Gallery · Captain Kidd · Room 6 of 9
The Papers
Two facts about the French passes sit at the centre of this Collection. The register holds them as separate entries, and this room asks you to read them together.
In the courtroom, May 1701 Confirmed
The passes were never produced. No witness would say he had seen one, and Kidd told the court his papers had been taken from him by Bellomont. From the printed trial record itself.
In the archive, since 1910 Confirmed
Two passes survive, for the Quedagh Merchant and the Rouparelle, as enclosures to Bellomont's letter No. 64 at The National Archives (CO 5/860, items 64 ii and iii). Bellomont received Kidd's papers in July 1699 and sent them to the Council of Trade the same month; they were rediscovered among the Board of Trade records in 1910. The government held them before, during and after his trial.
But if you read the two entries together, the trial changes character. Kidd's defence on the piracy charges was that his captures fell within his authority against French shipping. The documents that would have tested that defence survived, yet the court never read them. That absence is not a legend attached to the story later. It is the reason this Collection begins where it does.
Absence is also the limit. The passes bear on particular captures, chiefly the Quedagh Merchant. They say nothing about William Moore, nothing about other conduct alleged across the voyage, and they do not by themselves make Kidd an innocent man. A document proves what it proves.
The Primary Source Room for the passes sets out what the documents are, where they sit at Kew, and what the evidence leaves open. The Quedagh Merchant pass is on display there in the 1911 photographic facsimile that announced the rediscovery, its enclosure mark still legible in the corner.