William Moore

William Moore is known almost entirely through the record of the trial in which his killing became a charge of murder. Four things about him are securely fixed, and they are close to the whole of him: his name, stable across the record; his post as gunner of the Adventure Galley; the blow Kidd dealt him on 30 October 1697; and his death of the fractured skull the next day. Everything else is absence.

That absence is worth stating plainly rather than filling. No source gives him an age, a birthplace, a nationality or a family, and nothing outside the trial names him at all. He survives as an adult seaman holding the gunner's post at the moment of his death, and no portrait or physical description of him is known.

When he joined the ship is not recorded. The letter-of-marque declaration drawn up in December 1695 names a different gunner, Walter Dorman, so Moore probably came aboard during the 1696 re-crewing at New York, when Kidd rebuilt his company. That is a reasoned inference from the earlier list, not a documented enlistment.

The murder indictment sets the act down precisely. On the high sea near the Malabar coast, Kidd struck Moore a little above the right ear with a wooden bucket bound with iron hoops, an object the indictment valued at eight pence; Moore languished and died the following day. The ship's surgeon, Robert Bradinham, found the skull fractured and gave the fracture as the cause of death.

The words that passed first are preserved in the printed trial. Moore was grinding a chisel on deck when Kidd taxed him over a ship the crew might have taken. Kidd called him "a lousie dog." Moore answered, "If I am a lousie dog, you have made me so; you have brought me to ruin, and many more." Kidd then took up the bucket and struck him.

The later shorthand for Moore, mutineer and troublemaker, sits awkwardly against that evidence. Kidd's defence cast him as a mutineer whose killing was lawful discipline, and a modern editor called him an insubordinate gunner. But the trial witnesses, two of them Kidd's own, testified there was no mutiny at the moment of the blow, and the court placed what unrest there had been a fortnight or more earlier. The label is characterisation added afterwards, and the sworn evidence complicates it.

The murder of Moore was tried first and by itself, on 8 May 1701 at the Admiralty sessions at the Old Bailey, ahead of the piracy charges. The mutiny defence failed on timing: the Lord Chief Baron directed that without a mutiny at the time there was no lawful cause, and that the slight words at the grindstone were not provocation enough. The jury withdrew and about an hour later returned Guilty. It was the killing of his gunner, not the disputed captures, that carried Kidd to Execution Dock.

Moore outlived the record in a ballad. The 1701 broadside lament put in Kidd's own mouth the lines "I murdered William More, / And laid him in his gore" and "I with a bucket broke / His scull at one sad stroke." It is the earliest popular fixing of his name, and it kept a man of whom almost nothing else is written from vanishing altogether.