Most of Kidd’s crew deserted him and went over to Culliford, leaving Kidd to
return to the Caribbean with just thirteen men.
Learning that he was wanted as a pirate, Kidd scuttled his ship and headed
for New York, where he believed he had influential friends. He was lured to
Boston in 1699 but stopped and buried some of his treasure on Gardiner’s
Island on the way. The treasure was said to consist of a box of gold and two of
silver, precious stones and silver tableware. Mrs Gardiner was given a bolt of
gold cloth from an Arab ship captured off Madagascar and a sack of sugar, and
Kidd asked the family to keep the booty safe for him. His Boston friend
betrayed him and he was arrested and tried, the treasure being produced in
court as evidence against him. After a year of harsh imprisonment he was sent
to England, where the Tory government hoped he would implicate Whig
politicians who had financed his voyages. He refused to do so, believing that
these old acquaintances would save him. They did not. He was tried again by
the Admiralty court, found guilty of murder and piracy, and hanged at
Execution Dock in Wapping, the traditional place for the execution of pirates.
His body was hung in a cage at Tilbury Point for three years, as a warning to
others.
Many efforts have been made to trace the ship scuttled by Kidd in the
Caribbean, theQuedagh Merchant. In 2007, a shipwreck was found off the
coast of the Dominican Republic which is thought to be the famous pirate
ship. It was lying in less than ten feet of water. Underwater archaeologists
from Indiana University found anchors and many cannons, as well as pottery,
weapons, coins, jewellery and other artefacts which seem to confirm its
identity.
The pirates set up a number of bases in the Bahamas and Caribbean.
Tortuga and Port Royal both began life as pirate ports in the middle of the
seventeenth century (Plate 7). French, Dutch and English pirates inhabited
Tortuga by 1640, calling themselves the‘Brethren of the Coast’. In 1645 the
French governor supplied them with some 1,600 prostitutes, in the hope that
this would calm the pirates down. The island changed hands between the
French, Spanish and English several times. Around 1670, when it was in
decline, the Tortuga pirates found a new employer–Henry Morgan, a Welsh
pirate–who hired them as mercenaries for the French but they kept on with
their piratical activities, and hid their booty in Tortuga.
Port Royal on Jamaica was founded in 1518; by the end of the sixteenth
century, it had become an international pirate centre. Taken by the English in
1655, it grew rapidly. In 1657 the governor invited the Brethren of the Coast
to make Port Royal their home port, as part of his scheme for defending the
EARLY MODERN CRIME