The Voyage Sours

The plan assumed pirates would be found and taken. The Indian Ocean did not cooperate.

Months passed without a lawful prize. A crew signed on for shares of captured goods watched the shares fail to exist, aboard a ship that was itself beginning to fail. This is the pressure to keep in mind through everything that follows: a voyage financed by powerful men, executed by unpaid ones, drifting further from any capture its papers covered.

Madagascar finished it. The island's anchorages served pirate crews as bases beyond any navy's reach, and when Kidd's expedition reached Ile Sainte-Marie in 1698, the working pirates there included Robert Culliford. Most of Kidd's men deserted to him. The men who had sailed to hunt pirates chose piracy over their own captain, which says something about Kidd's command, and something more about what the voyage had become.

The desertion left Kidd stripped of his crew at the exact moment his legal position needed defending. It is also the clearest verdict on the venture we have from the men inside it.