“The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd”, by Richard Zacks

434 pages, Hachette Books, ISBN-13: 978-0786884513

By the end of Richard Zacks’ The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd I wanted to throw it across the room and shout at the heavens…NOT because it was a bad book – quite the opposite – but because of the sheer injustice done to William Kidd, the decidedly un-pirate who was hanged as such (and whose body was then left gibbeted over the River Thames at Tilbury Point for three years) – while Robert Culliford, Kidd’s great nemesis who was, in fact, as notorious a pirate whoever went a’pirating, not only got away with it all but disappeared altogether with God-only-knows how much loot (man, is life unfair). All this may come as some surprise to you lot, seeing as Captain Kidd is one of the two most notorious pirates America ever produced (the other being Blackbeard, as you well know, of course).

Captain Kidd was in fact a prominent and well-respected captain and merchant in Colonial New York who sometimes found work as a privateer; that is, a private person that engaged in maritime warfare under a commission of war from the British government in which he was charged with finding and destroying pirates as a going concern. Privateers were, as Zacks points out, were legally contracted to prey on enemy shipping, so it may well be treading a fine-line to paint Kidd as an innocent abroad, but the evidence Zacks presents that Kidd was a Pirate Hunter, not a pirate himself, is highly compelling, particularly after Kidd returns to await trial (interwoven with Kidd’s tale is the Culliford’s story, told as a kind of counterpoint to Kidd).

Zacks’ work is copiously backed by research, documentation and records galore, and is wonderfully enhanced by period details, pirate lore and backroom political intrigue, including such tidbits as the surprisingly democratic structure of most pirate crews, their general distaste of battle (they preferred to frighten and bluff unwary ships into submission), the truth about the legendary lost treasure of Captain Kidd, the virulent anti-Catholicism of England at the time, the built-in English contempt for the Scots, the British competition with and hatred of the French and the inevitable and unenviable fate that the Admiralty reserved for convicted pirates (in a word – YIKES). Apparent throughout is the greed of the power mongers of the Admiralty, the Government in Colonial America and England and the many abuses of the East India Trading Company.

The Pirate Hunter shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Captain Kidd was not a pirate but rather a privateer who was also a decent man, according to the standards of his times. He became a pirate quite mysteriously, endangering as he did the interests of British East India Company by seizing a merchant ship of a prince of Mogul Empire. True, the ship was carrying a French pass, and France was then at war with England, and so seizing the ship was, therefore, a perfectly legal operation according to the law of the times. But the Indian Moghul it belonged to thought that the British East India Company should be responsible for its loss and so the company had to compensate for it, thereby setting a bad precedent. Captain Kidd was also a Scot who wanted to become an admiral of the British Empire; blinded by his ambition, he could not understand the political current of the times. So his life was forfeit.