A Ship Built for the Job

The Adventure Galley was not bought for the voyage. She was built for it, launched at Deptford late in 1695 with a hull rigged for sail and banks of oars for the calms. A pirate hunter needs to move when the wind will not, and the oars were the investors' answer.

A purpose-built ship tells you what the venture expected: serious prey, long distances, real fighting. It also tells you the scale of the outlay. Money on this scale wants a return, and a return meant captures. From the day she went down the ways, the Adventure Galley carried an arithmetic problem as well as guns. Every empty month at sea made a questionable prize look more like a necessary one.

Her specifications, builders and crew are not yet established in the ship's record, and this room states no figures the evidence does not support. What is already secure is how she ended: worm-eaten and unseaworthy by 1698, abandoned at Ile Sainte-Marie off Madagascar while Kidd moved into his captured prize. The hunter did not survive the hunt.