Robert Culliford

No image of Robert Culliford is on display in this gallery; his part in the story is carried by the documents.

Culliford is the man Kidd's crew chose instead of Kidd.

Nothing of his beginning survives. No record gives his birthplace or the year he was born, and the Cornish town sometimes attached to him rests on nothing documentary. He enters the story already at sea, in company with William Kidd. In 1690 he was among the crew who seized the Blessed William from Kidd in the West Indies and carried her off to their own account, electing William Mason captain. The taking was bloodless, a quarrel over a ship rather than a killing, but it set the two men on the collision that defines them both.

By 1698 Culliford commanded the Resolution in the Indian Ocean, a frigate of about forty guns that had begun life as the East India Company's Mocha. He had no personal role in the mutiny that first turned her pirate. Her captain, Edgcumbe, was murdered before Culliford came aboard, and while the surviving letters disagree over whose hand did it, none places Culliford at the scene. He was given command of her only later, after the death of the man who had led the seizure.

In late September 1698, consorting with the pirate Chivers off Surat, he took a great Mughal ship reputed at 120,000 to 130,000 pounds in coin and gold, one of the richest prizes of the age. The one firsthand account, sworn by an Englishman held aboard, records that several Turks were killed and wounded in the taking, and that the two companies shared some seven or eight hundred pounds a man.

His meeting with Kidd at Ile Sainte-Marie off Madagascar the same year survives in two accounts that cannot both be true. Kidd's own narrative says he found Culliford's frigate at anchor, meant to seize her as a pirate, and was overruled by his own men, who threatened to fire on him and went over to Culliford in a body. Sworn evidence at Kidd's trial tells it the other way: that the two captains fraternised, made a cup of bomboo on the quarter-deck, drank to one another, and that Kidd swore he would sooner his soul should broil in hell-fire than do Culliford any harm. Which is the truth cannot now be recovered. What both accounts agree on is that most of Kidd's crew deserted to Culliford, and that Kidd's ships were stripped of their guns and stores.

When the royal pardon of December 1698 reached the Indian Ocean, Culliford was not among the men it excepted by name, and he surrendered under it. The pardon did not hold. He was arrested and brought to London, and in May 1701 he was tried for the Surat piracy at the same Admiralty sessions that condemned Kidd. His pardon plea was ruled defective and he was convicted. Yet where Kidd's trial was printed and sold as a pamphlet within weeks, Culliford's was never printed at all, and it survives only in the manuscript sessions records.

He was not hanged. Convicted but reprieved, he was kept alive because the crown wanted his evidence against another pirate, Samuel Burgess, a former shipmate. On Culliford's testimony Burgess was condemned, though he too was afterwards pardoned.

After that, Culliford vanishes. He was released about 1702, and then the record simply ends. No death, no place, no date. Later stories of quiet years ashore or a turn in the navy carry nothing behind them. The disappearance itself is the documented fact, and it is where his story closes.