Quedagh Merchant

This pass is why the Quedagh Merchant is the capture on which Kidd's whole legal case turns. She was an Indian-owned merchantman under French protection, not a French ship, and the pass is the document that made her seizure arguable under Kidd's commission against French shipping. It also fixes her identity: her Parsi owner, her Armenian freighters, and her burden of about 350 tons, which corrects an older figure of about 400 tons.¹

The 1701 trial indictment records her commander as English, Captain Wright, on a trading voyage from Bengal to Surat, and itemises her cargo with the prosecution's valuations in lawful money of England: the ship's apparel and tackle at 400 pounds; seventy chests of opium at 1,400 pounds; two hundred bags of sugar at 100 pounds; twenty bales of raw silk at 400 pounds; one hundred bales of calicoes at 290 pounds; two hundred bales of muslins at 1,000 pounds; and three bales of romels at 30 pounds. These are prosecution valuations, not an independent appraisal. A witness confirmed that the goods belonged to the Armenian merchants. Iron and saltpetre appear in some later retellings and are absent from the indictment.

The Armenian freighter Cogi Babba petitioned the House of Commons, valuing the cargo at 400,000 rupees at prime cost and the ship at 40,000 rupees. These are the petitioners' claimed figures for relief, in the money of the petition. In open court a witness recalled that an Armenian merchant, present at the trial, had offered Kidd 20,000 rupees to redeem the ship, and that Kidd refused.

No contemporary survey, builder's record or rig description of her survives, so her hull form, rig, builder and original armament are not established, and no picture of how she looked can be drawn from the record.

She is recorded under several names: Quedagh Merchant, Quedah Merchant, Karry Merchant, Cara Merchant, and, in the pass, le Navire Cara Marchand. After Kidd took her he renamed her the Adventure Prize and made her his principal ship once the Adventure Galley was abandoned at Ile Sainte-Marie in 1698.²

At her capture she was on the return leg of a Bengal-to-Surat trading voyage: freighted from Surat to Bengal, loaded at Bengal, and taken on the way back. Kidd took her about 30 January 1698, recorded Old Style as 30 January 1697/8, about ten leagues from Cochin on the Malabar coast. He put the question to his crew, who voted to keep the prize and carry her towards Madagascar; a witness added that not a quarter part of the men were truly concerned in it. The vote settled what the ship's company would do. It created no legal title.²

The French pass made the seizure arguable under Kidd's commission against French shipping. It did not amount to condemnation. The trial judge told Kidd that even a ship carrying a French pass ought to have been brought in and condemned as prize before any sale, and no competent prize court ever condemned her. The passes themselves were not produced to the jury.

Her cargo was sold and dispersed along the way and in the Caribbean. At Hispaniola Kidd traded with Henry Boulton of Antigua and William Burt of Curacao to the value of 11,200 pieces of eight, taking Boulton's sloop the Antonio at 3,000 pieces of eight, 4,200 in bills of exchange, and 4,000 in dust and bar gold, and moving about forty bales of goods and thirty bales of sugar into the sloop. Unable to bring the prize home, Kidd left her at St. Katharina, or Santa Catalina, on the south-east of Hispaniola, about three leagues to leeward of the westerly end of Savona, in the custody of Henry Boulton and about twelve to eighteen men, and asked them to stay three months against his return. The men left behind later stripped her, sold the remaining cargo, and burned or abandoned the hull in 1699. Kidd's own account has him leaving her secured and provisioned.

Her hull outlasted the case. In 2007 a shallow wreck was reported off Catalina Island on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic: about twenty-six cannon, anchor remains, roughly ten tons of scrap iron, and wooden hull remains in shallow water. Indiana University archaeologists, led by Charles Beeker and with Frederick Hanselmann's 2019 monograph, identify the site as the Quedagh Merchant, and the location matches Kidd's own account of where he left her. The twenty-six cannon reflect her fit under Kidd rather than her original armament. The site is now a protected preserve, a no-take, no-anchor Living Museum in the Sea. This Catalina wreck is a distinct prize hull; the Sainte-Marie site once promoted as the Adventure Galley was rejected in 2015.³

Evidence

The pass, the itemised cargo, the redemption offer, the crew vote and the judge's condemnation remarks are drawn from the printed 1701 Admiralty sessions trial and from the documents printed with Kidd's Narrative. The capture date and place, the crossing to the West Indies, the burning of the hull, and the wreck identification are the weaker points.

Sources

The printed record of the 1701 Admiralty sessions trial of Captain William Kidd. The French pass for le Navire Cara Marchand, printed in full in 1911 from the parliamentary record. Kidd's Narrative of 7 July 1699 and William Jenkins's examination. The petition of Cogi Babba to the House of Commons. The Indiana University underwater science programme on the Catalina wreck.