Some may deny this achievement to Irving, but it is beyond doubt that the dreaming author-folklorist was the first person of genius to attempt to fashion the story now recognized as the buried treasure tale. H e lacked but one conventional feature—the chart. One feature he had, common in the early American treasure tales but lacking in such a notable example as Treasure Island—the Negro accomplice. T o Irving must go the credit, not for writing a buccaneer classic, but for the literary uncovering of the rich Kidd lore from which later and more famous stories were to spring.3 Because the Guests from Gibbet Island, written some fifteen years later, revives some of these fictional devices, and because it suggests so directly Cooper's Water Witch, a word or two about it will be in order before we pass on to Cooper himself. This "Legend of Communipaw" concerns the doings of a scallawag nephew of an old Dutch tavern keeper of the Jersey shore along Lower New York Bay. Yan Yost Vanderscamp was a prankster, thief, and haunter of the waters of the Bay and the Lower Hudson. His companion was Pluto, an old Negro who had been mysteriously cast ashore in some earlier instance. In the course of time young Vanderscamp and Pluto disappeared from the Wild Goose Inn, much to the relief of the peaceloving citizens of Communipaw. After some years the pair returned, rebuilt the now dead uncle's much-fallen inn, and took up a shocking life of carousal with their rough sea-

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faring companions. They pitched quoits with Spanish dollars, refitted the inn with strange and costly furniture, swore foreign oaths, forced the neighbors to dine and drink with them, intruded themselves upon their neighbors and their daughters in ordinarily quiet houses, where they shot off pistols and swore prodigiously. It finally dawned on the slow intellects of the community that these were the times of the notorious Captain Kidd, and that Vanderscamp and Pluto had gone pirating (the implication is that it might easily have been with Kidd) and were now back home where they might hide out, safely if not quietly. But the government spoiled all this. In its pursuit of Kidd and all his kind it had apprehended several members of Vanderscamp's crew at the Wild Goose (Kidd's men?) and had hanged them in plain sight on Gibbet Island. Vanderscamp and a grizzled Pluto, now possessing but one eye, again disappeared, and there was no more talk of Captain Kidd in the village. For years the bones of the pirates swung in chains on the island. Then Vanderscamp and Pluto and one other returned. Vanderscamp, the wild wag and pirate, was now a changed man. H e had married a shrew and had become a "merchant." Again a kind of residence was set up at the Wild Goose. At a signal from the inn his former companions, also now "merchants" would slip up from the Bay at night or Pluto would row Vanderscamp out to them. Some said Vanderscamp was up to his old game. Others said he was smuggling. Coming home one night from a carousal on board one of these mysterious visitants, the pirate-merchant-smuggler was annoyed because Pluto rowed him close to the swinging bodies of his former companions, but in his drunken humor he drank a health to them, wished them alive, and

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invited them to the inn once again. Returning home he found from his angry wife's words that they had preceded him. H e mounted to the Blue Room where they were, but in his astonishment at actually seeing them seated at a table, singing and drinking, their halters about their throats and a blue light burning before them, Vanderscamp fell backward down the stairs and broke his neck. After that the house was considered haunted. Diabolic merriment could be overheard there on stormy nights. The final brawl was notable for certain unusual and piercing shrieks. The next day the neighbors found everything turned topsyturvy and the body of the shrewish Frau Vanderscamp stretched out on the floor of the Blue Room with marks of the death grip on her throat. Pluto had disappeared. His empty skiff was found adrift, and his body was washed ashore off Gibbet Island beneath the clanking skeletons. In this tale Irving simply attached a ghost story to the supposed piracies of Captain Kidd, emphasizing instead of buried treasure some smuggling along the Jersey shore, even as Cooper had done nine years before. It purported to have been found among the Knickerbocker papers at "Wolfert's Roost"—a corruption, we are told, of "Lust in Rust," Cooper's name for the New Jersey country home of Mynheer Beverout of the Water Witch. Indeed, other details in Cooper's longer, more carefully wrought tale of smuggling lead one to think that Irving made generous use of it for his Guests from Gibbet Island. Both stories are obviously rooted in the Kidd legend. The way lay open for a thoroughgoing, well-rounded historical novel on Captain Kidd and the exciting days of old New York. Irving had succeeded with humorous Knickerbocker history and had pointed to tales of Kidd's

164 Pirate Laureate treasure. Scott and Cooper had begun to set the pace in historical fiction. But, even today, that novel has never been written. In 1827, however, when Cooper was abroad and already beginning to realize the imaginative appeal of Kidd in American maritime history, such a novel was attempted. It was The Buccaneers, A Romance of Our Own Country in its Ancient Day, Illustrated with Divers Marvellous Histories and Antique and Facetious Efisodes gathered from the most authentic chronicles and Affirmed records extant from the Settlement of Nieuw Nederlandts until the time of the famous Richard Kid: carefully collated from the laborious researches and minute investigations of that excellent antiquary and sublime -philosopher, yclept Terentius Phlogobombos * This pretentious affair was the handiwork of Samuel B. F. Judah, who must have been ambitious to play the Jonathan Swift of his times. H e had sharpened his pen on libelous satire and a poor play on Revolutionary Lexington, and in The Buccmeers set forth another dish of caustic comment. Had he not been so seriously intent on railing against the vices of society, and had he not been so long-winded, he might have written an important book in early American fiction. As it is, he stretches to exasperating thinness a semihistorical tale reminiscent of Irving, if of any one at all, in which a bloody, buccaneering "Richard" Kidd becomes a figure in the Leisler troubles. Judah intended to create more than a tale of adventure and intrigue, clearly an attack on a corrupt state of affairs not one thousandth as bad as those in the wicked year 1827. In the six hundred and forty pages of this story-disquisition, historical events concerning Jacob Leisler and Kidd, though a decade apart, are telescoped and changed. The figure of Kidd is fundamentally that of popular imagination: a bloodthirsty

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villain whose savagery has filled the countryside with fear and superstition, and whose buried treasures lie in numerous places about the island of Manhattan, still guarded by the ghosts of the slain. Kidd and his crew come ashore and extort money from the pipe-smoking Dutch owner of the Harlem ferry, a man who is a smuggler and an accomplice in their designs. They are engaged in lending aid to the Leisler faction by intercepting and kidnaping the governor, newly arrived. Their futile maneuvers stretch through all of volume one. In the second volume the center of interest shifts to the imprisonment, trial, and execution of Jacob Leisler, Kidd having dispersed his men and taken to his boats. A few things, however, may be said for The Buccaneers as historical fiction. Judah was aiming in the right direction. The indignant man simply lacked the ability to tell a good story. He used a mass of minutiae of everyday life, especially in scenes of assembly and feasting, both public and private. He laid an extravagant emphasis on dialect and strongly individualized his characters. He gave a certain convincing air to his ogrelike Kidd by sprinkling in a handful of real details taken from the published accounts of Kidd's trial. The result is that Kidd and his men, especially one Eumet, speak an extravagant mixture of Spanish and nautical English, and some of the men bear their own names, like Gabriel Loffe. Also as part of this realistic seasoning is the mention of the Quedagh Merchant and her owner, of William Moore, Kidd's slain gunner, and of bombo, the drink with which Kidd really toasted Captain Culliford when he should have been fighting him. But Samuel B. F. Judah never mastered his assembled material. He produced a mere might-have-been and left the main task to Cooper.

9-

Leatherstocking Kidd

O COMMENT TO MY KNOWLEDGE UPON T H E CONTRI-

bution of Kidd Legends to belles lettres has gone farther than the rather obvious linking together of Irving's Tales of a Traveller, Poe's Gold Bug, and Stevenson's Treasure Island,. This leaves out of account James Fenimore Cooper, whose use of such lore is more subtle than Irving's, if less imaginative than that of the others, and clearly indicates that he was not only familiar with Kidd legends but respected them as such and drew upon them significantly in several tales. It is fashionable now to view Cooper as a turbulent patriot who became a novelist by accident, and who used his novels as vehicles for articulating his views on American democracy—a new way of life. Washington Irving clung to the Old World ways. Cooper was the first widely read American author, it has been said, who viewed American life from the point of view of the western New World. In this fact, really, lies the significance also of his treatment of Kidd.1 That he was as much aware of the imaginative appeal of Kidd lore as Irving may be seen in his heavily worded lament, a kind of author's alibi, in the 1850 Preface to the

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Red Rover. " T h e history of this country has very little to aid the writer of fiction, whether the scene be laid on land or on water. With the exception of the well-known, though meagre incidents connected with the career of Kidd, indeed, it would be very difficult to turn to a single nautical occurrence on this part of the continent in the hope of conferring on a work of the imagination any portion of that peculiar charm which is derived from facts clouded a little by time." This rather negative way of stating the exceptional importance of the famous New York mariner to the American historical novelist is well borne out by the spirit of and certain details in several of Cooper's works. An incident in The Deerslayer, for example, overshadowed by scenes of fighting and escape, is the opening of Floating T o m Hutter's mysterious chest. Floating Tom, the avaricious old man who claimed all of Lake Otsego and kept his past and his sea chest triple-locked, had formerly been a pirate, probably one of "Kidd's men." "Some think he was a free liver on the salt water," said Hurry Harry to the Deerslayer, "a companion of a sartain Kidd, who was hanged for piracy . . . and that he came up into these regions, thinking that the King's cruisers could never cross the mountains, and that he might enjoy the plunder peaceably in the woods." 2 Peace was never to be his, but his incoherent ravings at the time of his death verify well enough the truth of the rest of this remark. The clothing and especially the chessmen found in the chest are of course important items in the ransom of Hutter and March, and in Judith's brilliant but futile impersonation in order to save Deerslayer. In 1839 , two years before, Cooper had reviewed the facts of Kidd's life for his History of the Navy, mentioning the famous deposit of money and jewels on Gardiner's Island and the unwarranted legends that had grown about Kidd's

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name. In The Sea Lions (1849) he undertook a tale of the sea that intertwined whaling with treasure hunting, and quite clearly took suggestions from Kidd legends having to do with Gardiner's Island and eastern Long Island, especially a promontory curiously called the Oyster Pond. His young hero is a Gardiner, whose task is to sail to the Antarctic for whales and en route home to stop at a West Indian key for a $30,000 pirate treasure buried near a tree and a hillock of sand. The story deals almost wholly with the perils of whaling and the rivalry of a second vessel that doggedly followed the Sea Lion literally to the death, having caught wind of the treasure hunt. Recovery of the treasure is finally achieved, but is presented in a few words merely in retrospect by Captain Gardiner to his owner. Cooper maneuvers his plot into the shadow of Captain Kidd not only through the person of Gardiner and the locale, but through a remark about the Widow White very early in the tale. The Widow White harbored a dying sailor named Daggett, a pirate or acquaintance of pirates, possessing two charts, one of a rich whaling ground and one of the treasure. Deacon Ichabod Pratt visits him often and succeeds in acquiring, copying, and finally altering the maps. The homeless sailor dies, and the acquisitive Deacon organizes the expedition under young Gardiner. If the Widow White had not thought Deacon Pratt was really coming to visit her, wrote Cooper, when the Deacon repeatedly visited the dying seaman Daggett in her house, the whole east end of Long Island would have known not only of the fabulous sealing island and the West Indian treasure key, but "twenty such islands, and keys without number, each of which contained more hidden treasure than Gar'ner's Island, Oyster Pond, the Plumb and Fisher's, and all the coasts of the Sound put together; enriched

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as each and all of these places were thought to be, by the hidden deposits of K i d d . " 3 Rubbing shoulders thus with Kidd lore, The Sea Lions, however, eschews the excitements, ghostly and otherwise, of the conventional hunt for golden doubloons. It does present in American fiction perhaps the first instance of the conventional South Sea treasure island chart found among the effects of a mysterious dying sailor, thus anticipating Robert Louis Stevenson and a hundred others. T o go back in time now to the Water Witch (1830), we find an association and an interpretation of this American legend that I believe is more important than what we have noted already. T h e Water Witch is one of a small group of novels of the 1830's in which Cooper somewhat stiffly dealt with legendary lore, European and American. " W e have had our buccaneers on the water, and our witches on the land," he wrote in the Preface; "but we believe this is the first occasion on which the rule has been reversed." Altogether he felt it was his most imaginative work up to the date of writing, but that it failed by blending too much of the real with the legendary. It is today, however, among the more, rather than less, entertaining of his works despite its stiffness and artificiality. In this tale Cooper takes material from Manhattan legends of Captain Kidd, employs the ghostly mystery of a spectre ship doubtless related to the then popular legend of the Flying Dutchman, introduces the illicit trade between Colonial New York and the freebooters, and draws no inconsiderable suggestion from Shakespeare's Temfest. W i t h these he builds a tale of a respectable Dutch "mynheer," Alderman Van Beverout, who carries on a lively trade in smuggled goods with " T h e Skimmer of the Seas," a half-

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real, half-phantom outlaw who lands at will at the Highlands in New Jersey, and who magically eludes all pursuers. H i s patroness is the Water Witch, who lives aboard his rakish vessel and who has given it her name. H e r countenance adorns the figurehead of this strange and mysterious brigantine, and a shrine in her honor is kept, before which certain priestly rites are observed in the cabin. At moments of apparent capture the long, graceful, black ship (to a description of which Cooper devotes three-quarters of a page) disappears} and nothing is seen but the illuminated countenance of the fair sorceress—then she, too, disappears. T h e small rakish hull has become the symbol of the marine outlaw, the picaroon. T h e Red Rover commanded such a ship, and Irving's Dutchmen often saw one. It long had been a familiar adjunct to Hudson River legends of Kidd and had appeared in other fiction dealing with Kidd, especially in J . S. Jones's popular melodrama of the same year, Captain Kyd, or the Wizard of the Sea. T h e events of The Water Witch take place in the second decade of the eighteenth century, just after Kidd's and just before Blackbeard's time. Most of the scenes center in the waters and shores near Van Beverout's summer mansion, " L u s t in Rust," on the west bank of the Shrewsbury near where high water occasionally broke through the narrow neck of sand between the river and the ocean and temporarily made Sandy Hook an island. The Water Witch is Cooper's attempt, whatever its success or failure, to spin out a story from what was to him as an historical novelist the most exciting nautical occurrence in American history, "the meagre incidents connected with the career of K i d d . " H e anchors his legend in Kidd by creating an atmosphere through frequent mention of him in suggested connections. Euclid, the Negro servant of Van

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Beverout, having been roundly scolded in advance of any delinquency., whines that nothing is done in all Manhattan but "a color' man do him! H e do a mischief, and he do all a work, too! I won'er what color massa t'ink war' Captain Kidd?" Black or white, he was a rank rogue, the rich Alderman retorted. " M s fate should be a warning to every nigger in the colony." H e should have been hanged here "as a warning to the blacks of Manhattan." But Euclid perseveres in self-defense, reminding Myn Heer that the blacks in Kidd's ship were "Guinea-born." Lord Cornbury, historically one of the corrupt governors for the Crown, reported to Myn Heer Beverout, as he took the air of a morning, that one of his fellow prisoners "in yonder cage" whispers that the Skimmer of the Seas is on the coast! "Be wary, worthy burgher, as the second part of the tragedy of Kidd may be enacted in these seas." But the alderman-merchant-smuggler was his lordship's match and shrewdly replied, " I leave such enterprise to my superiors . . . enterprises that are said to have occupied the Earl of Bellomont, Governor Fletcher, and my Lord Cornbury." The ferryman who takes Alderman Van Beverout, his niece and heroine of the story, Alida, and her stolid Dutch suitor across to Staten Island, the first leg of their journey across the Bay to Lust in Rust, repeats the news that the Skimmer of the Seas had recently been seen. "And pray friend who is this Skimmer of the Seas?" asks the bold and witty Master Tiller, a passenger who startles all the other passengers by his nautical actions and remarks, his brilliant India shawl, and his audacity in the face of the Queen's officer. "The witches may tell! I only know that such a rover

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there is, and that he is here today and there tomorrow. Some say that it is only a craft of mist that skims the top of the seas . . . and others think it is the sprite of a vessel that was rifled and burnt by Kidd in the Indian Ocean, looking for its gold and the killed." The ferryman admits that he has seen him once but "could hardly give a good account of his hull or rig" because of the distance. The party arrives at Lust in Rust, where Van Beverout soon undertakes dealings with the very Skimmer of the Seas, who puts into the secret inlet at night in his lightrigged Water Witch. The fair Alida, romantically gazing from her balcony in Lust in Rust, sees the phantom craft in the moonlight and later hears the regular stroke of oars. Her mind fills with tales of lawless rovers from the Caribbean who refit in American waters—tales "coupled with the deeds, character, and fate of the notorious Kidd . . . still recent, and although magnified and colored by vulgar exaggerations, as all such tales were known to be, enough was believed by the better instructed, to make his life and death the subject of many curious and mysterious rumors." Alida fears a band of rovers might be.approaching her uncle's house to rob it. She recalls stories of freebooters visiting a neighboring island and is aware that much digging for hidden treasure had recently gone on. It is only Seadrift, the Skimmer, mysterious, courteous, sure. Smuggling operations are impeded, however, by the presence of Captain Ludlow of Her Majesty's cruiser Coquette, who endeavors in vain to take the Skimmer and who is also a suitor for the hand of Alida. The plot is concluded by the completion of the Skimmer's business, the failure of Ludlow to take him, a chase through Hell Gate into the Sound, ending in a fight with a Frenchman in which Ludlow and Alida and the Skimmer find themselves

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adrift on a raft later to be rescued by the Water Witch, and the final romantic disappearance of the Skimmer of the Seas, who leaves everything quiet for the marital bliss of Ludlow and Alida. The character of the Skimmer himself, and his men, is the most interesting and significant thing in this tale of witchcraft at sea and buccaneering ashore. The Skimmer is just as mild, though not so innocuous, as the Dutchmen of Lust in Rust. Mildness in mien and manner in conjunction with cool daring and outlawry, Cooper asserts, is often to be found in "the most desperate and self-willed men." This is in part no doubt an embellishment of character due directly to the influence of the Byronic, or at least the Romantic, hero. The Pilot and The Red Rover present the same general type—strong men physically and mentally, fully capable of their command, but given to speculative, melancholy, poetic moods. The Red Rover, like Byron, delights in the tempestuous. These seamen, especially the outlaws, are the opposite of what we expect in such tales. Philosophers, dreamers, and idealists, they find themselves red rovers and skimmers of these seas against their desires. The Red Rover and the Skimmer are American patriots—with more of the gentleman than of homespun, yet also with sober touches of Robin Hood. They both hate the English and love America. They both would do other than they do. In the Red Rover Cooper consciously cuts himself loose from the legends of Captain Kidd to present a roving patriot in the period of calm that preceded the storm of the Revolution. In The Water Witch Cooper goes back further and builds on the legends of Kidd and the Madagascar trade of Colonial New York. His whole point of view is ardently American. His Skimmer feels equal to and above Queen Anne of England and takes no orders from her be-

iy4 Pirate Laureate cause her laws rob the Colonials. "When our affairs call us the same way," he says quite frankly to Captain Ludlow, "no one can be readier than I to keep her majesty's company." What might the fair Alida have thought of her uncle's land-buccaneering? "It will create little surprise," says Cooper, "that she saw no reason to distrust the legality of some of her uncle's speculations, with less pain than might be felt by one of her sex and opinions at the present hour" because she was well-aware of political corruption and connivance at flagrant acts at sea by the political higher-ups, the Bellomonts and Cornburys. And old Van Beverout, though never condoned by Cooper, is nevertheless made to state the position of the New York merchant. "What sin is there in pushing commerce a step beyond the limits of the law? These English are a nation of monopolists; and they make no scruple of tying us of the colonies hand and foot, heart and soul, with their acts of Parliament, saying 'With us shalt thou trade, or not at all.' " Then he ends excitedly but not so much so as to prevent his characteristic indulgence in the oath referential, "By the character of the best burgomaster of Amsterdam . . . that we should lie down and obey!" The Skimmer led a charmed life. H e was not intended to represent Kidd, but though Cooper generalized the theme of the whole book, he never allowed it to drift far from the name and fame of Kidd. Near the end, when the Skimmer has daringly come in to Lord Cornbury in New York to bargain for the release of his Ariel-like "boy," made captive, Cooper goes out of his way to accomplish this. "What is the meaning of that gun . . . ? It gave the alarm to the smuggler as if it had been a summons from Execution Dock, or a groan from the ghost of Kidd." 4 Cooper no doubt partly spoils two good narratives by in-

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ability to turn his imagination loose on his subject. Yet, this must be said: It is he and not Irving or Poe who saw the meaning in American Colonial life of Captain Kidd and all like him. H e caught the early spirit of independence that disregarded English law, a spirit that in the Revolution was patriotic and good, but which, before that time, had been criminal.

IO.

T h e Oval Stone and the Old Women of New England

H

A M L E T CRIED OUT TO T H E GHOST:

Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure in the womb of earth, For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death Speak of it: stay, and speak! How long has buried treasure been tainted—Devil's money! How easily Captain Kidd fitted into this ghostly money legend, a latter-day symbol of the bad man hoarding up to an evil end an ill-gotten wealth. In the nineteenth century a deliberately didactic literature for the young naturally exploited Kidd tales and Kidd associations. Not only is the Captain to be found on the road to heaven, as in the camp meeting, but along the road to hell, as in the moral tales of Daniel Pierce Thompson and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Thompson is most famous for his Green Mountain Boys. In a lesser known, early tale, May Martin, or the Money Diggers, he ventured before the American public of 1835 with his first villain, who was a professional sharper with the real pirate name of Gow and who practiced divination

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and false witchcraft on the credulous of Cape Cod and Vermont. H e was a counterfeiter and a professional buriedtreasure hunter. H e employed not only the hazel rod but the stone. Are you quite sure, asked May Martin's foster father, that "you have at last found the real, genuine sort of stone which you have the faculty of seeing things in?" "O quite sure," returned the hoaxer. " I t is the same thin, oval, yellow, speckled kind of Stone I used when I discovered the pot of money on Cape Cod that they supposed Kidd buried there." 1 This made him doubly a villain. H e leads a group of simple Vermonters to the mountain treasure spot where, when they have uncovered the first dollar, they are to pay him a hundred dollars each. They strike a planted chest— and hear ghostly groans from the thicket. They finger planted counterfeit dollars—and an accomplice properly rigged up with phosphorus and a mask runs screeching among them like some human hound of the Baskervilles, with fiery eyes, flaming mouth, and severed throat. Things go well enough for Gow, even to his designs upon the heroine. But she and her lover turn the tables, to no one's surprise, and all ends not only happily but amazingly in the reform of Gow, who appears at the end suddenly transformed into a preacher! This moral opuscule won for the young author a fifty dollar prize in the New England Galaxy and encouraged him to continue writing. Done in the manner of Cooper's earlier work and owing much to Irving, it drew also from Thompson's notes taken on conversations heard up and down the state of Vermont. Vermont had its share of seers and its stock of money legends. At least one of Kidd's men was popularly said to have retired to its mountain valleys. Its old women saw pirate money in visions and clairvoyant

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trances. Thompson half believed some of this himself. In a long footnote he refers to a female practiser with the round, flat, opaque stone "a few years back." Several of these tales referred to Kidd's treasure. J. G. C. Brainard, the melancholy poet who evoked "a eulogy from Whittier and a sneer from Poe," wrote six Spenserian stanzas in 1827 on the subject of two honest simpletons from Vermont who dug for money with oyster tongs by the side of a New London wharf. It was a jeer at old women witches in the Green Mountain State, witches like the one who had sent off these diggers to the exact spot (to an inch) because she had seen in an opaque pebble the chest clearly packed edgewise with dollars. These dollars were actually Spanish, being historically those of one Don Joseph Miguel, who either stored them or was wrecked there in 1753. But Brainard's last stanza and his accompanying footnote only go to show how well-nigh impossible it was for such matter to escape Kidd's shadow. The deluded Vermonters work, as usual, at night and in great fear. They strike the chest. It is hot and otherwise protected by deep growls and reddening eyes of the Black Dog. Grey wild geese with green eyes scream. Where is the witch with her hazel wand now? She is back in Vermont, alas, and Brainard concludes: Go seek her there, The Grand dame of Joe Strickland; find her nest Where summer icicles and snowballs are, Where black swans paddle and where Petril's rest! Symmes be your trusty guide and Robert Kidd your guest! Brainard's note explains the current New London incident and ends: "and for Kidd, inquire of the oldest lady you can find."2

The Oval Stone and the Old Women

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Whether Thompson referred to this incident or to Mrs. Chester, of Lynn, whose wonderful mesmeric revelation of Kidd's treasure ship in the Hudson was in all likelihood current then, we can do no more than speculate. In May Martin we can now see a'hopeless tangle: of witches and counterfeiters and buried treasure and diabolic rites and Captain Kidd. Farther away from Irving in time, but very close to him otherwise, was Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Captain Kidd's Money," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1870. This was one of a series of ten moral tales, entitled Oldtown Fireside Stories and republished two years later under the same title. This series, together with Old Town Folks (1869), formed a collection of stories reminiscent of Mrs. Stowe's childhood. In them the central character is Sam Lawson, hired man and village jackof-all-trades, who tells the stories to two boys, "Harry and me." "Oldtown" is believed to be South Natick, Massachusetts, although Mrs. Stowe's childhood recollections would be of Litchfield, Connecticut. At any rate, Oldtown is a typical New England village, and Sam Lawson's tales are in all probability the true small talk and old wives' gossip of the 1820's. "Society then was full of traditions and narratives," wrote Mrs. Stowe, now turned antiquarian, "told [by the aged] to sympathetic audiences,"—tales of war, adventure, forest days, Indian captivities and escapes, bears and wildcats, witches and wizards, dreams and appearances, and providences. In the absence of newspapers, magazines, and theaters, storytelling was an art. Sam begins thus: "Wal, boys, that 'are history o' Kidd's is a warnin' to fellers. Why Kidd had pious parents and Bible and sane-

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tuary privileges when he was a boy, and yet he come to be hanged. It's all in this 'ere song ,I'm a goin' to sing ye . . . Caesar can't you strike the pitch o' 'Cap'n Kidd' on your fiddle?" A "most wailing minor-keyed tune was doled forth, which seemed quite refreshing to Sam's pathetic vein, as he sang in his most lugubrious tones" five stanzas (2, 3, 6, 7, 23) of the ballad and closed with the remark that he could not recall the rest "but it's real solemn and affectin'. " Next he devotes a lurid paragraph to an apocryphal account of Kidd's life which we could sum up with the word blood. Kidd buried money "around here and there" says Sam, and always killed one or two men, women, or children to keep watch over it. Indeed, Sam knows whereof he speaks, having gone money-digging himself, as an observer only, with three of the town's lazy men and a shrewd Negro hired to do the digging. It all begins with Mother Hokum, wife of the town ne'er-do-well, who prodded her shiftless spouse into investigating the truth of the local Kidd tales he brought home. From here on Mrs. Stowe puts into the mouth of Sam the conventional Knickerbocker Kidd story transplanted to the Old Bay State. Sam and his friends dig at the first full moon, twelve midnight on October 9. They talk of spirits as they walk to the half-buried rock that shows Kidd's crosses and marks. Hokum carries a bottle to fortify himself against spirits. No word is to be spoken from the time the treasure is struck until it is out on firm ground. Whippoorwills call. Elm trees whisper. During the early digging Sam tells of people with power who could put an ear to the ground and locate Kidd's treasure from the wailings of the murdered, especially one Shebna Bascom, who had told many where

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Kidd's money was. They strike an iron pot and hoist it up in silence, but one of them shouts, "There, we've got i t ! " The rope breaks with a loud report; the pot falls down, down, downj the money clinks loudly; the ground closes over it; and there comes a screeching laugh. The men quarrel, and Sam "sets it home to 'em" showing the "vanity o' hastin' to be rich."

Wizard of the Sea

I

T IS NOT W I T H O U T S I G N I F I C A N C E T H A T T H E

MANAGE-

ment of the Bowery Theater in New York built a special pool in 1840 in order to present nautical plays and spectacles. In the exhausting search for novelty, American drama and melodrama naturally turned to contemporary event and popular legend as well as to regular prose fiction and earlier plays. Those sources in the 1830's and 184.0's were growing more and more rich in nautical materials. American ships were the best in the world. The American whaling and clipper captains were establishing a noble tradition. Sailor songs crowded the songsters, and some songsters were compiled especially for sailors. Cooper, Dana, and Melville were creating the American novel of the sea. The annals of the New York stage record an interesting array of subjects* and titles having to do with ocean outlaws: smugglers, witches, wizards, pirates, and the like.1 Romantic and historical novels were sure to be quickly adapted if they were at all popular. Works of Irving, Cooper, Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Poe, and Dickens were diverted quickly to the stage. Quinn records that the character and situation of Rip Van Winkle, first introduced upon the stage in 1828, outlived every other.2 Cooper's Water

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Witch was speedily made into a play and, along with dramatizations of some of his other novels, was seen again and again. The poet holds the mirror up to nature; the player is the abstract and brief chronicle of the times. Times were bad and taste was low in the American theaters of these two decades, but a bad theater may be useful for the literary historian who would take the measure of an era. Audiences in increasing numbers called for show and spectacle. Some of the nautical plays no doubt may have had a just claim to dignity, but the majority must have taxed their producers severely. Explosions, wrecks, sinkings, fires, violent storms, and bloody battles seem to be normal requirements. The Flying Dutchman was ever popular. The Deep Deep Sea was famous for its sea serpent part. On into the 1840's titles like The Pirate Boy, The Black Brig of Bermuda, The Wizard Skiff, The Child of the Wreck, and The Black Schooner indicate no shortage of salty melodrama. In 1842 P. T . Barnum began his famous career at the American Museum with his "mermaid captured off the Feejee Islands." 3 So, in the year that saw Dana's Two Years Before the Mast the Bowery built its special pool and nautical spectacle came into its own. Captain Kidd, in all this, was not overlooked. For twenty-five years audiences in Boston and New York were entertained on occasion with a familiar piece called Captain Kidd, or the Wizard of the Sea (or variously in the subtitle, The Witch of Castle More or The Witch of Hell Gate). From the list of characters in these plays they would appear to be nearly the same. They go back to J . S. Jones's strenuous, four-act melodrama, Captain Kyd, or The Wizard of the Sea, which was first shown at the National Theater in Boston in 183o. 4 It was revived ten years later at the

184 Pirate Laureate same theater and periodically thereafter until 1856. In New York it had appeared sometime before 1839, in the slimmer of which year it was shown five times at the Park Theater j and for over fifteen years it was to be seen at such places as the Chatham, the Bowery (with its special pool), and Purdy's National. The trite plot concerns the rivalry of the false Robert of Lester, bastard son of the pirate Hurtel of the Red Hand and Elpsy (sometimes Elpsie), with Mark Meredith, the true Lord of Lester but living as a poor peasant. In the first scene, an archery contest for a silver arrow, Mark wins the favor of the ladies by an act of physical bravery; and Lester loses favor by cowardice, insane jealousy, and the physical beating of Mark. Elpsy the Witch reveals to Lester his true, base origin. In hope of revenge, Lester turns pirate and becomes "Captain Kyd," King of the Sea, commanding the Silver Arrow. Mark becomes Captain Fitzroy of the King's navy, in command of the Ger Falcon, but in the usual manner it is given out that he has been lost at sea. The scene next shifts to the Dutch taverns of New York, where stage Dutchmen and their miles gloriosus, swaggering Captain of the Guard Horsebean Hemlock, reveal more than enough to establish in the dimmest mind the dark character of the villain and his "pokerish hellifications" with the Witch of Hell Gate. Kate Bellomont and the other ladies have also come to New York. Kyd (Lester) continues the vain attempt to win the hand of Kate. Failing, he seeks Elpsy, the Hag of Hell Gate, for a charm. The witch scene, with all the accompaniments of cauldron, incantation, black accomplice, thunder, rain, lightning, gongs, and an amulet, ends with two lighted "transparencies" on a darkened stage, one of the Ger Falcon and a sinking pirate ship, the other a pirate swinging from a

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gibbet. These symbolize the two deaths from which Kyd has no protection: death by water and death by air. In Act I I I Kyd scuds through a storm "like the Flying Dutchman," engages the Ger Falcon and takes her, losing his own ship. Captain Fitzroy escapes by swimming ashore. In the last act the ballad of Captain Kidd is sung by Horsebean Hemlock, who claims to be its forehanded author, having thus made ready rather early for the execution. Kyd himself has gone, however, to the Witch's hut near Hell Gate for advice and to bury treasure. H e is pursued by Fitzroy and all the principal characters and is taken. With more sentiment than poetic justice, the pirate's life is temporarily saved by Kate—for memory's sake. Seven songs, including a pirate chorus, are scattered throughout. This popular extravaganza sprang from obvious sources. In America's brief literary tradition it had behind it living's Money-Diggers and Samuel B. F. Judah's Buccaneersand it anticipated by a matter of months or weeks Cooper's Water Witch, all dealing with Captain Kidd. J . S. Jones's plays were frankly homespun and very much on a level with a spectacle-loving audience nursed by unchecked popular superstitions and a lively will to believe. The excitement over salvaging Kidd's supposed treasure ship from the Hudson River runs parallel with the years of popularity of Caftain Kyd, and as has been shown, well antedates it. With no claim to original conception, J. S. Jones follows conventional Kidd lore, using old familiars: pipe-smoking, Irvingesque Knickerbocker Dutchmen gossiping in fear of Kyd in a tavern, a bold bad pirate captain (yet not unlike Cooper's mysterious Skimmer of the Seas and Red Rover) in opposition to an English naval officer both in line of duty and for the hand of a fair lady, two episodes concerning buried treasure, and the singing (here

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comically) of a dozen stanzas, true and improvised, of The Dying Words of Caftain Robert Kidd. Bits from Irving, the Flying Dutchman (now publicly identified with Captain Kidd, as we have already seen), and other popular Kidd lore, therefore, are thrown together, needing only the addition of songs, music, noise, horseplay, and the two transparencies to round out a farrago of devices. At least one observer has lamented the descent of taste in the 1840's to such horrors as this.5 On the other hand less sensitive critics admit a certain earthy and native vein wherever they find it—even here. In its limited way Caftain Kyd helped in fostering a native American subject and scene on a stage still dominated largely by the European. The fabulous Edwin Forrest failed to create a sturdy American product, though by his prizes and his robustious acting he stood out against the European tide. Yet homely American characters were winning a place in spite of these odds. There was Rip van Winkle. There were the vastly popular homespun comic heroes of J . S. Jones,6 who made several efforts to write American historical plays and in so doing gave to his times heroes of the sock, like Jedediah Homebred in Green Mountain Boys, Solon Shingle in The Peo-ple's Lawyer, and Horsebean Hemlock in Caftain Kyd. Thus, though in an undistinguished era, the Captain Kidd of fiction and folklore was joined to a wholesome and natural dramatic stock which we should neither feel ashamed of for its bad taste nor eulogize for its continual popularity— or for the fact that reputable and competent actors played the roles of Kyd, Hemlock, and Elpsy. Rather, we might simply regret that the graft had not taken better so as to grow more sturdily into something comparable to the prose fiction of Captain Kidd. A word more may be added concerning Kidd and the

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Flying Dutchman. Enough allusion to the association of the two has already been made to indicate that it was undoubtedly common. J . S. Jones shows Kidd scudding through a storm "like the Flying Dutchman." Three years before his Captain Kyd, Edward Fitzball's spectacle-drama, The Flying Dutchman, began a forty-year career during which it was a favorite in New York, running at times simultaneously in two theaters.7 Even a casual reading of these two melodramas will reveal gross similarities. One assumes that Jones modeled his drama directly on Fitzball's.8 But J . G. C. Brainard goes farther than anyone else in identifying the real and the phantom mariner. In the Fort Braddock Letters, already alluded to and written in 1827 to acquaint readers with the riches of American history and tradition, he relates a narrative of a spectacular capture of Captain Kidd in an unhistoric sea battle off Gardiner's Island between H.M.S. Martyr and the Quedagh Merchant. After Kidd is captured and his great ship is abandoned to flames, the burning Quedagh Merchant sails on with all sails set "as though dead men on board of her" had come to life and sprung to duty. To the watchers on board the Martyr the flaming spectacle seemed "portentous and supernatural." Brainard ends his narrative with the plain but astonishing statement that the legend of the "Ghost Ship or Flying Dutchman" sprang from this spectacle—a ship "which was manned by spectres, and with all her canvas spread, sailed rapidly in a gale against the wind." 9 So a legendary character of Captain Kidd was developed in the fictions of prose narrative and of the stage, of a mariner of evil reputation living a charmed life under the spell of supernatural forces. Attention was frequently centered on a conflict between this mysterious rover and a handsome

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young naval officer, with a heroine often poised between. There was commonly an atmosphere of Knickerbocker farce and comical Dutch names. Much was made of a phantom ship, and a witch who had a definite name and abode was likely to appear. It is therefore not at all surprising that newspaper parlance of June, 1844, when salvage operations were being described, should employ the common epithet for Kidd, " T h e Flying Dutchman of the Western World."

Scaraboid Kidd

B

COOPER'S WATER WITCH (1830) AND HIS Sea Lions (1849), a n d some twenty years after Irving's Tales of a Traveller, Poe employed the legend of Kidd's buried treasure as the basis for one of the first and most famous modern detective stories, The Gold Bug, which appeared as a prize-winning story in the Dollar News-pafer in 1843 and as a play on the stage of a Philadelphia theater.1 ETWEEN

" Y o u will observe," says Legrand in The Gold Bug, "that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not money-finders. Had the pirate recovered his money, there the affair would have dropped." This was the argument of the fictitious recoverer of Kidd's treasure, and this, presumably was the reasoning of Poe for the purpose of his tale. A l l the usual stories are mixed up with ghosts, devils, dreams, bad bargains, frustrations of the naive or the wicked, and what not. Away with them! Let us find the treasure. Let us apply reason. The fun will come in the intelligent solution through a chain of interlocked pieces of evidence. Legrand was created as a person of no fictional appeal beyond his useful analytical mind, a kind of Sher-

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lock Holmes who succeeds in deciphering a code and in successfully concluding a piece of logical deduction. Poe airily disregarded geography and located the cache of treasure on Sullivan's Island off the South Carolina coast, a place already celebrated in verse as a bare, sandy, savage place inhabited only by a hermit who had left soft refinement and had "rushed infatuate to the desert wild." 2 T h e Island enjoyed considerable reputation for its pirate treasure haunts, though Blackbeard would have been more native to the region than Kidd, who was never very near. It was the scene of Poe's own rambles while he was an enlisted United States soldier stationed at Fort Moultrie. Poe merely accepted the generic pirate name "Kidd" and proceeded with this safe folk personification behind him. Poe dropped out the ghostly touches, though he preserved in his eccentric and ratiocinative hero a "presentiment of some vast good fortune impending." H e kept the conventional black servant, but called him Jupiter instead of Euclid or Pluto. H e made no Irvingesque references to family vaults or charnel houses, but he did represent his Legrand as a man of ruined fortune. H e resorted to no melodramatic thunderstorms but he placed Legrand on a semi-barren island and housed him in a hut. H e introduced a notable skull and some not-so-notable human skeletons, bones of Kidd's murdered companions. H e added the whimsy of dropping a symbolic golden scarab through a left eye socket, the total making a gesture at least toward the gruesome. H e employed a conventional wreck of a ship's longboat, but he cleverly devised a completely new method of concealing (and of discovering) the treasure, a cool million and a half. Legrand mounts to Bishop's Castle, a high rock, from which he takes a sight with "a good glass" 41 ° 13" N E .

Scaraboid Kidd

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and by N. toward a very tall tree, on one branch of which he sees a human skull. Having reached the tree he sends Jupiter aloft to drop a plumb line (with the gold bug on the end) through the left eye socket of this death's head. But Jupiter drops it through the right eye. The calculations are wrong consequently, and disappointment is the only reward for the first try. With the scarab-plumb dropped properly, however, Legrand finds the exact spot, turns up two skeletons and some personal hardware (buttons, coins, and the blade of a Spanish knife), and ultimately a ring of iron that betrays the chest. The treasure is won. Poe's nature might have led him as easily to the weird, the morbid, or the tragically romantic. As it was, he purged away much of the old-fashioned machinery and, true to his famous theory of single effect, fastened upon the idea of a cryptogram, the interpretation of which still provides the main pleasure of reading the most cleverly plotted buriedtreasure tale before Stevenson. Before Stevenson adapted it to his ends, however, The Gold Bug was plundered as baldly as ever a story was, in an uninspired piece of romantic fiction, called The Pirate Queen by Douglas Stewart (London, 1867). In this bloodsoaked yarn a Captain John Kidd, "the dreaded pirate of the seas," sails "on the bosom of the deep" in a ship called the Rattlesnake. His former mistress, Elmira the beautiful pirate queen, has turned against him and commands the Sea Gull. If any of the conventional devices of the penny dreadful are omitted from this yarn, I do not recall them. There are vessels on fire, ships wrecked, oaths, screams, dusky figures, fair young English girls seized and tossed into pirate boats. There are dramatic captures and equally dramatic escapes. It is nothing at all for Kidd, "mad with fury, and thirsting for revenge," to slay "all in his path."

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Wild animals, lone huts, starvation, persons tied to brass guns, bones, skeletons in a death grip, a ruffian Negro, treasure, and romantic vows—what more could the boys of '67 crave in one tale? After the young English heroes and the young English heroine have been rescued from the toils of this John Kidd by Elmira, a mysterious parchment comes into their hands. When this is held to the fire strange characters come out upon it. At midnight Elmira shows it to her friends, and they proceed to follow its instructions. First they go to a cedar grove where they find a skull on a limb, no different from Poe's except that it has been adorned with two glass eyes. From the skull they drop a plumb line and measure out from that spot to the treasure. They are, however, attacked by the devilish and very black Scipio who has been lurking by with corrupted members of the Sea Gull's crew. Scipio had formerly been with Captain Kidd. Overpowered by their own men, Elmira and her party are recaptured by Kidd and do not escape until H.M.S. Sfitfire attacks the pirates. Kidd gets away. The treasure disappears. The English return to England. And Elmira remains on the island to keep her vow not to rest until Kidd is dead. The Pirate Queen still remains as loot, buried in oblivion. Many other plagiarisms from Poe's brilliant plot doubtless were thumbed into decay and never reached the quiet grave of some of their fellows in old libraries. The Gold Bug plot itself lived to become a convention. And thirty-eight years later a really expert literary pirate was to do his work so well upon the preceding fictions of Captain Kidd that the world never since has thought of blaming him.

Kidd's Anchorage

AND

/\

NOW,

MEN,"

SAID

CAPTAIN

SMOLLETT

AS

THE

Hisfaniola was laid a couple of points nearer the X A - wind in toward Treasure Island, "has any one of you ever seen that land ahead?" " I have, sir," said Silver, "I've watered there with a trader I was cook in." "The anchorage is on the south, behind an islet, I fancy?" asked the captain. "Yes, sir j Skeleton Island they calls it. It were a main place for pirates once." Silver then called uff by name the island's landmarks. " I have a chart here," said Captain Smollett, spreading out a copy of Billy Bones's famous map. Noting everything, Silver suavely rattled on. "Yes, sir, this is the spot to be sure} and very prettily drawed out . . . Ay, here it is: 'Capt. Kidd's Anchorage'—just the name my shipmate called it." The most exciting moments of the most popular treasure tale in the English tongue were introduced by this conversation. Treasure Island, though it is not about Kidd or Kidd's treasure, nevertheless contains what must be considered the final flowering of the Kidd legend. An entirely

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conventional pirate tale, it absorbed and assimilated a large number of its memorable details directly from earlier stories based on Captain Kidd. Indeed, because of Stevenson's professed attitude toward stock pirate yarns, we may profitably observe that these had fallen into conventional lines by then. Rooted in early accounts of actual buccaneers and pirates, they got some start with Defoe and a febrile attempt by Scott. T h e Kidd stories got their first literary dressing-up by Irving, Cooper, and Poe, whose influence is so great that it scarcely can be calculated. A fresh phase, never destined to assume the ascendancy however, is to be seen in the tales of Mediterranean pirates and corsairs made famous in Byron's poems of 1813 and 1814 and in the later warfare to clean up the Barbary coast. T h e 1830's and 1840's saw a great flourishing of pirate titles among the London penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers which entered the stream of "Gothic" romances with titles like, Captain Kyd; or, The Wizard of the Sea (in six parts, 1838 and again in 1839), The Death Ship; or, The Pirate's Bride and Maniac of the Sea (in thirty-two parts, 1846), and Jack Junk; or, The Tar for All Weathers ( " a lascivious tale" in twenty-two parts, from about 1840). English writers of boys' stories, like Reid and Kingston, and Ballantyne, appeared and provided longish yarns, both inside juvenile periodicals and out, entitled, Three Fingered Jack, Kidnapping in the Pacific, The Maroon, or The Ocean Waifs. From this sort of thing, young minds had learned of the jolly roger, murder by rope and plank and cutlass and pistol, doubloons and pieces of eight, galleons and ingeniously discovered sea chests. A t this same time, the more dignified novel of the sea begun by Defoe and Smollett was being continued by Cooper, Captain Marryat, Dana, and Melville.

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Only a short time before Young Folks magazine had printed Treasure Island by "Captain George North," another serial in the same paper had been Billy Bos>n by Charles E. Pearce, in which boys read of a cypher, a chart, a mutiny, a derelict ship, and a hunt for pirate treasure that was hidden on an island. Apparently Stevenson had more than once entertained a quiet desire to write such yarns. In an Edinburgh shooting gallery he confessed to a Scottish author of such tales, J. Wilson MacLaren, whose wooden-legged, rum-drinking hero, Cornelius Dabber, was then holding a large boy public,—that he "still had a hankering to write for the 'penny-bloods' " such as The Boys of London and New York} When he finally released this boyhood yearning by joining the rainy-day pastimes of his stepson, drawing on impulse the famous map spontaneously marked "Treasure Island," and when he began to compose at the rate of a chapter a day the now famous story, he was simply indulging in the love, inherited from his father, of the picturesque and salty sea yarn full of blood and action. Gone were his hoverings over "style." This was the business of the old familiar thrills in the old familiar way. From his conscious and his subconscious mind freely flowed the thousand impressions and recollections from his reading and experience. H e had at first, he said, not even an idea of publication. H e said regarding the genesis of The Master of Ballantrae, " I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very titlepage." 2 Something similar must have been in his mind when he wrote Treasure Island. How many readers of the finished story begin with Stevenson's sixteen line poem, "To the Hesitating Pur-

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chaser"? Of these, how many believe the first eight and two-thirds lines? The verses go as follows: If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons, And Buccaneers and buried Gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of today: —So be it, and fall on! If not, If studious youth no longer crave, His ancient appetites forgot, Kingston or Ballantyne the brave, Or Cooper of the wood and wave: So be it, also! And may I And all my pirates share the grave Where these and their creations lie! All the old romance exactly in the ancient way! In the year of his death he recalled the composition of Treasure Island in a magazine article called " M y First Book" wherein he disclosed with almost a touch of bravado his sources. Adding to this his comments recorded elsewhere and those of his friends, we can see that a very considerable part of the tale grew out of Kidd. An itemized list would look something like this: 1. Billy Bos>n, Pearce's tale in Young Folks. The similarity of Billy Bones and Billy Bos'n has often been pointed out. 2. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe from which he declared he took Silver's parrot, and I suspect some suggestion for Ben Gunn.

Kidd's Anchorage

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3. Marryat's Masterman Ready, from which he said he took a stockade. Poe's Gold Bug, from which he said he got a skeleton and thereby a direction to the Spot. 5. Irving's Tales of a Traveller, from which he lifted so much that he announced, "Plagiarism was rarely carried farther." Though the seeds of the story lay elsewhere, he considered this the "chief part of the loot." 6. Kingsley's At Last, where he said he got " T h e Dead Man's Chest." 7. Captain Johnson's "great" History of the Pirates. 8. "Cooper of the wood and wave" wherein ( T h e Sea Lions') he went treasure-hunting by means of a dead seaman's chart. 9. The map drawn for his stepson. 10. J. Wilson MacLaren's Cornelius Dabber. Other sources could be undoubtedly combed out. There was, for example, a personal acquaintance who Stevenson said was the original of Silver. H e had Silver's strength, courage, quickness, and magnificent geniality} but when he was metamorphosed into Silver, he was shorn of all of his finer qualities and graces of temperament until there remained a "raw tarpaulin." The leavings of other authors were to him in one breath, "footprints on the sands of time" and in another, stolen sweets, he cared not which. Indeed, Treasure Island is one of those literary masterpieces in which scarcely anything is original but the magical catalytic agent we call genius. It is more to the point to view it, as Stevenson did, as the turning point in his career, where he abandoned self-consciousness and spun out of whatever came into his mind a good boys' pirate tale. Regarding ( 1 ) literary sources and (2) the literary results, he wrote pointedly in " M y First Book" as follows: "Upon

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Pirate Laureate

the first we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence . . . but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of." 3 Kidd legends belong to the trunk. First he grafts into Irving's tale of Wolfert Webber the inn on Corlear's Hook full of pipe-smoking burghers; the scar-faced, muscular, mysterious mariner; his chest, his telescope, his cocked hat, his rum, his buccaneer boasts, and banging on the table; his timid audience, his preemption of the seat before the fire, his foreign coin, his admiration of Captain Kidd; his word battle with the retired English officer; his connection with the legend of Old Father Red Cap; the terrified landlord. Stevenson takes over the scene almost point for point and gives it more of a local habitation and a name. The nameless sea monster grows into scar-faced Billy Bones at the Admiral Benbow inn. His expected visitors are individualized into Pew and Black Dog. H e is brown, muscular, rough. H e pays in strange coin. H e wears a cocked hat but it is now tattered and patched and old. H e brags and cows his listeners with startling tales. H e forces them to join in the chorus of his song which Stevenson makes a specific song, "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest." H e slaps the table for silence. H e mortally terrifies the landlord and sends Jim Hawkins to bed to be plagued, not by Webber's golden dreams, but by nightmares. Rum is the death of him. H e battles Dr. Livesey with looks, but in contrast to Irving's character, he is out-faced. This last is one of the few fundamental variations in the scene. His chest is almost too famous to mention. It is impossible to resist noting Irving's English half-pay officer's one blind eye and Pew's two. The Black Spot passed on to Bones is

Kidd's Anchorage

igg

a pure addition. The name "Black Dog" was a common one for the devilish apparition frequently encountered by buried treasure seekers.4 So it goes, Stevenson blossoming lustily forth on the sturdy stock of Irving, with more characters more sharply drawn, more violence, and more narrative art in building for future action. Stevenson's fondness for the spyglass is notable. Billy Bones, being a reincarnation of Irving's character, carries one constantly. Jim Hawkins is early sent to "The Sign of the Spyglass" in Bristol, and the great hill on Treasure Island is "Spyglass Hill." Poe's Legrand sights his death's head with "a good glass." No one has a monopoly of such things as spyglasses and red cotton night caps. Yet it is astonishing how Treasure Island successfully absorbed detail after detail from the Kidd legend as it had been elaborated in earlier works. In the story of Wolfert Webber, Old Preechy Prauw says, "Have none of you heard of Father Red-cap, who haunts the old burnt farmhouse in the woods . . . near Hell-gate? . . . Lights have been seen about the woods at night and an old fellow in a red cap has been seen at the windows more than once, which people take to be the ghost of the body buried there." 6 H e goes on to tell of three soldiers who rummaged through the old house and there found Father Red-cap astride of a cider barrel in the cellar, with a jug in one hand and a goblet in the other." They accept his proffered drink and suffer the shock of a sulphurous, diabolic explosion. Wolfert Webber passed the house of Red-cap en route to Kidd's treasure. And when he and his German "doctor" are frightened away by the grining ghost of the old buccaneer, they fancy they see a legion of hobgoblins in red caps.

200

Pirate Laureate

No red cap and nothing ghostly appear in Treasure Island until the scenes of violence just before the climax of the hunt. More ominous moments scarcely can be found in Jim Hawkins' tale than those in which he peeps into the cabin of the well-nigh abandoned, soon-to-be-derelict ship and sees swarthy Israel Hands and O'Brien of the red nightcap in murky, drunken struggle. Between peeps Jim is horrified by the glow of the mutineers' campfire shining through the shore-side trees. The ghostly rolling, next morning, of Red-cap's dead head ghastly and grinning on his dead body at every jump of the schooner, makes him unforgettable. Proceeding to the treasure spot, Stevenson now grafts into the gruesome skull on the tall tree from Poe's Sullivan's Island. Silver and his five mutineers have the true chart by this time, on the back of which are Flint's directions: "Tall tree, spyglass shoulder, bearing a point to N. of N N E . [Poe's cryptogram read NE. and by N.] "Skeleton Island ESE. and by E. "Ten feet." At the foot of a tall pine, Jim and Silver find a human skeleton laid out unnaturally straight—a human pointer, pointing ESE. and by E. to the tip of Skeleton Island. That this skeleton is from Poe is seen by the conversation regarding the absence of metal furnishings—not a copper doit, a baccy box, or the knife they knew the victim had upon him. It was all very unnatural. The talk now gruesomely concerns Captain Flint, his ghastly little joke, his blue face, and his evil nature. "It don't look natural," Silver repeats and admits he runs cold inside. "If ever sperret walked, it would be Flint's," says someone elsej and terror

Kidd's Anchorage

201

of the dead buccaneer settles on their spirits. "Thinkin' o' Flint," takes away old Morgan's appetite. Off they go by compass toward the three tall trees. They are almost in a run and their talk has been reduced to whispers. Then their morale is completely shattered by a voice, which they take to be Flint's, singing "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest" and a moment later calling out Flint's last words, "Darby M'Graw! Fetch aft the rum, Darby." Morgan is for quick retreat. Dick produces his Bible and starts praying. Silver alone saves them from complete panic, and on they go to the final discovery that someone else has beaten them to the £700,000 treasure. "Darby M'Graw" unmistakably calls to mind "Darby Mullins," the name of a colorful member of Kidd's crew. Stevenson, furthermore, restored to the Kidd treasure legend its full due—a ghost. No matter that it turned out to be only Ben Gunn. The conventional fever and fright and frustration are all there, almost exactly in the ancient way. What "Cooper of the wood and wave" gave to Stevenson the latter does not specifically say; but the buried treasure tale, to which he probably refers in his verse, is The Sea Lions. Two crews of men in this tale compete for the same treasure, although mutiny is not involved. The most likely episode would appear to be, once again, the early scenes in which Daggett, a dying sailor, leaves behind him a chest and a chart. Deacon Pratt seizes the true chart, copies it, and leaves it behind sufficiently altered so that Daggett's relatives who claim the dead man's effects only can be suspicious. Through Cooper Stevenson utilized the Kidd legends of Gardiner's Island and vicinity. In Treasure Island, therefore, the American .folklore of Captain Kidd through two removes comes into flower.

Epilogue A T T H E B E G I N N I N G I SAID T H A T T H I S BOOK W O U L D PLAY

/ \ upon a theme: the simple facts of Kidd's life. It A . has turned out that the material falls naturally into two parts, and they are so designated. They might have been given somewhat more pretentious titles, such as ( I ) The Imagination of the People and ( I I ) The Imagination of Literary Artists. These two phases of the human imagination at work on the Kidd story, though roughly in sequence, nevertheless acted upon one another and were operating at times contemporaneously. In the few words remaining to be said, I shall continue to use the phrase "The Kidd Legend" to mean the whole story of Captain Kidd as I have tried to tell it. What then is this thing we have been viewing in retrospect, and what does it signify? The growth of the Kidd legend and Kidd's final place in the American scene are not so extraordinary as they at first might seem. It but narrowly escaped becoming an American epic, either because of the nature of the events themselves, or because of the accident—of which we are frequently reminded—that America was born too late, too far from the age of naive faith, to produce a national epic. Had there been one evolved from the founding of the new nation, what would it have been? Presumably the myth, as it came from the popular mind would have dealt with the fight for existence in the New World, the heroic break with England through defiance of her restricting laws, the exploitation of our vast natural resources for great and rela-

Epilogue

2 05

tively sudden wealth, and the westward trend of the pioneers. The hero would have been a fighting sailor-traderfarmer. Embedded in the incompletely worked vein of Kidd lore are the first two of these: acquisition of sudden wealth and rugged independence. Kidd's story is wrapped up in the New York trade that made quick, sometimes unscrupulous, wealth, and gave to the founding Fathers some of the first family fortunes in America. Kidd's fame is built upon ill-gotten gain, although that would not necessarily have blocked his rise to heroic stature, if other things had been suited to the expansion of the story. Perhaps if the events of Kidd's life had impinged more sharply on the eve of the Revolution, his whole character might as it is now known even have been heroic rather than villainous. His name was coupled with that of Robin Hood, and, in some of Cooper's novels, manifestations of the roving outlaw were intertwined with those of the American Patriot. Something like this must account for placing the Kidd ballad and other pirate ballads under the title of patriotic songs in some of the old songsters. The legendary figure of Captain Kidd here made some headway. However, the diabolic in his story was to burn most brightly, fed by money-digging credulities for one hundred and fifty years, and fanned by examples of German folklore. The Kidd legend, furthermore, is not far removed from the American tall tale. American myths have flourished about the heads of gargantuan comic figures evolved from the rough and picturesque men of the woods, the plains, the mountains, the lumber and other work camps. Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, and Johnny Appleseed became American demigods. The same kind of myth-making that produced them made Kidd what he is today, although the comic element , seldom was employed. His kin-

204

Pirate Laureate

ship wth Crockett and other homespun heroes is very real, nevertheless. The American homespun hero, built up from our extraordinary fondness for physical vigor and arrogant love of freedom, was a young giant, an extraordinary and a boasting talker, and characteristically a lover of a good fight, especially if it were with the sheriff or any other representative of established or dignified authority.1 The deeds of Captain Kidd, though symbolic of bold and wicked piracy, have nevertheless been relished with some affection. He is our maritime Kit Carson and Jesse James. Just as the wild free spirit of the West is to be seen in the great outlaws of the mountains and plains, so too the daring and the disregard of law of the great rovers of the sea are never quite overshadowed by moral disapproval of their spectacular deeds. They touch the imagination, but they also stir the feelings. And this is, once again, what Cooper had the perceptiveness to discern. He was perhaps the only person to see the true relation of Kidd to the everincreasing pulsations of freedom in America. The Earl of Bellomont was astonished at the openly blunt opposition to British law in the New York Council in the 1690's, and it would seem that the only reasonable explanation for the curious vacillation of Captain Kidd was his feeling, up to the time of his capture, that he could yet escape punishment for his violations of commonly violated laws. The many ways in which Captain Kidd touched the imagination of America are little known, yet the sum total cannot be described otherwise than as an important contribution to the nation's culture. Around Kidd's name grew a whole mass of lore—beliefs, tales, legends—of interest in itself, of course, but serving a higher purpose for writers to come later. A fine old ballad was not only refined on American tongues, but its tune entered the service of revival

Epilogue

205

hymnology. The Kidd legend furnished themes and background for many pieces of nineteenth century fiction, and played a dominant part in fixing the character of the conventional buccaneer and the conventional buried-treasure tale through Washington Irving and Robert Louis Stevenson. It came to life in the minds of the superstitious and na'ive, in prose fiction and in lurid lives of criminals, on the stage, in the "concert" hall, and in moral tales for the young. All in all, it was inextricably associated with the American scene. , But like the life of Kidd himself, which might be called a tragedy of unfulfillment, Kidd legend falls short. It might have become a great myth, but did not. It might have fused and solidified into a single great tale, heroic or diabolic, but did not. It might have received really profound imaginative treatment from poet or novelist, as Cooper foresaw and as the young Longfellow implied with some eagerness. Writing in the North American Review in January, 1832,2 Longfellow made a plea for a strictly national literature that would be "as original, characteristic and national as possible." He was well aware of two things: that American literature, especially poetry, was in the making; and that to be shaped up best, this new literature should break away from European examples and influences and take cognizance of its own scenery, climate, and historical associations. Let us have no more skylarks and nightingales, he wrote. Let us look around us and take note of native scenes and national events, events which, though they may "be exaggerated facts, or vague traditions, or inventions entirely apocryphal," nevertheless "faithfully represent the spirit of the ages which produced them." His own ballads and tales show how he served this ideal and suggest that he might have served it yet more if only he

206

Pirate Laureate

had been able to break completely with bookish tradition. Others like Whittier, whose genteel attraction to New England legend is popular and well known, and like Hawthorne, who was absorbed in the problem of evil but who nevertheless was well aware of the vitality of popular literature and who even found more sap retained in old almanacs, newspapers, and ballads than in books of religion of a former period—others felt the spell of the lusty life and the imaginative lore of America's past. But Kidd escaped their notice. Melville's demon, Ahab, just as easily might have been an extension of Kidd lore. Kidd legend was, therefore, a rich native literary deposit that lay only partly workedj but where it was worked by the folk or by literary artists, it provided a rewarding quantity of ore. As for what might have been, that must be accounted merely among treasure that still lies buried.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. George F. Dow and John H . Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast (1923), 83. 2. I. N . Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan (New York, 1 9 1 5 - 1 8 ) , I, 183. 3. Charles Johnson, General History of the Most Notorious Pirates (ed. 1927), 386. 4. The History of Piracy (1932), 180. 5. Frank Monaghan, "An Examination of the Reputation of Captain Kidd," in Neta York History (Quarterly journal of the New York Historical Society), XIV, 256. 6. Edward Channing, History of the United States (New York, 1908), II, 264, 270. 7. See: Ralph Paine, The Book of Buried Treasure (New York, 1911). Paine discovered Kidd's long lost "French passes." Sir Cornelius Dalton, The Real Captain Kidd: A Vindication (New York, 1911). An extravagant defense of Kidd. Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast (1923), v. Harold T . Wilkins, Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island (London, 1935). Bristles with good leads, but Wilkins' eye is on Kidd relics. Margaret S. Dorman, "Legend and Literature" in Connecticut Magazine, IX, 269—78. Don C. Seitz, The Trial of Caftain Kidd (New York, 1935). Prints much useful material, but the long bibliography at the end, though extensive and suggestive, is extraordinarily inaccurate and almost hopelessly confused. 8. Paine, Book of Buried Treasure, 28. Wilkins, Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, 286—89, 2 97Thompson, Body, Boots, and Britches (New York, 1940), 20. CHAPTER

I

x. T h e bare outline of the principal events in Kidd's life in this chapter is based upon many biographies of Kidd, most of them

2io

Pirate Laureate

readily accessible. I have drawn freely upon them, and have cited references for particular facts and opinions only. T h e historians Osgood and Jameson should be noted for considered modern judgment of Kidd's crimes and his trial (H. L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1924), I, 540-42; J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (New York, 1923), 190. 2. H . T . Wilkins, Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island (London, 1935), ch. 29. Later references to this book will be to "Wilkins." 3. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, ed. E. B. O'Callaghan (Albany, 1 8 5 3 - 8 7 ) , II, 381. 4. This was the King's share as a private venturer and should not be confused with "the King's tenth," which ordinarily went to the Crown from privateers' booty. 5. T h e y were no less than the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Orford, the Earl of Romney, the Earl of Portland, Lord Halifax, and the Duke of Shrewsbury. 6. Dalton, The Red Caftain Kidd, 1 1 5 - 1 6 . 7. F. L. Gay Transcripts (Massachusetts Historical Society), Kidd Pafers, II, 58. 8. Wilkins, 119. 9. Harold Thompson, Body, Boots, and Britches (New York, 1940), 32. CHAPTER

II

1. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (1708), 1 1 9 , 129. 2. E. E. Hale, "Bellomont and Captain K i d d " in Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Winsor (Boston, 1881), II, 184-85; E. E. Hale, New England History in Ballads (Boston, 1903), 3 7 ; John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1844), II, 225; H . L . Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1924), I, 539-40; Shirley C . Highson, Carolina Pirates and Colonial Commerce 1670—1740 (Baltimore, 1894), 288.

2ii

Notes

3. Newton D . Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies ( N e w York, 1916) 4—11 ; A Description

of . . . New

York . . .

1695

(1843), 7 - 1 3 . 4. Edward Channing, A History

of the United. States

(New

York, 1908), II, 266—67; William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England (Boston, 1890), I, 342. 5. Documents

Relative

to Colonial History of New

York,

IV,

413; Johnson, General History of the Pirates, see under " T e w " ; Defoe, A True Account of the South Sea Trade ( 1 7 1 1 ) , 21 ; T . B . Howell, State Trials, X I V , 208. 6. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, I V , 550-51. 7. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, IV, 550-51, 584—85; F. D. Miner, The Diary of Manasseh Minor of Stonington,

Connecticut

(1915), 36; Weeden, History

of

New

England, I, 349; M . W . Goodwin, Chronicles of America (1919), VII, 168; T . J. Holmes, Cotton Mather, A Bibliography (1940), II, 494. 8. T . Weaver, Agent for N e w York, testified regarding Fletcher before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, September 27, 1698. Documents

Relative to the Colonial History

of New

York,

IV, 384. p. Bellomont's correspondence with the Lord Chief Justices and the Lords of Trade may be read passim in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, IV. 10. Documents

Relative to the Colonial History

of New

York,

IV, 3 1 7 , 354—57; H . L . Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth

Century

(New York, 1924), I, 275.

1 1 . For T e w , see the relatively authoritative Johnson,

General

History of the Pirates (ed. 1927), 399-416. 12. Johnson, General History of the Pirates (ed. 1927), 412—16. 13. For the wining and dining of pirates, see Documents

Rela-

tive to the Colonial History of New York, IV, 307; Johnson's General History; National

Gosse's Pirate/ Who's Who; and The Dictionary of

Biography.

14. Philip Gosse, Pirates' Who's Who (Boston, 1924), 293.

212

Pirate Laureate

1 5 . History of the Navy ( 1 8 3 9 ) , I, 25. See also Channing, History of the United States, II, 268. 16. I. N . Phelps Stokes, Iconography

of Manhattan

( N e w York,

1 9 1 5 — 1 8 ) , IV, 387. 1 7 . I N N E W Y O R K : 1693. T w o issues from Bradford's press of the Act of September 10, 1692. See M c M u r t r i e , Printing York In MDCXCIII,

in

New

fourth and fifth items. I N P H I L A D E L P H I A :

1699. T h e proclamation was signed by William Penn, and followed considerable discussion of piracy. T h e Assembly had made two laws against piracy and forbidden trade which, said Penn, " d i d not sit easie on the books of some." Penn addressed the Assembly twice on the subject. On April I, 1700, he congratulated the body on having already made such laws before Secretary Vernon and the Lords Justices commanded them to do so. Penn's proclamation was one of the strongest, warning that "all persons were to be apprehended who could not give a reasonable and credible account of their former abode and conversation and about whom was found a suspicious quantity of East India, Arabian or foreign goods or coin." See J. F. Fisher, Memoirs

of the

Historical

Society

of Pennsylvania,

1 8 8 - 8 9 ; C . R . S. Hildeburn, A Century of Printing, American

Bibliography,

I,

38. I N

II, Pt.

II,

I, 3 3 ; Evans,

MASSACHUSETTS:

1685,

1 6 9 1 , 1698, 1699. See Worthington C . Ford, Massachusetts

Broad-

sides, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 17, 27, 32, and Charles Evans, American

(1922), LXXV,

Bibliography

(Chicago,

1 9 0 3 - 3 4 ) , I, 130. 18. Documents

Relative

to the Colonial

History

of New

IV, 299; J. F. Fisher, Memoirs of the Historical Society of

York, Pennsyl-

vania, II, 1 8 8 - 8 9 . /p. For the general state of trade and piracy in N e w York, see: I. N . P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, where. Documents

Relative

to the Colonial

IV, 408, 4 1 7 , and elseHistory

of New

York,

IV, 3 1 8 , 378, 3 8 1 , 5 5 0 - 5 1 , 6 0 4 - 0 5 , 685, and elsewhere; John Franklin Jameson, Privateering

and Piracy in the Colonial

Period

( N e w York, 1 9 2 3 ) ; the F. L . G a y Transcripts (Massachusetts Historical Society), Kidd Province

of New

Papers. William Smith, History

York

(New

York,

1829),

I,

of the

123,

late

125—27,

Notes 130—31. T . B . Macaulay, History vincial Society

(History

2/j

of England.

of American

Life,

J. T . Adams,

III, N e w Y o r k ,

Pro-

1928).

20. Leisler's son, Robert Livingston, and Robert W e a v e r . J . W . Leonard, History

of the City

of New

York.

2 1 . For the Leisler troubles see: Documents nial History mentary

of New

History

to the

Colo-

York, I V , 1 2 9 , 3 1 8 , 3 7 9 , and elsewhere.

Docu-

of New

York,

368, 389. Pargellas, Dictionary Osgood, American

Colonies

Relative

I I , 4 3 7 . Stokes, Iconografhy,

of American

IV,

Biography,

XI, 156-57.

Century,

I, 2 7 5 . H i s -

in the Eighteenth

torians of Colonial N e w York are still divided in their sympathies. 22. A photostat of Bradford's printing of the speech may be seen in the N e w Y o r k Public Library. 23. Arraignment

of Captain

24. F . L . G a y

Transcripts

Kidd

William

Kidd

(1701),

(Massachusetts

17.

Historical

Society),

Papers, II, 2 7 - 2 8 .

CHAPTER

III

1. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World 1927),

2. Letter of M a y 1 5 , 1 6 9 9 . Documents History

(London,

136. of New

Relative

to the

Colonial

York, I V , 5 2 1 . In two months he had quite reversed

his opinions and hopes. H . T . Wilkins, Captain

Kidd

and His Skeleton

Island

(Lon-

don, 1 9 3 5 ) , 40. Letters o f . L i v i n g s t o n to the D u k e of Shrewsbury misdated by Wilkins, September 20, 1 6 9 5 . It must have been 1 6 9 6 . Ibid.,

36. Compare w i t h buccaneer articles of a f e w years later

in Gosse, History

of Piracy

( 1 9 3 2 ) , 1 9 0 and Pirates'

( 1 9 2 4 ) , 1 6 — 1 7 ; Johnson, General

History

Who's

of the Pirates

Who

(1927),

182-84. 5 . For Hamilton's letter, see Documents History

of New

Jersey,

Relative

to the

Colonial

II, 1 1 3 — 1 4 , 1 1 5 ; Church's public notice

m a y be seen in facsimile in the Pageant

of America

(Yale Press,

1927), VI, 41. 6. Documents 275.

Relative

to the Colonial

History

of New

York,

IV,

214

Pirate Laureate

7. For some of the gossip of K i d d during the summer of 1 6 9 6 , see: Documents

Relative to the Colonial History

of New

York, I V ,

760 and Wilkins, 40, 4 1 , 45, 46. Bellomont's letter of October 18, 1700 to Secretary of State Vernon. 8. Brief Historical Relation

( 1 8 5 7 ) , I V , 4 5 3 - 6 6 9 . Also referred

to as Diary. p. Diary (ed. Bray, 1 8 1 9 ) , II, 67. 10. Reprinted in Documents

Relative to the Colonial History

of

New Jersey, II, 289—90. 1 1 . Letter of June 1, 1699, to the Lords of T r a d e , Relative

to the Colonial History

Documents

of New Jersey, II, 277—80. T h e

succeeding letters here may be found among the same N e w Jersey documents, II, 280—81, 284—87, 2 9 0 - 9 3 , 304. For the fact that Basse knew the Nassau's mate back in 1 6 9 7 , see II, 158. It was through the pirate's friend Mathew More of Woodbridge, formerly a soldier in the frontier detachment at Albany, that former Governor Hamilton hoped the Jerseys' quota of young men could be "soothed into" service, but of whom he really despaired because so many had run off to join Captain K i d d . Ibid.,

II, 1 1 3 .

12. J . F . Watson, Annals of Philadelphia,

1844, II, 217—88.

1 3 . In Pennsylvania in June and October; in Jersey in M a y or J u n e ; Jersey adopted the "Jamaica A c t " ; Pennsylvania made its own. Documents

Relative

to the Colonial

History

of New

Jersey,

II, 2 8 5 - 8 6 , 287-88. 14. Watson gives this gossip in Annals of New Annals of Philadelphia,

York, 228, and

II, 2 1 , 2 1 2 , 2 1 4 , 2 1 5 .

1 5 . T h e Campbell Newsletters are printed in L . H . Weeks, Historical Digest of the Provincial Press (Boston, 1 9 1 1 ) , I, 35—37, and Massachusetts

Historical

Society

Proceedings

(1871—72),

XII,

422—27. T h e y are dated Philadelphia, June 5 and Boston, June 19. Campbell seems to have quoted his correspondent without alteration. " O u r bay" is Delaware Bay. 16. Boston News Letter, Benjamin 17.

June 30, 1704. See J. B. McMaster,

Franklin as a Man of Letters (Boston, 1 8 9 6 ) , 14.

Under the patent of Thomas Neale from 1691—93 till after

1 7 1 0 when the Crown took over Colonial Postal matters and appointed John official postmaster in Boston. Some of his troubles may

Notes

2/5

be gleaned from Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, Third Series, VII, 60—84. See also Drake, History and Antiquities of Boston, 538. Weeks, An Historical Digest, I, 34; Dictionary of American Biography. 18. Life and Errors ( 1 7 0 5 ) , 128. 19. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, IV, 727, 740; Samuel Sewall, Diary, I, 507, December 14, 1699. T h e diary is printed in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Fifth Series, V, VI, VII. 20. F. L. Gay Transcripts (Massachusetts Historical Society), Kidd Papers, I, 40-43. 21. Cornelius Dalton, The Real Captain Kidd (New York, 1 9 1 1 ) , 3 1 5 - 2 1 ; H . T . Wilkins, of. cit., 115. 22. Kidd's letter to Bellomont, June 24, 1699, quoted in Wilkins, 103. Hutchinson (History of Massachusetts, ed. 1936), II, 89, and Hale (Bellomont and Captain Kidd) 178, are quite wrong in assuming that Kidd made a bold carefree descent upon Boston. 23. Sewall records his surprise that the warrant for Kidd's removal to H . M . Frigate Advice "had no mention of the Council in it. But the Governor's name only, in pursuit of the King's Command." Diary, II, 7. 24. "Memoranda" in Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall, I, 2 1 1 , printed in Collections of Massachusetts Historical Society, Sixth Series (Boston, 1886), I. 25. F. L. Gay Transcripts (Massachusetts Historical Society), Kidd Papers, II, 92-93, 96. 26. Ibid., II, 28-29. 27. For the pirates at Boston see Bellomont's correspondence and Sewall, Diary, I, 493, 498, 500, 503, and II, 3—4, 7 n; Sewall, Letter-Book, I, 216, 260; Gosse, Pirates' Who's Who, 60, 3 1 5 ; Cotton Mather, Diary, I, 299, 331, and II, 483, 488, 490, 722, 726, 729, 491. Mather's Diary is printed in Collections of Massachusetts Historical Society, Seventh Series, VII, VIII. CHAPTER

IV

1. Letter to the Lords of Trade (May 15, 1699) just before he went to Boston.

2i6

Pirate Laureate

2. Luttrell, Brief Relation, IV, 6 3 4 ; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, IV, 971 ; Evelyn, Diary, II, 67. 3. Evelyn, Diary, II, 6 7 ; T . B. Howell, State Trials, X I V , 2 4 3 ; Historical MSS Commission Reports, Portland MSS, III, 6 1 2 . 4. See the article on Lord Somers, Dictionary of National Biography, by James McMullen Regg. 5. Historical MSS Commission Re-forts, Portland MSS, III, 6 1 2 . 6. For Evelyn, see the Diary, II, 62, 67. Burnet's account seems notably impartial. See his famous Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Times (ed. 1 8 3 3 ) , IV, 434, and passim. 7. Howell, State Trials, XIV, 2 4 2 - 4 3 . 8. Luttrell, Brief Relation, March—June, 1 7 0 1 ; Howell, State Trials, XIV, 2 4 3 - 3 5 0 . 9. Thomas Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1 9 3 6 ) , II, 89; Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Times ( 1 8 3 3 ) , IV, 434, 489, 505, 507. jo. Historical MSS Commission Reports, Portland MSS, IV, 1. 11. Ibid., VIII, 66; Wm. Smith, History of New York (New York, 1 8 2 9 ) , I, 1 2 4 - 2 5 . 12. A Full Account of Proceedings in Relation to Captain Kidd (2nd ed., 1 7 0 1 ) , 15—20. Burnet confirms many of these remarks. 13. See also Evelyn, Diary, II, 67, and Burnet, History of His Own Times. 14. Letter in handwriting that "resembles Dummer's" in the Harley Papers. Historical MSS Commission Reports, Portland MSS, VIII, 65-66. 15. Howell, State Trials, XIV, 179. 16. Historical MSS Commission Reports, Portland MSS, IV, 1 7 . i j . Jameson, Piracy and Privateering, 251 n. 18. Wilkins, 157—58, 2 1 8 , 219. /p. It was a few hours late. See the advertisement in the Post Boy for May 24, 1 7 0 1 . 20. Wilkins, 1 8 4 - 8 5 , 186, 187. Wilkins quotes Lorraine. 21. 3 1 3 . 22. Johnson, General History of the Pirates (ed. 1 9 2 7 ) , 396. 23. Wilkins, IQ4.

Notes 24. Johnson, of. cit.,

2/7

3 9 3 . A t least, thus I identify the vindica-

tion there referred to. 25. Wilkins,

151—52.

26. A l l quotations from the trial here are from The Tryal,

and

Condemnation

of

Caftain

William

Arraignment,

Kidd

(London,

1701). CHAPTER /. J.

Oldmixon,

The

1 7 0 8 ) , I, 7 9 ; Bishof

British

Burnet's

V

Emfire

History

in

America

(London,

of His Own Times

(London,

1 8 3 3 ) , I V , 4 3 4 ff. 2. I, 24.

3- 77-944. See John G . Palfrey, History W i l l i a m Ellis, History

of New

of Madagascar

England

(1890)

contrast, see James T r u s l o w Adams, Revolutionary

New

( 1 9 2 3 ) . John Campbell's remarks are in the Life

of Lord

in Lives of the Lord Chancellors

and

( 1 8 3 9 ) . F ° r an interesting England Somen

( 1 8 4 8 ) , I V , 140.

5. Ed. 1844, II, 2 1 1 .

6. E d . 1 9 2 7 , x . 7. E d . 1 9 2 7 , 386. 8. John Robert

Moore,

Indiana

University

Publications,

Hu-

manities Series, N o . 1 ( 1 9 3 9 ) , ch. V I I I . 9 . The History History

of Pirates, published by H e n r y Benton, and

of the Lives and Bloody

Exploits

of the Most Noted

The

Pirates,

published by Ezra Strong. 10.

Entered in the Massachusetts District Court

in

1837

Samuel N . Dickinson; published also in Philadelphia in 1 8 3 9 ,

by

I84i>

1 8 4 2 , and Portland, M a i n e , 1 8 5 5 , 1 8 5 6 , 1 8 5 9 . O t h e r editions bear no date. A l l are uniform in style and size. CHAPTER 1. Paul Lorraine's The behaviour cuted

. . .

of Caftain

May 23, 1701

behaviour

Ordinary W.

VI

of Newgate

Kidd

his Account

and other Pirates

( L o n d o n , 1 7 0 1 ) and A True

and last dying

speeches

of

. . .

Account

of

the exethe

of . . . W. K. and the rest of

218

Pirate Laureate

the Pirates that were executed

. . . 23rd of May

iyoi

(London,

1701). An Elegy on the Death of Caft. William Kidd, Who was Executed at Execution-Dock,

on Friday the 23rd of this Instant May,

iyoi.

2. T h i s ballad is still preserved in the Duke of Crawford's library, but war conditions have made it impossible to get photostatic copies at this time. It is transcribed here from J. F . Jameson's Privateering

and Piracy in the

Colonial

Period

( N e w York,

1923),

253-573. The

History

of Piracy

(1932),

1 8 3 - 8 4 and The

Pirates>

Who's Who ( 1 9 2 4 ) , 1 8 2 - 8 4 . 4. History of Piracy,

183.

5 . Jameson, of. cit., see note 2 ; Charles W . Elliott, The England History

New

( N e w York, 1 8 5 7 ) , H> 6 0 - 6 3 ; E . E . Hale, New

England History in Ballads (Boston, 1 9 0 3 ) , 40—46. 6. Caftain

Kidd

and his Skeleton Island (London, 1 9 3 5 ) , 1 9 1 .

Jameson speaks only of the different order of stanzas. 7 . In conversation with the author. M r . Brigham made immediately available to me the extraordinary resources of not only the collections in the American Antiquarian Society library but of his own wide knowledge. 8. T h e broadsides usually bear the title: The Caftain

Robert Kidd,

Dock in England.

Dying

Words of

a noted Pirate who was Hanged at

O n e reads, however, Caftain

rate, etc.; another, The Dying

Kidd,

Words of Caftain

Kid.

Execution

a noted

Pi-

T h e y vary

somewhat in size and are typical of their class having two columns of type on one side of the sheet. One has other matter on the reverse side. T h r e e are adorned with cuts. Complete reprinting of the ballad may be found in: 1. Forget

Me

Not

Songster

(Philadelphia and N e w

York, c.

1840), 1 9 2 - 9 6 . 2. Charles W . Elliott, The

New England

History

( N e w York,

1 8 5 7 ) , II, 6 0 - 6 3 . 3. An Old Story Revived, Historie

of Caftain

"Ye

Lamentable

Robert Kidd"

Ballad, and Ye

True

(Brown and Green, N e w

York, 1 9 0 1 ) . In this pamphlet the publishers declare that

Notes

2 ig

many people then in middle life remember having heard the ballad in childhood. It is printed in the manner of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with marginal gloss and illustrations by W. T . Aldrich. Two copies are in the New York Public Library. 4. E. E. Hale, New England History in Ballads (Boston, 1 9 0 3 ) , 37-46.

5. Joanna Colcord, Roll and Go ( 1 9 2 4 ) , 69—72. 6. Joanna Colcord, Songs of American Sailormen ( 1 9 3 8 ) , 141-44. 7. Helen K. Johnson, Our Familiar Songs ( 1 8 8 1 ) , 171—73. 8. W. Roy Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia ( 1 9 2 8 ) , 278-82. This is the most scholarly, and therefore the most useful, printing of "Captain Kidd." 9. See E. E. Hale, of. cit., 39; Kate A. Aplington, Pilgrims of the Plains (Chicago, 1 9 1 3 ) , 55—56. Interesting comments may be found in the introduction to Louise Pound's American Ballads (New York and Boston, 1 9 2 2 ) , and Eckstorm and Smyth's Minstrelsy of Maine (Boston and New York, 1 9 2 7 ) , 248. In the last named, the reader is reminded how quickly Oliver Wendell Holmes's Ballad of the Oysterman was adapted to folk use. Numerous collections of American song give space to but a few characteristic stanzas. See for example Downes and Siegmeister, A Treasury of American Song (New York, 1940). Telescoped and corrupted versions may be seen in Pound, American Ballads, 160, and C. P. Milligan, Caftain William Kidd, Gentleman or Buccaneer (Philadelphia, 1 9 3 2 ) , 124. to. Douglas Gilbert, Lost Chords (New York, 1942), 40—41. 11. Diary, II, 242, Massachusetts Historical Collections, 7th Series, VIII. iz. Reasonableness of Regular Singing, or Singing by Note ( 1 7 2 0 ) . Quoted by F. L. Ritter, Music in America (New York, 1 8 8 3 ) , 25. 13. J . B. McMaster, Benjamin Franklin as Man of Letters (1898), 1 8 ; Isaiah Thomas, History of Printing in America (Worcester, 1 8 1 0 ) , II, 474.

220

Pirate Laureate

14. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin ( 1 9 3 8 ) , 9. 15. Annals of Philadelphia, II, 213—15; Annals of New York, 286, 3 1 4 . Gardner Shaw of Palmer, Massachusetts, writing a life of Kidd in 1850 declared that Kidd deliberately changed his name in order to deceive those he met at sea and cited the old ballad as proof! ( L i f e , Trial, and Execution of Capt. Kidd, 1 0 ) . 16. C. W. Ford, " T h e Isaiah Thomas Collection of Ballads," in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s., XXXIII, 34-112. 17. I am indebted for this to W. Roy Mackenzie's useful note in his Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia (1928), 279. 18. Journal of Welsh Folklore Society ( 1 9 3 0 ) , III, 45. See also II ( 1 9 1 4 - 2 5 ) , 122. 1 p. G . P. Jackson, Down-East Spirituals (New York, 1943), 259—61. For further comment, see: J . A. Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs ( 1 9 3 5 ) , xxxviii—xxxix. Eckstorm and Smyth, Minstrelsy of Maine ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 247—49. C. J . Finger, Frontier Ballads ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 29-32. W. B. Whall, Sea Songs and Shanties ( 1 9 2 0 ) , ix. 20. Cambridge History of American Literature (New York, 1 9 1 7 - 2 1 ) , III, 5 1 7 - 1 8 . 21. L. F. Benson, The English Hymn (Philadelphia, 1 9 1 5 ) , 291—329; P. A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music ( 1 9 3 8 ) ; Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume VI, American Supplement (rev. ed., New York, 1934). See under "TuneBooks." 22. G . J . Jackson, Spiritual Folksongs of Early America (New York, 1 9 3 7 ) , 6 - 1 2 . 23. George Pullen Jackson cites Ingalls's Christian Harmony (Exeter, New Hampshire, 1805), as one of the first, and William Hauser's and Benjamin Turner's The Olive Leaf (Philadelphia, 1878) as one of the last of these song books. Cf. Spiritual Folksongs of Early America (New York, 1 9 3 7 ) , 6—12. 24. Reprinted by George Pullen Jackson, Spiritual Folksongs of Early America (New York, 1 9 3 7 ) , 159-60. 25. See Kemp, Father Kemp and His Old Folks (Boston, 1868) ; The Dictionary of American Biography; and F. J . Metcalf, Ameri-

221

Notes can Writers

and Compilers

of Sacred

Music

( N e w York,

1925),

287-88. 26. " P r e f a c e " to the Continental 27. "Preface" (Boston,

to

Father

Harmony

Kemfs

Old

(Boston,

Folks

1857).

Concert

Tunes

1874).

28. Our American

Music

( N e w York, 1 9 3 0 ) , 167—68.

29. For an interesting list of these songsters, see W . R .

Mac-

kenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia (Cambridge, 1 9 2 8 ) , 279. 30.

Douglas Gilbert, Lost Chords CHAPTER

1. Documents

Relative

to the

( N e w York, 1 9 4 2 ) , 42—43. VII

Colonial

History

of New

York,

I V , 602. 2. I , 1 2 6 . 3. Annals of New

York,

293.

4. Works, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston, 1 8 3 6 ) , I I , 3 8 - 4 5 . 5 . Documents

Relative

to the

Colonial

History

of New

York,

IV, 551. 6. Ibid.,

591.

7. Ibid.,

602.

8. For the fate of the cargo left on the Quedagh Wilkins, 252 and Jameson, Privateering 1923),

see York,

Papers, I I , 3 6 - 3 9 , 46, 9 1 , 9 7 - 9 8 .

Stokes, Iconography

Privateering xi.

(New

218-25.

p. Kidd 10.

Merchant,

and Piracy

New

and Piracy, England

of Manhattan,

IV, 970—71;

Jameson,

227.

Historical

and Genealogical

Register

(1852),

83 and ( 1 8 7 7 ) , 332. z2.

Sewall, Diary, I I , 7 n . ; Paine, Book of Buried

13.

Documents

Relative

to the Colonial

Treasure,

91.

History

of New

York,

Council

Minutes,

141 ;

IV, 584. 14.

Wilkins, 2 5 0 ; Paine, 87.

1 5 . Wilkins, 243. 16.

Stokes, Iconografhy,

John Gardiner's Account

I V , 4 1 7 ; Cal.

(Boston, July 12, 1 6 9 9 ) quoted in Wilkins,

222

Pirate Laureate

2 5 6 ; Wilkins, 246-49 (for Clarke); Dalton, Appendix B , 2 7 0 - 7 1 . iy. Thompson, History of Long Island (ed. 1 9 1 8 ) , I, 497. 18. Wilkins, 5 1 , 2 0 9 - 1 0 . 19. Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in Office of Secretary of State, ed. E . B. O'Callaghan (Albany, 1 8 6 6 ) , pt. II, 2 8 1 . 20. Howard M . Chapin, The Letter Book of Peleg Sanford (Providence, 1 9 2 8 ) , 7 3 - 7 4 . 2j. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, IV, 6 0 1 , 7 1 1 , 8 1 8 ; Paine, 89-91 ; Gosse, Pirates' Who's Who, 1 3 5 . 22. Wilkins, 242-44, 2 5 5 - 5 8 . 23. Paine, 86-87. 24. Paine, 87-88. 25. Wilkins, 2 5 7 - 5 8 ; Thompson, History of Long Island (ed. 1 8 3 9 ) , 202, 203. 26. Annals of New York, 227—28. 27. Rhode Island Historical Magazine (October, 1 8 8 5 ) , VI, 1 5 6 . 28. John R . Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island (Providence, 1 8 5 8 ) III, 400. 29. James N . Arnold, Narragansett Historical Register (Hamilton, Rhode Island, 1 8 8 2 ) I, 296-97. ¡ 0 . Maud W. Goodwin, Dutch and English on the Hudson (vol. V I I in Chronicles of America, Yale Press, 1 9 1 9 ) , 1 7 0 . 31. Account paraphrased by Watson, Annals of New York, 2 7 3 . 52. An Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments Respecting Captain Kidd's Piratical Vessel, (New York, 1 8 4 4 ) , 8. 33. See Annals of New York, 314—15. 34. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 41, 2 1 3 , and repeated in Annals of New York, 314. 5 5 . Niles1 National Register (Baltimore, July 25, 1 8 4 5 ) , L X V I I I , 325. 36. A copy of this may be seen in the rare book room of the Library of Congress. Lengthy quotations from it are made by Harold T . Wilkins in Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island, ch. XXIV. 5 7 . New York Times (September 8, 1 9 0 7 ) ; reprinted in Ballads of Old New York (New York, 1 9 2 0 ) , 1 5 3 .

Notes

225

38. For New England legends, see Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folklore (Boston, 1884). For modern ghost and treasure tales in New York State, see Louis C . Jones, " T h e Ghosts of New York: An Analytical Study," Journal of American Folklore, Oct.-Dec., 194.4, 237-54. 3p. Wilkins, Caftain Kidd and his Skeleton Island (American edition, New York, 1937), 235—36. 40. Wilkins (American edition), 236. 41. Historical MSS Commission Re forts, Portland MSS, IV, 123. 42. For the Palmer forgery, see: Field (editor), State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century. A History (Boston, 1902), I, 5 4 1 - 4 2 n., article by H . P. Smith; J. H . Temple (editor), History of . . . Palmer (Palmer, 1889), " T h e Kidd Letter" by F. T . Wallace, 343-49; and Gardner Shaw (publisher), The Life Trial and Execution of the Famous Pirate Caft. Robert Kidd . . . and the Famous Kidd Letter Recently found enclosed in a Bottle in a Ledge of Rocks in the Town of Palmer, Mass. (Palmer, 1850).

CHAPTER

VIII

1. For the best comment on Irving, see Stanley T . Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935). 2. Tales of a Traveller, " T o the Reader." 3. Some features of the Wolfert Webber story may be seen in one of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure." Peter ("the Destroyer") is a simpleton who tears his old house down in order to find a treasure left by an ancestor who had been prevented by "Old Scratch" from spending it. In the kitchen Peter finally comes upon a chest full of worthless Revolutionary paper money. Peter sells the gutted old house to his former partner, who plans to put up a modern brick block. 4. A copy of Judah's The Buccaneers (New York and Boston, 1827) may be seen in the library of Harvard University. For a few biographical details regarding Judah, see H . W . Schoenberger in the Dictionary of American Biography, X, 228.

224

Pirate Laureate CHAPTER IX

1 . For modern comment on Cooper, see Henry Seidel Canby, Classic Americans (New York, 1 9 3 1 ) , eh. I l l ; Percy Boynton, Literature ani American Life (New York, 1 9 3 6 ) , 254—72; and Vernon L . Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, I I : The Romantic Revolution in America (New York, 1 9 2 7 ) , 222—37; Robert E . Spiller, James Fenimore Coofer, Critic of His Times (New York, 1 9 3 1 ) ; Robert E . Spiller, James Fenimore Coofer in American Writers Series (New York, 1 9 3 6 ) , selections, autobiography, and notes. 2. The Deerslayer, Mohawk Edition ( G . P. Putnam's Sons, New York, n.d.). 3. The Sea Lions, eh. IV. 4. Quotations from The Water Witch may be found in the Mohawk Edition (Putnam's, New York, n.d.) in the order quoted, 4-5> I 3 - H > 33. 8 1 - 8 2 , 58, 308, 99, 94, 3 4 1 . CHAPTER X 1. May Martin and Other Tales (Boston and Portland, 1 8 5 5 ) , 49. 2. Brainard, Literary Remains (Hartford, c. 1 8 3 2 ) , 66—68.

CHAPTER XI 1. George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1 9 2 7 - 4 1 ) , IV, passim. 2. A. H . Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War (New York and London, 1 9 2 3 ) , 325. 3. See Odell, Annals, IV, V. 4. A copy of the printed play, undated but probably of about 1 8 5 7 , i s ' n the New York Public Library. 5. Odell, op. cit., IV, 289. 6. See eh. X I . 7. Odell, of. cit., I l l , 2 7 1 . 8. I have given a fuller treatment of this in " T h e Flying Dutch-

Notes

225

man of the Western World," Journal of American Folklore, J u l y Sept., 1946, LIX, 2 8 2 - 8 8 . p. Fort Braddock Letters (Worcester, 1927), 5 8 - 7 8 . CHAPTER XII 1. A . H . Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biografhy

(New

York, 194.1), 392-932. [ W i l l i a m C r a f t s ] , Sullivan's

Island, the Racial and

Other

Poems, (Charleston, 1820). CHAPTER XIII

1. See John A. Steuart, Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1928), I, 375—91; Sidney Colvin, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1911), II, 224; Ralph Paine, The Book of Buried Treasure (New York, 1911), 27-29. " M y First Book, Treasure Island," which first appeared in The Idler (August, 1894) is reprinted in the Biographical Edition of Treasure Island (Scribner's, New York, 1906), xix—xxxiii. 2. Letters and Miscellanies (New York, 1898), XXII, 4 3 1 - 3 2 . 3. See Treasure Island, Biographical Edition, xxv. 4. See J . G. C. Brainard's poem The Money Diggers. 5. Tales of a Traveller (rev. ed., New York, 1897), 2 8 5 - 8 6 . EPILOGUE

1. I am indebted for many helpful suggestions to F. O. Matthiesson's interesting chapter, "American Demigods," in his American Renaissance (Oxford Press, 1941). 2. North American Review, XXXIV, 68—75.

Index Abrohlo Shoals, 118. Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments respecting Captain Kidd's Piratical Vessel, An, 135-140. Act of Trade of 1696, 25. Adams, James Truslow, 27, 213, 217. Addington, Justice Isaiah, 126. Adventure, the ship, 51, 132. Adventure Galley, the, 7, 9, 10, I I , 36, 69, 132. "Adventure of the Black Fisherman, T h e , " 153. Adventure Prize, the, 12. Advice, H.M.S., 16, 51, 53. Aldrich, W . T . , 219. Alricks, Wessell, 46. American Antiquarian Society, ix, 95. American Jurist, The, 134. American Literature, ix. American Museum, the, 183. Annals of New York, 65, 134. Annals of Philadelphia, 46, 100. Antigua, island of, 4. Antigua, the ship, 4. Antonio, the sloop, 14, 1 1 7 , 1 1 9 , 121, 122. Aplington, Kate, 219. Appledore Island, 142. Appleseed, Johnny, 203. Arabian Nights, The, 115. Archangel, the ship, 4. Arnold, James N., 222. Astor, John Jacob, 147. Astor hoax, the, 137, 146.

At Last, 197. Atlantic Monthly, The, 179. Avery, Capt. John, xiii, 13, 24, 71.77» 137Baldridge, Mr. (merchant of N . Y . ) , 21. Ballad of Capt. Kidd, the, 18, 66, 79, 8 2 - 1 1 2 , 9 1 - 9 5 , 154, 185, 186, 204; Captain Kid's Farewel, 66, 85, 86—90; The Dying Words of Capt. Robert Kidd, 91—95, 186, parody on, 101, tune of, 103. Ballantyne, Robert Michael, 194, 196. Bangs, John Kendrick, 112. "Barbara Allen," ballad tune, 104. Barbary, John, 41. Barleycorn, John, 35. Bamum, P. T . , 183. Bartlett, John R., 222. Basse, Gov. Jeremiah, 43, 44, 46, 47, 116, 214. Bayard, Col. Nicholas, 29, 30, 132. Beck, Mr., Kidd's quartermaster, 64. Belcher, Andrew, 20. Bellomont, Earl of, ii, 6, 9, 14, I5> 25-39 passim, 45, 50-54 passim, 59, 60, 113—131 passim, 1 7 1 , 204, 214, 215. Bellomont, Lady, 39. Benbow, Rear Admiral, 13, 99. Benson, L. F., 220.

228

Index

Benton, H e n r y , 217. Billings and Holden, 106. Billingsly, Capt. Rupert, 13. Billy Bos'n, 195, 196. Billy Kidd, King of the Kikeroos, 110. Black Brig of Bermuda, The, 183. Black Schooner, The, 183. Blackbeard, xii, 24, 45, 100, 110, 113, 142, 190. Blackwell's Island, 158. Blessed William, the ship, 4. Block Island, 49, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 129. Board of T r a d e and Plantations, 22, 28, 41. Body, Boots and Britches, xiv, 109. Bolton, Henry, 14, 114, 118. Bombo, the lime juice drink, 12. Bonnet, Stede, xiii. Bonney, Anne, xiii. Boston Almanac, The, 80. Boston Netos Letter, The, 48, 130. Bowery Theater, 182, 183, 184. Boynton, Percy, 224. Boys of London and New York, 195. Bradenham, Dr. Robert, 47, 63, 70, 72. Bradford, William, 31, 77, 212; his History of the Pirates, 77. Bradish, Capt. Thomas, 51—52, 53. 55. " 9 > I 2 4> 132. 152» 160. Bradley, Samuel, 10, 13. Brainard, J . G . C., 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 , 178, 187, 224, 225. Brief Historical Relation, Luttrell's, 38. Brigham, C. S., 95, 218.

Broadsides and books on Kidd, 66-68. Brooke, Henry, 80. Brooklyn Tabernacle, 109. Brooklyn Winter Garden, 109. Buccaneer, conventional scarfaced, 157, 198, 205. Buccaneers, The, 137, 164—165, 185. Buchanan, President James, 107. Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, I3+Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward, 182. Bunyan, Paul, 203. Burchell, Goldsmith's M r . , 156. Burgess, Capt. Samuel, 4. Burke, an "agent" of Kidd, 118. Burlington, N . J., 47. Burnet, Bishop Gilbert, 57, 74, 216. Busy Body Pafers, The, 115. Byron, Lord, 173, 194. Caldwell's Landing, 132, 133, I34> 139» I 5 i California gold rush, 144, 145, 146. Camp meetings, 103—106. Campbell, Duncan, 15, 46, 49, 50, 51, 119, 120, 122. Campbell, John, 46, 48, 49, 214. Campbell, John (the biographer), 75, 2 1 7 ; his Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 75. Campbell, W . W . , 7 5 ; his Robin Hood and Captain Kidd, 75. Caraccioli, Capt!, 23. Canby, H e n r y S., 224. Cape Cod, 77. Cape Fear, 45. Cape May, 42, 46, 47, 143.

Index Captain Kidd, Ornum and Company's romance, 1 1 0 . "Captain Kidd's Money," 179. Captain Kyd, or the Wizard of the Sea (drama), n o , i n , 136, 170, 1 8 3 - 1 8 8 . Caftain Kyd, or the Wizard of the Sea (shilling shocker in six parts), 194. Carson, Kit, 204. Carter, Capt., 120. "Censor Morum," pseudonym of Benjamin Franklin, 1 1 4 . Chambers, Robert W., ii. Channing, Edward, 209, 2 1 1 , 212. Chapin, Howard M., 222. Chatham Theater, 184. Cheeke, John, Marshall of Newgate, 65. Cherry Harbor, 128. Chester, Mrs. Charles, 140, 179. Child of the Wreck, The, 183. Christian Harmony, The, 105. Churchill, Nicholas, 1 2 1 . Clark, J . C. L., 90. Clark, Thomas "Whisking," 120, 1 2 1 , 126. "Cloth of Gold," Kidd's, 1 1 9 . Coddington, Capt., 123. Codrington, Col. Christopher, 4. Colcord, Joanna, 219. Columbian Harmony, The, 105, 106. Colvin, Sidney, 225. "Come ye that fear the Lord," camp meeting hymn, 106. Comic songsters, n o . "Coming Down," the tune of, 90, 102. Comoro Islands, I o. Conanicut Island, 130.

229

Coniers, Mr., one of Kidd's prosecutors, 72. Continental Harmony, The, 108. Cooke, one of Kidd's crew, 126. Cooper, James Fenimore, xv, 24, 75, 1 1 6 , 122, 1 5 1 , 1 5 3 , 1 6 1 , 165, 1 6 6 - 1 7 5 , 1 7 7 , 182, 185, 189, 194, 196, 197, 201, 203, 204, 224; History of the Navy, 75, 1 6 7 ; The Deerslayer, 102, 1 6 7 ; The Water Witch, 1 6 1 , 163, 169— 174, 1 8 2 - 1 8 3 , 185, 1 8 9 ; The Red Rover, 167, 1 7 3 , 184; The Sea Lions, 1 6 8 169, 189, 197, 2 0 1 ; The Pilot, 173. Cooper Institute, 109. Corlear's Hook, 1 1 4 , 1 3 3 , 1 5 2 , 156, 157, 159, 198. Cornbury, Lord, 1 7 1 , 174. Corso, John, 143. Cow Neck, 1 2 1 . Cowles story, the, 138. Crafts, William, 225. Crawford, Duke of, 218. Crockett, Davy, 203, 204. Culliford, Capt. Robert, 4, 10, 12, 3 1 , 86, 89, 165. Curasao, 39. Dalton, Sir Cornelius, ii, 209, 210, 215. Dampier, Capt. William, 33, 40, 213. Dana, Richard Henry, 182, 183, 194. Darien, Scotch settlement at, 14, 60. Death Ship, The, 194. Deep Deep Sea, The, 183. Deer Island, 146, 147, 148.

230

Index

Deerslayer, The, 1 0 2 , 1 6 7 . Defoe, Daniel, 20, 79, 109, 194, 196, 2 1 1 . D e Lancey, Stephen, 20, 4 1 , 44. D e la N o y , Peter, 28. Delaware Bay, 14, 38, 40, 50. Dellius, Domine Godfriedus, 3 1 . Devil and Tom Walker, The, I53> 1 5 4 - 1 5 5 D e W i t t , the song publisher, 110. Dialogue Between the Ghost of Caftain Kidd and the Naffer in the Strand, A, 68, 83— .85Dickens, Charles, 182. Dickinson, Mrs. Jonathan, 45. Dickinson, Samuel N . , 80, 2 1 7 . Dighton, ballad of Bold, 109. Discourse Between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome, 59. Dole, Francis, 124. Dollar Newsfafer, The, 189. Dorman, Margaret S., 209. D o w , George F., 209. Down-East Sfirituals, 106. Downes, Olin, 219. Drake, Samuel Adams, 2 1 5 , 223. Dryden, John, 29. Duchess, H . M . S . , 6. Dummer, Edmund, 62, 63. Dunderberg Mountain, 132, 1 3 3 . 139» i + i Dunton, John, 48. Dying Words of Caftain Robert Kidd, The, 185. E a s t India Company, 5, 6, 7, 12, 38, 45. 56, 57Eckstorm, Fannie H . , 2 1 9 , 220. Edmonds, John H . , 209.

Elegy on the Death of Caft. William Kidd, ii, 83, 96. Elehant and Hengler, publishers, no. Elliott, Charles, 90, 2 1 8 ; his New England History, 90. Ellms, Charles, 80. Emmot, James, 14, 49, 50. Esquemeling, John, 7 7 , 78. Essacambuit, the Indian sachem, 52. Evans, Capt., 22. Evans, Charles, 2 1 2 . Evelyn, John, 40, 57, 2 1 6 . Execution of K i d d , 64—66. Faneuil, Peter, 20. "Farewell ye blooming youth," camp meeting hymn, 106. Farrington story, the, 139. father Kemf's Old Folks Concert Tunes, 108. Faust legend, the, 1 1 4 , 15 3 , 1 5 5. Felt, Joseph B., 7 5 ; his New England and Genealogical Register, 7 5. Fenwick, Capt. Jacob, 120. Finger, C . J., 220. Fink, M i k e , 203. Fisher, J. F., 2 1 2 . Fisher's Island, 123, 168. Fitzball, Edward, 187. Fleet, Thomas, ballad printer, 100. Fletcher, G o v . Benjamin, 2 1 , 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 3 1 , 34» 36, 37, I 7 1 » 2 " Flying Dutchman, The (drama), 183, 187. Flying Dutchman, the legend of, 134, 136, 1 3 7 , 1 5 3 , 1 5 9 , 169, 185, 186, 187-188, 224-225.

Index Ford, C. Worthington, 2 1 2 , 220. Forget Me Not Songster, 109. Forrest, Edwin, 186. Fort Braddock Letters, 1 2 9 , 1 8 7 . Fort Moultrie, 190. Fortune, the ship, 22. Forum. Magazine, 147, 148. Foster, Stephen, 109. Franklin, Benjamin, 100, 1 1 4 . Franklin, James, 100. Full Account of the Proceedings in Relation to Caftain Kidd, Ay 62, 66-67. Gambia, 23. Gardiner, Curtis C., 129. Gardiner, John, 120, 127, 129, 137, 221. Gardiner, Mrs. John, 1 1 9 , 127, 137. Gardiner's Island, 14, 1 5 , 38, 1 1 9 , 120, 1 2 1 , 1 2 5 - 1 3 0 , 1 3 6 , 1 3 7 , 167, 187. Gardiner's Island treasure legend, 1 2 5 - 1 3 0 , 168. Gay, F . L., 1 1 8 , 2 1 0 , 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 , 2 1 5 ; the Gay papers, 1 1 8 . Gibraltar Point, 1 3 3 . Gilbert, Douglas, 99, 109, 219, 2 2 1 ; his Lost Chords, 99. Gilchrist, Anne, 102. Gillam, Capt. James, 5 1 , 52, 53, 55, 1 1 7 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 2 , 1 2 3 , 124. Glover's story, 138. Gold Bug, The, 166, 1 8 9 - 1 9 2 , 197. Goldsmith, Oliver, 156. Goodman, Charles, 44. Goodwin, M . W., 2 1 1 , 222. Gosse, Philip, xiii, 80, 90, 2 1 1 , 2 1 3 , 222. Gough, Capt., 20. Gow, Capt., 176.

231

Gravelly Point, 1 3 1 . Great Mogul, 39-40, 1 3 7 . Great South Bay, 1 2 1 . Green Mountain Boys, 176, 186. Grosvenor Library, ix, 147. Guests from Gibbet Island, The, 1 5 3 , 1 6 1 , 163. Guiterman, Arthur, 1 4 1 . Hackshaw, Mr. (merchant of London), 4 1 . Hale, E. E., 90, 2 1 0 , 218, 2 1 9 . Halifax, Charles Lord, 56, 57, 62, 210. Hamilton, Gov., 36, 2 1 3 . Harcourt, Sir Simon, 60. Harley, Robert, 59, 63. Hauser, William, 220. Hawkins, Sarah, 64. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 206, 223. Hazard, Thomas B., 1 3 1 . Head, Franklin H., 146, 147. Hell Gate, 1 5 2 , 1 5 3 , 1 5 5 , 1 5 8 , 172, 184, 185. Hewson, Capt., 4, 7, 72. Hicks, Capt. Jasper, 4. Highlands, N. J . , 170. Highson, Shirley C., 210. Highwaymen and Pirate? Own Book, 80. Hildeburn, C. R. S., 2 1 2 . "His Heart Was True to Poll," IIO-III. History of the Buccaneers of America, 77, 78. History of the Most Notorious Pirates, 197. History of the Navy (Cooper's), 75. 167History of New York (Smith's), "3-

252

Index

Hoaxes, 1 4 3 - 1 4 8 . Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 219. Holmes, Sherlock, 189—190. Holmes, T . J . , 2 1 1 . Homebred, Jedediah, 186. Homer, 195. Hore, Capt., 1 1 , 22, 41. Hore Kills, the, 43, 172. Horsebean Hemlock, 1 1 2 , 185, 186. Houseboat on the Styx, The, 112. How, James, 1 2 1 . Howe, Lord, 60. Howell, T . B., 2 1 1 , 216. Hudson river legends, 1 2 1 , 131-142. Hughes, Jeremiah, 134. Hungerford, Mr., 45. Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, I35: Hutchinson, Thomas, 216. Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Pious, 105. Hynde, Thomas, 107. Ichabod Crane, 1 4 1 , 1 5 1 . Illian, George, 1 1 2 . Ingalls, Jeremiah, 105 ; his Christian Harmony, 105. Ingoldsby, Major Richard, 29. Ingraham, author of a Kidd romance, n o . Ireland, Capt. John, 8, 10. Irving, Washington, xiv, xv, 25, 1 1 3 , 125, 1 3 3 , 137, 142, 1 5 1 - 1 6 4 , 166, 175, 177, 179, 182, 185, 186, 189, 190, 197, 198, 199, 205, 223 ; The Knickerbocker History of New York, 25, 152, 15 3 ; The Money-Diggers, 1 1 3 , 1 5 2 , 154, 1 8 5 ; Tales of

a Traveller, 1 2 5 , 1 3 7 , 1 5 2 , 153, 166, 189, 1 9 7 ; The Sketch Book, 152; The Legend of Sleefy Hollow, 153; The Sfectre Bridegroom, 15 3 i Rif Van Winkle, 1 5 3 ; The Guests from Gibbet Island, 1 5 3 , 1 6 1 , 163. Isle of Shoals, the, 1 1 5 , 142. Jack Junk, 194. Jackson, George Pullen, 102, 106, 220. James, Capt. John, 143. James, Jesse, 204. Jameson, J . F., 90, 9 1 , 210, 2 1 2 , 216, 218, 2 2 1 . Jenkins, William, 36. Johanna, island of, 10. Johnson, Capt. Charles, 68, 77, 80, 197, 209, 2 1 1 , 2 1 3 , 2 1 6 , 2 1 7 ; his General History of the Most Notorious Pirates, 77-79Johnson, Helen K., 219. Johnson, the Bold Buccaneer of the Lakes, ballad of, 109. Jones, J . S., 136, 170. Jones, Louis C., 223. Journal of American Folklore, The, ix. Judah, Samuel B. F., 1 3 7 , 1 6 4 165, 185, 223. K e m p , Robert C., "Father," 1 0 7 - 1 0 9 , 220. Kidd, Capt. William, the arch pirate, xi—xvi; early piracies, 3 ; services in the West Indies, 4; home-loving citizen, 5; selected to go out against pirates, 6—7; his men pressed from his ship, 7 ; his special com-

Index mission, 7—8; draws up articles, 9 - 1 0 , 34-35» 7 2 ; piracy off Madagascar, 1 0 - 1 2 ; his men mutiny, 10—11; murder of William Moore, 1 1 ; shares booty, 1 2 ; proclaimed a pirate, 1 3 ; beaches his great ship, 1 3 ; gives up his French passes, 1 5 , 50; is arrested, 1 5 , 5 1 ; connection with impeachment proceedings in Parliament, 16, 56—73; caught up in New York politics, 18—3 2; parallel with life of Tew, 22— 24; gossip about, 3 3 - 5 5 ; boys in his crew, 35—36; confused with Bradish and Gillam, 51— 5 3 ; in the "News," 4 7 - 4 8 ; preached to by Cotton Mather, 54; in Newgate prison, 62-65 > trial of, 68— 7 3 ; the hanging of, 64-66; London books and broadsides on, 66—68; lives of, 7 4 - 8 1 ; called "Robert," 80, 9 1 , 96, i o o - i o i ; the Kidd ballad, 8 2 - 1 1 2 ; tune of the ballad, 90, 1 0 3 ; treasure and treasure legends, 39, 50, 54, 75, 104, 112, 113-148, 151, 1541 6 1 , 1 6 7 - 1 6 8 , 1 7 6 - 1 8 1 ; the Gardiner's Island legend, 125—130; Narragansett Bay legend, 130—131; Hudson River legends, 1 2 1 , 131— 1 4 2 ; hoaxes, 143—148; Kidd legends in the works of Irving, 1 5 1 - 1 6 5 » i n works of S. B. F. Judah, 164-165; called "Richard," 1 6 4 ; in works of Cooper, 1 6 6 - 1 7 5 ; as a picaroon, 160, 1 7 0 ; in the works of Thompson and Stowe,

233 1 7 6 - 1 8 1 ; on the stage, 1 8 2 188; identified with the Flying Dutchman, 186-188; called "John," 1 9 1 ; in Poe's Gold Bug, 189-192; in Treasure Island, 193—201; as an American myth, 202—206. Kidd, Mrs. William, 1 5 , 50, 53, 1 1 9 , 120. Kidd\ A Moral Optscule, 112. Kidd the Pirate, 153. Kidd's Hollow, 1 2 5 . Kidd's Island, 1 2 1 . "Kidd's Lament," 108, 109. "Kidd's men," 4 1 , 43, 46, 53, 1 2 1 , 167. Kidnaffing in the Pacific, 194. King William, 5-9, 26, 56, 57, 69. Kingsley, Charles, 197. Kingston, William Henry, 194, 196. Kitsdale, a London coffeeman, 62. Kittredge, George Lyman, 95. Knickerbocker, Diedrich, 1 5 1 , 152,154. Knickerbocker History of New York, The, 25, 1 5 2 , 1 5 3 . Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 153Knight, Joseph P., 109. Knott, Capt., 1 1 9 , 1 2 3 . Lafitte, ballad of Brave, 109. Lamb, Wallace E., ii. Lee, Dorothy (Kidd's housekeeper), 1 1 9 , 120. Leeward Islands, 4, 1 1 8 . Legarre, a Boston j eweler, 120. Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 153-

2$4 Index Leisler, Jacob, 28, 29, 32, 164, Maise, Capt. William, 8, 124. Malabar Coast, the, 10, 7 1 , 88. 165. Marblehead, 142. Leisler troubles, the, 19, 28-32, Markham, Col. William, 1 1 6 . 164, 165, 2 1 3 . Marks, James, 1 4 5 . Leonard, J . W., 2 1 3 . Maroon, The, 194. Libertatia (communistic pirate Marryat, Capt. Frederick, 194, settlement), 23. Life, Trial, and Execution of the 195» 197- . Famous Pirate Caft. Robert Marshalsea prison, 40, 63. Kidd, The, 145. Martha's Vineyard, 1 2 1 , 134. Linnhaven Bay, 143. Martyr, H.M.S., 129. Litchfield, Conn., 179. Mason, Capt., 4. Littell's Living Age, 135. Massachusetts Historical Society, Lives of Kidd, 74—81. ix, 1 1 8 . Master of Ballantrae, The, 195. Livingston, Robert, 5, 6, 1 5 , 45, Masterman Ready, 197. 49. 59» I 2 4> 1 2 7 , 2 1 3 . Mather, Capt., 128. Loffe, Gabriel, 35, 5 1 , 165. Mather, Rev. Cotton, 2 1 , 54— Lomax, John A., 99, 220. 55,99-100, 215. London Post Boy, 65. Matthiesson, F. O., 225. Longfellow, Henry W., 205. May Martin, or the Money Dig"Lord Lovel," ballad tune, 104. gers, 176. Lords of Trade, the, 20, 24, 25, McAdoo, William, 80. 27» 31» 32» 34» 37» 41» 43» McMaster, J . B., 2 1 4 , 2 1 9 . 44» 45» 46, 1 1 6 , 1 1 7 , 2 1 1 , McMurtrie, Douglas, 2 1 2 . 214, 215. Mead, Mr., Kidd's shipmaster, Lorrain, Paul, 64-65, 216, 2 1 7 ; 64. his Only True Account, 64— 65,66. Melville, Herman, 182, 194, 206. Lowman, Samuel, 143. Mereness, Newton D., 2 x 1 . Loya.ll Captain, the ship, 1 1 . Metcalf, F. J . , 220. Luesten, Carsten, 120. Michigan Indian story, the, 140. Luttrell, Narcissus, 38-40, 58, Middletown, N. J . , 1 2 2 . 216. Miguel, Don Joseph, 178. Lynn, Mass., 140, 142, 179. Miller, Rev. John, 20, 36. Milligan, C. P., 2 1 9 . Macaulay, T . B., 60, 76, 2 1 3 . Milton, John, 195. Mackenzie, W. Roy, 219, 220. Miner, F. D., 2 1 1 . MacLaren, J . Wilson, 195, 197. Minor, Manasseh, 2 1 . Madagascar, island of, xiv, 5 , 2 1 , Misson, Capt., 23. 22, 23, 26, 30, 3 1 , 32, 34, "Modern Broadsides," 1 1 2 . 36, 37» 38, 40, 41» 42, 44» Moll Flanders, 79. 45» 47» 51» 75» 76, " 6 , 122, Monaghan, Frank, 209. 173.

Index Money Pond, the, 1 2 1 . Money-Diggers, The, 113, 152, 154, 185.

Moore, John Robert, 217. Moore, William, compiler of songs, 105. Moore, William, Kidd's gunner, 10, 69, 70, 87, 92, 96, 165.

More, Mathew, 214. Morgan, Henry, xiii, 77, 78, "3Mott, Margaret M . , ix. Moulton, Jonathan, 114. Musgrave, Sir Christopher, 59. Music societies, early American,

255

New York American, 134. New York Assembly, the, 4, 31. New York Council, the, 3, 6, 26, 30, 50, 120, 204.

New York Folklore, ix., New York Journal of Commerce, 134, 135. New York Mercury, 132. New York World, 142. Niblo's Saloon, 109. Niles' National Register, 135. Norris, Isaac, 46. North American Review, The, 205.

Nova Scotia, 20.

104-107.

" M y Luve's in Germanie," ballad tune, 102. " M y Name Was Captain Kidd As I Sailed," 155. Nanfan, Lt. Gov., 45. Narragansett Bay legends, 130— 131Nassau, the ship, 214. Nassau Island, 39, 120. National Theater, the, 183. Neale, Thomas, 214. Nevis, Isle of, 38. N e w y , a fellow-prisoner, 63. New England Galaxy, The, 177. New England Quarterly, The, ix. Newgate, Keeper of, 64. Newgate Calendar, The, 76. Newgate prison, 16, 40, 57, 62, 64.

New London, 178. News Letters, the Campbell, 47— 48, 214.

Newton, Dr., Advocate of the Admiralty, 71,133. Newton story, the, 140.

O'Callaghan, E. B., 75, 2IO, 222.

OceanWaifs, The, 194. Odell, George C., 224. Odeon, the, 109. Old Bailey prison, the, xv, 16. " O l d Folks at Home," 109. Old Folks Concert Troupe, Father Kemp's, 107—109. Old Folks Concert Tunes, 108, 109.

Old Town Folks, 179. Oldmixon, John, 74, 210, 217. Oldtown Fireside Stories, 179. Olive Leaf, Hauser and Turner's, 105. Olmstead, Cotton Mather, 147, 148.

Olmstead, Frederick L., 146. Oort, Sarah Bradley Cox, 5. "O'Reilly on the Rolling Sea," ballad of, 104. Orford, Edward Earl of, 56, 210.

Ornum and Company, publishers, 110. Osgood, H . L., 210, 211, 213.

236

Index

Otsego, Lake, 167. Oyster Bay, 1 2 1 , 129. Oyster Pan, 120. Oyster Pond, the, 168. Iain, Capt. Thomas, 53, 1 1 9 , 123,130. Paine, Ralph, xiv, 209, 2 1 7 , 2 2 1 , 222, 2 2 ; . Palmer, Joseph, 35, 72. Palmer, Mass., 144, 1 4 ; . Palmer hoax, the, 144—146. Pargellis, Stanley M., 2 1 3 . Park Theater, the, 184. Parrington, Vernon L., 224. Parrott, Hugh, 126. Paul Jones, ballad of, 109. Peace Dale, R. I., 1 3 1 . Pearce, Charles E., 195, 196. Peekskill, 140. Penn, William, 19, 46, 2 1 2 . Penny dreadfuls, 194. Peofl^s Lawyer, The, 186. Perth Amboy, 122. Philadelphia Mercury, The, Philips, Frederick, 20, 30. Phipps, Sir William, 1 1 8 . Picaroon, the conventional, 160, 170. Pilgrim Songster, The, 105. Pilkerton, Ephraim, 46. Pilot, The, 173. Pirate, The, 143. Pirate Boy, The, 183. Pirate Queen, The, 191—192. Pirate? Own Book, The, 80. Plumb Island, 168. Poe, Edgar Allan, xiv, xv, 1 5 1 , 1 5 3 , 166, 175, 182, 1 8 9 192, 197, 199, 200; The Gold Bug, 166, 1 8 9 - 1 9 2 , 197.

Poems on the Affairs of State ( 1 7 0 4 ) , 83. Point Judah, 1 2 3 . Polypus Island story, 139. Popple, William, 44. Port Royal, 45. Portland, Earl of, 56, 58, 210. Pound, Louise, 219. Price, Kate, 5 1 . Providence Island, 2 1 . Providence Galley, the, 143. Purdy's National Theater, 184. Pursuit of the Houseboat, the, 112. Pyle, Howard, 80. Quabog, Mass., 145. Quakers, 43. Quarry, Col. Robert, 4 1 - 4 3 , 46, 116. Quedagh Merchant, the ship, 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 3 , 14, 72, 87, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 7 , 129, 1 3 2 , 165, 187, 2 2 1 . Queeneborough, H.M.S., 1 3 . Quelch, the pirate, 48. Quick, Capt. Cornelius, 12Q. Quinn, A. H., 182, 224, 225. Rackam, Calico Jack, xii. Ray, Caleb, 5 1 . Rayner, Capt., 46. Reading Old Folks Musical Society, 107. Red Rover, The, 167, 1 7 3 . Red Sea, 6, 30, 40. Regg, J . M., 216. Reid, Mayne, 194. Remarkable Lawsuit, A, 148. "Remember Sinful Youth," camp meeting hymn, 106. Revival, the Great, 103. Richmond, H.M.S., 22.

Index

Riley, Woodbridge, 102. Rip Van Winkle, 1 4 1 , 1 5 1 , 182, 186. Rif1 Van Winkle (drama), 1 5 3 . Ritter, F. L., 219. Robin Hood, 1 7 3 , 203. Robin Hood and Caftain Kidd's Songster, 109. Robinson Crusoe, 79, 196. Robinson Crusoe, ballad of, 109. Rochester, H.M.S., 39, 60. "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," 109. Rogers, Bruce, 1 1 2 . Romney, Earl of, 21 o. Rudge, William Edwin, 1 1 2 . Russell, Admiral Edward, 7, 14, 109. Rye Beach, 1 2 1 . Saco, Fort, 52. St. Clair, Henry, 76; his U. S. Criminal Calendar, 75, 76. St. Katherine, town of, 14. St. Laurance, island of, 44. St. Mary's, island of, 12. St. Thomas, island of, 1 3 , 3 8 , 39. Salleck, Major, 2 1 , 120. Sanford, Col. Peleg, 122. Sargent and Co., 1 3 5 . Say, the loquacious Mr., 63. Schoenberger, H. W., 223. Scholes, P. A., 220. Scott, Sir Walter, 164, 182. Sea Lions, The, 168—169, 189, 197, 201. Seitz, Don, 142, 209. Sewall, Samuel, 2 1 , 49, 50, 53, 1 1 7 , 215, 221. Seymour, Sir Edmund, 60, 61— 62. Shakespeare, William, 76, 169.

257

Shaw, Gardner, 144, 145, 220, 223. Shaw, Samuel, 144, 145. Shelly, Capt. Giles, 14, 26, 36, 40, 4 1 , 44, 45, 46, 47, 1 2 2 , 124, 132. Shelter Island, 120, 1 2 1 . Shilling shockers, 194. Shingle, Solon, 186. Shrewsbury, Duke of, 210, 2 1 3 . Siegmeister, Elie, 219. Singing schools, 104—105. Singing societies, 106. Sketch Book, The, 152. Sleepy Hollow, 1 5 1 . Sleepy Hollow, The Legend of, 153-

Sloughter, Gov. Henry, 4. Smith, Alexander, 78; his History of the Highwaymen, 78, 79-

Smith, H. P., 223. Smith, Mary W., 219, 220. Smith, William, 74, 1 1 3 , 2 1 2 , 2 1 6 ; his History of New York, 74. Smollett, Tobias, 194. Somers, John Lord, 56, 57, 58, 59,216. Songsters, early American, 105— 106. South Natick, 179. Southold, 1 2 1 . Sparks, Jared, 2 2 1 . Spectre Bridegroom, The, 153. Spiller, Robert E., 224. Steuart, John A., 225. Stevenson, Robert Louis, xiv, xv, 153, 166, 169, 1 9 1 , 1 9 3 201, 205; Treasure Island, 1 6 1 , 166, 1 9 3 - 2 0 1 . Stewart, Captain, 7, 63. Stewart, Douglas, 1 9 1 .

238

Index

Stokes, I. N . Phelps, 209, 2 1 2 , 213, 216, 221. Storm Shif, The, 141. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1 7 6 , 179—181. Strong, Ezra, 2 1 7 . Stuyvesant, Peter, 29. Sullivan's Island, 190, 200. Swift, Jonathan, 59, 164. Symmes, Rev. Thomas, 100. Tales of a Traveller, 125, 1 3 7 , 152, 1 5 3 , 166, 189, 1 9 7 . Tarpolin Cove, 1 2 1 . Temfest, The, 169. Temple, J. H . , 223. T e w (or T o o ) , Capt. Thomas, 8, 10, 2 2 - 2 4 , 79> l Z 2 > 2 1 T h i m b l e Islands, 1 2 1 . Thomas, Isaiah, 219. Thompson, Abraham G . , 133,

135Thompson, Benjamin F., 75, 128, 222; his History of Long Island, 75. Thompson, Daniel Pierce, 176— 179. Thompson, Harold, xiv, 109, 209, 210. Thoreau, Henry D . , 98. Three lingered. Jack, 194. " T h r o u g h all the world below," camp meeting hymn, 105— 106. Treasure, Kidd's, 39, 50, 54, 75, 104, 1 1 2 , 1 1 3 - 1 4 8 , 151, 154-161, 167-168, 1761 8 1 , 1 8 9 - 1 9 2 , 199. Treasure Island, 1 6 1 , 166, 193— 201. Treasure legends, Gardiner's Island, 125—130; Narragansett

Bay, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 ; Hudson River, 131-142. Trial of Captain William Kidd, The, 142. T r i a l of K i d d , the, 6 8 - 7 3 . Tricks in Love Songster, 110. Tune Book, Richard Weaver's, 105, 106. T u n e books, 1 0 4 - 1 0 5 . Turner, Benjamin, 220. T u r p i n , Dick, xiii. Turton, M r . Justice, 7 3 . Tutall, John, 28. Tuthill, Justice John, 120. Two Years Before the Mast, 183. U.s . Criminal Calendar, 75, 76. Van Courtlandt, Col. Stephanus, 139. Van der Head, William, 120. VanDoren, Carl, 220. Van Horn, Garrett, 36. Van Tassel story, the, 138. "Venture G w e n , " the Welsh tune, 102. Vermont, treasure hunting in, 176-179. Vernon, Secretary, 49, 5 1 , 2 1 4 . Ver Planck's point, 1 3 3 . Vesey, Rev. William, 3 1 . Virgil, 195. W a k e , Capt. Thomas, 8, 10. Walden Pond, 98. Walker, John, 9. Wallace, F. T . , 223. Walsh, Richard, 1 1 2 . Ward, Lord Chief Baron, 70, 72. Warwick Neck, 1 3 1 . Water Witch, The, 1 6 1 , 163, 169-174, 182-183, 185, 189.

Index Watson, John F., 46, 65, 100, 102, 1 1 4 , 134, 143, 1 210, 2 1 4 , 222; Annals of New York, 65, 1 3 4 ; Annals of Philadelphia, 46, 100. Way, Capt. Thomas, 1 1 9 . Weaver, Richard, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 . Weaver, Robert, 2 1 3 . Weaver, Thomas, 22, 27, 2 1 1 . Weeden, William B., 2 1 1 . Weeks, Lyman H., 2 1 5 . Wesley, John, 104. West Indies, 4, 1 3 , 20, 38, 39, 40, 1 1 7 , 130. West Warren, Mass., 145. Wetherley, Tee, 5 1 - 5 2. Whall, W. B., 220. Whig Lords, impeachment of, 56-62. Whittier, William Greenleaf, 206.

239 Wilkins, Harold T . , xiv, 90, 9 1 , 209, 210, 2 1 3 , 2 1 4 , 2 1 5 , 2 1 7 , 2 2 1 , 222, 223. Williams, Gus, 1 1 0 . Williams, Stanley T . , 223. Winthrop, Gov. John, 47, 122. Wizard Skiff, The, 183. Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams, 1 5 3 , 1 5 5 , 198. Wolfert's Roost, 153. Wonderful Mesmeric Revelation, The, 140. "Wondrous Love," camp meeting hymn, 106. "Woodman Spare that Tree," 109.

Yeats, E. C., 1 1 2 . Yeats, Jack B., 1 1 2 . Yeats, William Butler, 1 1 2 . Young Folks magazine, 195, 196.