USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. II > Part 29
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" Captain William Kidd and his accomplices, lately apprehended within this prov- ince for committing divers acts of piracy, on examination severally, acknowledging and agreeing thereon that they left a prize ship, of the burden of four hundred tons or upwards, which they took in the seas in India, at Hispaniola in the West Indies, safely moored in a river there, and in the care of Henry Bolton and eighteen or twenty men more, and a considerable quantity of bale goods of India, saltpetre, iron, sugar, etc., on board of the same, -
" Advised, that his Lordship do forthwith cause to be taken up, equipped, and manned for his Majesty's service a suitable ship, with good force, to be managed and applied on the aforesaid affair." Which is, " the securing and bringing away said ship and lading left there by said Kidd and his company, the charge thereof to be answered and secured by the goods and treasure imported here by said Kidd and company, now under seizure and in custody."
Additional stringency was given to all these proceedings from the fact that just before Kidd's arrest the pirate Bradish, who was in Boston jail, succeeded in escaping with one Tee Witherly, another pirate, with the complicity of the maid of the prison-keeper, and, as the Council believed, by the fault of Ray, the jailer. Ten days after Kidd was com- mitted to jail, the Council, being informed that he was kept in the prison-keeper's house, directed that he should be put in the stone prison and ironed.
Kidd had not come to Boston with any sign of anxiety. He had brought
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LORD BELLOMONT AND CAPTAIN KIDD.
his wife with him,1 and she had brought her maid. They had left the sloop - the " Antonia " - at the wharf, and had taken their lodgings at Duncan Campbell's. Campbell's house must have been the most luxurious house of entertainment in Boston, for it was here that Bellomont himself had been received only a few weeks before. At that time Campbell received seven pounds six shillings and four pence for providing for the Earl's enter- tainment. Bellomont had made Campbell his messenger in communicating with Kidd, - Kidd being his countryman, that is, a Scotchman, and his acquaintance. Campbell is described by Dunton as " a bookseller, who dresses à la mode ; who is a very virtuous person, extremely charming ; whose company is coveted by the best gentlemen in Boston, nor is he less accessible to the fair sex."
When Kidd was arrested, Mrs. Kidd's trunk was broken open, and there was taken from it " a silver tankard, a silver mug, silver porringer, spoons, forks, and other pieces of plate, and two hundred and sixty pieces of eight." These Madam Sarah Kidd claimed as her own, and also asked that twenty- five English crowns, the property of her maid, might be refunded to her. The Council granted this petition. The next week Sarah Kidd asked per- mission to attend upon her husband in prison, "he being under strait durance and in want of necessary assistance, as well as from your petitioner's affection to her husband."
While Kidd was in jail he proposed to Bellomont that he should be taken as a prisoner to Hispaniola to bring back the "Quedah Merchant." He stated the value of her cargo to be fifty or sixty thousand pounds of treas- ure, which could not otherwise be recovered. But Bellomont was afraid to send him; although if the " Quedah " were a lawful prize, four-fifths of this very treasure belonged to Bellomont and his companions. To this "great refusal " of Bellomont do we owe it that no man knows where that treasure is to-day. It is the treasure in search of which the hill-sides of southern Rhode Island have been honey-combed, and for which adventurous divers are at this moment looking under the waters of the Hudson River.2
It is to be observed that when the pirate Bellamy was shipwrecked, eighteen years afterwards, on Cape Cod,3 his ship was the "Whidah." It is not a violent supposition that when Kidd's men found their captain was gone
1 Kidd had married her in New York. She was Mrs. Sarah Oort, " the widow of a former friend and fellow-officer," President de Peyster says. She is said "to have been a lovely and
Jarah sk ku
accomplished woman." Lovely she may have been, but she could not write her own name. Her petitions are signed by her attorney with " S. K.," rudely printed by her as her "mark." Massachusetts Archives, Ixii.
2 [About forty years ago occurred one of the periodical revivals of the loose traditionary stories regarding Kidd and his concealed treas- ure, and some pretended revelations were made to connect a sunken hulk in the Hudson high- lands with his name. At this time Mr. Henry C. Murphy made a careful examination of Kidd's career, and published a paper upon the subject in Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, 1846, i. 39. There is a note as to treasures left by Kidd at Gard- ner's Island, in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1877, P. 332 .- ED.]
8 See the chapter in this volume by H. E. Scudder.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
they took the "Quedah " for themselves. Twenty years is not a long period of life for a ship built in the East Indies. It may well be that Kidd's lost treasure-ship is the same vessel which was wrecked, twenty years after, on the back of Cape Cod.
On Sept. 12 the Admiralty, who had heard of the arrest of Kidd, sent off a vessel to take him and his crew to England; but she met contrary winds, and returned. Another frigate, the " Advice," was sent, and did not bring back her prisoner until the April of the following year. He was kept in prison in England a long time. When Somers, the Whig chancellor, was prosecuted by the Tories in the House of Commons, in April, 1701, one charge against him was that of having been implicated in Kidd's affairs. Although Somers was not tried upon this charge, Kidd was tried under the same Government both for murder and for piracy; in the latter accusation several of his crew were joined with him.
The murder which Kidd was supposed to have committed was that of Moore, his gunner, whose death resulted from a blow given by a water bucket in a fight, without premeditation. No sentence but that of man- slaughter was justified by the evidence brought against him. He was, however, found guilty of murder. In the trial for piracy, which followed, he was treated with the same injustice and severity. He claimed that his commission justified his seizing the " Quedah Merchant," for, he said, she was sailing under a French pass when he took her. If any such pass existed, it was in Bellomont's possession. Kidd could not produce it. But, as our readers know, Bellomont acknowledges in his report to the Council that he received at Emmott's hands two such French passes. Kidd's death had been determined upon, and he was hanged.1
A well-known ballad has preserved his name, although incorrectly ; even in the early editions he is called Robert instead of William, which was his real name. The man he killed has been more fortunate, and we still sing with sufficient correctness, as regards the name, -
" I murdered William Moore, as I sailed, as I sailed."
Our law holds a man innocent till he is proved guilty. In this view we may say that Kidd was an innocent man. But he certainly departed from his orders in taking the "Quedah Merchant; " he remained in the East longer than the time in which he had promised to return; and innocent men do not need such concealment in their goings and comings.
Bellomont's letters are now entirely made public, and they show that he supposed Kidd to have departed from his orders, and that he did not him- self dare to join him in enjoying a treasure gained by such doubtful means. The letters are entirely consistent. The seizure of the "Quedah " was
1 [Kidd's trial in London is reported in State Trials, xiv. 123; and Palfrey, New England, iv. ch. vi., who gives a judicious account of the matter, expresses surprise at Macaulay's inac- curacy when this report was accessible. An
authorized report of it was also published in London in 1701, called The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation of Captain William Kidd, etc., of which there was an abridgment issued in 1703 .- ED.]
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LORD BELLOMONT AND CAPTAIN KIDD.
lawful if the French pass existed, and Bellomont and his friends would then have come into possession of four-fifths of sixty thousand pounds. It can hardly be supposed that his political enemies should have terrified him into losing a considerable fortune, and destroying an innocent man.
At the time of the trial no one pretended that Kidd was not guilty. The severest criticism made upon the affair was that Bellomont, Somers, and Halifax were guilty too.1
To avoid breaking in on the story of Kidd, we have followed it to its close without interruption. We have also spoken of Lord Bellomont at the council chamber in Peter Sergeant's house, as if we always had lords presiding at the council chamber, and were quite used to such grandeur. As the reader knows, this is not so. The Council had sent General Win- throp and Elisha Cooke (of Cooke's Court) and Penn Townsend, Speaker of the House, with John Rogers for a chaplain, as commissioners to New York to pay the new governor their respects.2 Before the commissioners left, the Council received a letter from him announcing his arrival, and thanking them for the piety which had ordered prayers for him in the Fast proclamation. "He did not doubt he fared the better for them," - an expression which was probably genuine, for Bellomont seems to have been a sincerely devout man. Bellomont's letter was sealed with a device bear- ing three birds, and Judge Sewall was well pleased with himself that at the council meeting he suggested that they were coots, - Coote being Bello- mont's family name. It was more than a year before he left New York for Boston. In more than one of his letters home he explains to the Govern- ment that he cannot live in New York, because of the parsimony of the Assembly, while if he resides in Massachusetts the Assembly there treats him more handsomely. His first arrival in Boston was on May 26, 1699. A fit of the gout had seized him on the sea, but he addressed himself man- fully to business; and after a stay of two months in Boston, in which time Kidd appeared and was arrested, he went further eastward to visit his other provinces. He officiated at the Artillery election of that year, and delivered the spontoons - as in the ceremony still preserved - to Walley the captain and Byfield the lieutenant.
The Assembly had hired of Peter Sergeant the house which afterwards became the Province House, that they might properly entertain Lord Bello- mont. The rent was a hundred pounds. Sewall speaks once and again of official meetings in the house. And, on the 20th of July, the General Court was sent for to wait upon the Governor there, and there he pro-
1 [Mr. Joseph B. Felt, in 1845, acting under into the form of a lecture, but with much ab- sence of literary finish, which is printed in the Essex Institute Hist. Coll., iv. 28. Kidd's story, as ordinarily told, can be found in Mrs. H. P. Spofford's New England Legends, 1871 .- ED.]
a commission from the Governor of Massa- chusetts, made an abstract of papers relating to Kidd found in the State Paper Office in London, which seem to have been sent over by Bellomont to the Lords of Trade ; and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Jan., 1852, he printed this ab- stract ; and later, in 1862, he threw the material
2 One hundred pounds was allowed the com -. missioners for their expenses, and the chaplain received ten pounds for his.
.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
rogued them. A little glimpse of daily life peeps out in Sewall's Diary on the 25th of July, when he " has my Lady up upon Cotton Hill" and shows her the town. The view is still remembered by persons of sixty years old, and has fortunately been preserved in a painting which has been engraved for a later volume of this history. Sewall goes on : -
" Madam Sergeant, Nanfan,1 Newton there ; and Major-general and Mr. Sergeant. Mrs. Tuthill's daughters invited my Lady as came down, and gave a glass of good wine.
" As came down again through the gate, I asked my Lady's leave that now I might call it Bellomont Gate. My Lady laughed, and said, 'What a compliment he puts on me !' With pleasancy."
Bellomont was entirely successful in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the leaders of the little Puritan town. Hutchinson, whose father remem- bered him, preserves the two anecdotes which have been often repeated, and makes us wish he had condescended to give us more. The General Court in that day always adjourned to attend the Thursday lecture. Bello- mont always went with them, and no single act could have done more to conciliate such men as Sewall and most of the ministers. One day, as Bellomont returned with a great crowd around him to his house from the lecture, he passed Bullivant the apothecary, loitering at his shop door. Bullivant was no lecture-goer. He had been imprisoned as one of Andros's friends. As Lord Bellomont passed, he said, " Ah, doctor, you have lost a precious sermon to-day." Bullivant observed in an under-tone, " If I could have got as much by being there as his Lordship will, I would have been there too." Hutchinson also records a speech of the Governor to his wife when his table was filled with representatives from the country towns : " Dame, we should treat these gentlemen well, - they give us our bread."
The crisis compelled by Kidd's arrest brought to the surface the latent determination of what may be called the Independent party not to refer judicial cases to England if they could help it. The reader will remember that the Superior Court dissolved itself and left the country with- out its highest judiciary, because the Crown had refused its assent to the provincial laws for its establishment. On Feb. 6, 1699-1700, Bellomont called a council to take advice about sending the pirates to England. Kidd had been imprisoned since the 6th of June. Bradish and Witherly had once escaped, but had been re-captured. Bellomont had himself written home, "These pirates I have in jail make me very uneasy for fear they should escape. I would give £100 if they were all in Newgate." There was no province law for punishing piracy with death, and the " Advice" frigate had been sent from England to take them on board. When the Council met at Bellomont's call, Judge Sewall said stiffly, that, before the pirates could be collected from New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, the Governor could call the Assembly together and they
1 The wife of the Lieut .- Governor of New York, who was Lady Bellomont's cousin.
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LORD BELLOMONT AND CAPTAIN KIDD.
would gladly rid themselves of such men. At this the Governor seemed displeased, - and well he might. It implied that the Governor himself, even with the advice of the Council, had no right to transport these men for trial.1 Sewall goes on : -
" I had asked before what pirates, and the Governor said them and their asso- ciates. Governor mentioned Kidd, Gillam, Bradish, Witherly, to be sent aboard presently for better security. Council voted to leave it to the Governor's discretion whom to send aboard ; only the Governor had said to some that enquired, he in- tended not [to let] them out upon bail. I think only I, Colonel Townsend, and Captain Byfield were in the negative. I said I was not clear in it. The grounds I went upon were because I knew of no power I had to send men out of the province. Captain Byfield said he was for their going aboard, but reckoned it was not so safe to send them presently as to keep them in jail."
Poor Sewall and his friends were in a minority of three against ten in the Council. It was certainly as hard a case as could have been selected on which to test the colony's independence of English interference.
Sewall's note of the treasure sent makes it out to be an iron chest of gold, pearls, etc .; forty bales of East India goods, thirteen hogsheads, chest and case, and one negro man, and Venturo Resail, an East Indian, born at Ceylon. The capture was thought to be worth fourteen thousand pounds.
Judge Sewall preserves the memory of another incident which shows his sensitiveness perhaps, but, at the same time, the respect paid to the Gover- nor. On Dec. 30, 1698, Stoughton, the Lieut .- Governor, made a great dinner-party for the Council. Sewall was not invited, though he was a member of the Council. On which occasion he says : -
"The grievousness of this proetermission is, that by this means I shall be taken up into the lips of talkers, and shall be obnoxious to the Governor at his coming, as a person deserted and fit to be hunted down, if occasion be ; and in the meantime shall go feebly up and down my business as one who is quite out of the Lieut .- Governor's favor. The Lord pardon my share in the abounding of iniquity, by reason whereof the love of many waxes cold."
Bellomont left Boston for New York by sea on the 17th of July, hav- ing resided in his eastern dominions about fourteen months. He died on Wednesday the 5th of March of the next year. your afection friend & fervent. Gelomont The news arrived in Bos- ton on Saturday the 15th. The Assembly was imme- diately prorogued. " The town is sad," Sewall 2 writes; and afterward, " the Artillery Company gave
1 " For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences," - this was one of the reasons given for breaking with King George
seventy-six years afterward in the war of In- dependence.
2 Sewall Papers, ii. 33.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
three volleys in the middle of the town when they came out of the field, with regard to my Lord." 1
Considering the very full materials which exist for the study of the history of Kidd, and his connection with the Crown and its officers, the number and seriousness of the errors regarding him in the popular mind and in more stately history are equally remarkable. Lord Campbell, in his Life of Somers, condenses the story into these lines : -
"Captain Kid was regularly commissioned 'to sink, burn, and destroy pirates ; ' but on arriving in the Indian Seas he turned pirate himself, and cruised against the commerce of all nations indiscriminately till, after a sharp engagement with an English frigate, in which several fell on both sides, he was captured and brought home in irons."
As the reader knows, this action with the English frigate is entirely imaginary. Lord Campbell probably had in his mind some ballad, with a true or false description of the surrender of some other pirate. Even Macaulay does not escape from the incoherency of others. But it is to be remembered that his notice of Kidd is in one of his posthumous chapters, which he had no opportunity of correcting. His statement of Kidd's adventures begins with a supposed interview in New York between Bellomont and a veteran mariner named William Kidd, of whom a pictur- esque account is then given. Bellomont recommends the king to commis- sion him, and the king refuses. Bellomont then writes to his friends in England, complaining of their want of public spirit, and proposing a private adventure, in which they engage. All this, as the reader knows, passed in London, not in New York, and the description of Kidd may be taken as largely imaginary. At the end, "Kidd, having burned his ship and dis- missed most of his men, who easily found berths in the sloops of other pirates, returned to New York with the means, as he flattered himself, of making his peace and of living in splendor." Properly interpreted, this means that Kidd did not burn his ship, did not dismiss his men, and that he sent to the Governor for a safe-guard, which he received. With it he came to Boston (not New York), and, after consultation, was arrested. Macaulay had the idea that Kidd had seen many " old buccaneers living in comfort and credit at New York and Boston." Since he wrote, that notion has been presented elsewhere to the public. The New York annalists can speak for their own city. In this book it is only necessary to say, that neither in
1 [The story of Kidd's career is examined with a view to vindicate Bellomont in A full Account of the Proceedings in relation to Cap- tain Kidd in two Letters, written by a Person of Quality to a Kinsman of the Earl of Bello- mont, in Ireland, London, 1701 ; the publisher of which closes his address to the reader thus : " As soon as the unhappy news [of Bello- mont's death] came to Boston, where the Gen- eral Assembly was then sitting, a proclamation
was published by the Deputy-Governor and Council, upon the unanimous address of the Assembly, for appointing a general Fast to bewail the loss of suclı a Governor as a pub- lic calamity, -so much was his virtue known and esteemed abroad, while he was so unrea- sonably persecuted in his native country." An account of the seat and family of Bellomont is given in Heraldic Journal, i. 166: (corrected) iii. 24 .- ED.]
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LORD BELLOMONT AND CAPTAIN KIDD.
tradition nor in the local annals is there any trace of such inhabitants. There is no candlestick, or pistol, or tea-pot, said to be an inheritance from so romantic a source. There is no old house said to have been built by such ill-gotten gains. Nor is there, in the full registers of mercantile busi- ness and of taxation, any single memorandum which has been pointed at as the evidence of such residence. It has been suggested that Phips's repu- tation was bad enough to permit calling him a buccaneer. But there is nothing to justify such a charge but the supposition that Phips's commis- sion from the king authorized him to cruise as a privateer.1 Privateering and buccaneering are entirely different things, and Macaulay should never have confounded the one with the other.
On the other hand, we have the material from which we could make almost a directory of the little town, of which the population did not foot up more than fifteen hundred families. We have Judge Sewall's and Dun- ton's very full accounts of their affairs, with frequent notes on the lives of the men of wealth at whose funerals Sewall assisted, or of whose dinners Dunton partook. In all such authorities there is no intimation that any man had been a buccaneer. What is even more conclusive is the fact that the life of Boston would have been detestable to any such man, unless he had been thoroughly converted from the error of his ways. A town where he could hardly play cards, where he would be expected to sing psalms at an evening party, and be compelled to stay in the house on Sundays, or to go to meeting twice, would be hateful to him. It would have been the last place for him to seek as a harbor after the storms of life.
It is possible that Macaulay remembered the statement that John Hull's mint proved valuable to buccaneers and pirates, in converting their plunder into pine-tree shillings. The mint may have been sometimes useful for them, but there is not a word of contemporary evidence to that effect.2 There are severe reports condemning the mint from the officers of the Lon- don mint, but they do not hint at any such use, which they would gladly have done had they heard of it. And, indeed, the operations of the New England mint were so small that it could hardly have served any pirate's purpose. In 1661, when it was doing as much as it ever did, apparently, the General Court tried to obtain from the mint-master some little royalty as its part of the profit. Hull offered ten pounds as " a free gift to the country," and would pay no more. The committee of the Court asked for five per cent on Hull's royalty, which was sixty-two pounds on every thousand coined.
1 Cromwell, whose story is told in Vol. I. p. 509, was no buccaneer or freebooter. He was a privateer, sailing under Warwick's commis- sion. Kidd never saw him, for he died in 1649. He was in Boston but a few weeks, and lived by choice in one of the poorest hovels in the town.
2 Hutchinson's statement is very accurate, and must be taken for just what it says, and no more. At the date of 1652 he says : "The trade
of the province increasing, especially with the West Indies, where the buccaneers or pirates at this time were numerous, and part of the wealth which they took from the Spaniards, as well as what was produced by the trade, being brought to New England in bullion, it was thought nec- essary for preventing fraud in money to create a mint." He does not say that the buccaneers brought their silver; and his remark applies only to 1652, misprinted in his volume 1651.
VOL. II. - 24.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
But Hull and his partner refused absolutely to give this. When this report was presented, the Court voted to accept the offer of ten pounds, "and what else the committee could get." And, so far as appears, this is all they ever did get from the past coinage. On the estimate of their committee, ten pounds would represent a coinage of only three thousand pounds. Six years after, Hull and Sanderson agreed to pay forty pounds for the years intervening, and ten pounds annually in future; and in 1675 they agree to pay twenty pounds. If we suppose that this agreement was as favorable as that which the committee proposed, the coinage was then only six thousand pounds a year. The mint-house and all the apparatus cost £395 12s. 2d. This does not indicate a large outfit.
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