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Gallery · Captain Kidd · Room 7 of 9

The Return and the Arrest

Title page of the 1701 pamphlet. Letterpress type reads: The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation of Captain William Kidd, for Murther and Piracy, Upon Six several Indictments, at the Admiralty-Sessions held at the Old-Baily on the 8th and 9th of May 1701, who upon full Evidence was found Guilty, receiv'd Sentence, and was accordingly Executed at Execution-Dock, May the 23d. Smaller type below names nine other men tried at the same time and place for piracy, then, beneath a rule: To which are added, Captain Kidd's Two Commissions. The imprint at the foot reads: London, Printed for J. Nutt, near Stationers-Hall, 1701.
Title page, The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation of Captain William Kidd Where the return ended: the printed record of the Admiralty sessions of 8 and 9 May 1701, the destination of the road that begins in this room. British Library copy, digitised (Internet Archive).

Kidd came back. That fact deserves more attention than it usually gets.

A man who believed himself a pirate had the whole Atlantic world to vanish into. Kidd instead returned to North America in 1699, carrying the French passes, apparently expecting the papers and his backers to hold. He sailed toward his patron.

The patron was the Earl of Bellomont: investor in the venture at its beginning, colonial governor at its end. Bellomont ordered Kidd's arrest. Both of Bellomont's roles are confirmed in correspondence and official records. What connected them, whether the arrest was duty, self-protection or both at once, is interpretation, and the interpretation piece on Kidd's political fall argues it as interpretation rather than fact.

What the arrest did is not in doubt. It moved Kidd from the custody of his own judgement into the machinery of the state, and it moved the passes into official hands. Kidd would next make his argument in a London courtroom. The papers he was counting on would not be there.

Records in this room