Famed Pirate Captain Kidd Hanged
William Kidd was born around 1645 in Greenock, Scotland, and by 1690 had become a respected shipowner in New York. In 1695, he received a royal commission to hunt pirates in the Indian Ocean, backed by some of the most powerful men in England, including the Lord Chancellor and the First Lord of the Admiralty. He sailed aboard the Adventure Galley in April 1696, but the voyage went badly: disease killed a third of his crew, and the promised prizes never materialized. In a fit of rage during a dispute, Kidd struck his gunner William Moore with an iron-bound bucket, killing him. He then captured the Armenian merchant vessel Quedagh Merchant, an act that would seal his fate.
Declared a pirate, Kidd surrendered in Boston in July 1699, hoping his powerful backers would protect him. They did not. He was shipped to London, tried at the Old Bailey on May 8-9, 1701, and convicted of Moore’s murder and multiple counts of piracy. Kidd insisted that French passes found aboard his captured ships proved they were lawful prizes under his commission, but the documents were conveniently “mislaid” by the prosecution and only turned up centuries later in the Public Record Office. His well-connected backers, meanwhile, may have preferred a quick hanging to a trial in which Kidd might name names. On May 23, 1701, Kidd was taken to Execution Dock at Wapping. The hangman’s rope broke on the first attempt; he was hanged on the second. His body was coated in tar, locked in a specially fitted iron cage, and gibbeted at Tilbury Point on the Thames estuary as a warning to sailors, a scene captured in a well-known engraving from Charles Ellms’ The Pirates Own Book (1837).
The broadside ballad Captain Kidd appeared almost immediately after his execution, with copies surviving from as early as 1701. Sung to a tune later shared with “Samuel Hall,” it takes the form of a scaffold confession, with Kidd repenting his sins verse after verse: “Take warning now by me, and shun bad company, / Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die.”