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Gallery · Captain Kidd · Room 5 of 9

The Prize

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 The capture on paper: the piracy indictments printed in the 1701 trial record turn on the taking of the Quedagh Merchant, the prize this room describes. British Library copy, digitised (Internet Archive).

On 30 January 1697/8 Kidd took the Quedagh Merchant, an Indian-owned merchant vessel and the one genuinely rich capture of the voyage.

She was carrying French protection papers. Under Kidd's authority against French shipping, that should have mattered decisively: a ship under French passes was arguably lawful prize, and the capture arguably sat inside his licence. The papers are real and confirmed. What they establish, and for which acts, is the careful question the next room takes up.

The capture also did something to the venture's politics. A rich prize meant the investors' arithmetic finally worked, if the capture was lawful. If it was not, the same prize converted their privateer into a pirate financed by names close to government. The Quedagh Merchant made Kidd worth arguing about. Before her, the voyage was a failure. After her, it was a problem.

The 1701 indictment documents much of her: Armenian owners, an English commander named Wright, and a cargo of opium, silk, muslins, calicoes and sugar. What still varies in the records is the form of her name, which appears as Quedagh, Quedah and Cara Merchant. Kidd renamed her the Adventure Prize. The ship's record carries the naming question and the 2007 discovery of her wreck off the Dominican Republic.

Records in this room