The Archives

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The French Passes

The texts survive as archived copies at The National Archives, CO 5/860 No. 64 ii (Rouparelle) and No. 64 iii (Quedagh Merchant), digitised in the TNA image library. No facsimile is on display here, and the middle of the custody chain is not yet established. Nothing on this page is a reproduction of the original documents.

Curator's note

The passes themselves are held at The National Archives, Kew, and are not yet on display here. The transcribed French texts remain the exhibit, and this room describes them.

What these documents are

The French passes were protection papers carried by vessels Kidd captured, two of which survive: one for the Quedagh Merchant, taken on 30 January 1697/8, and one for the Rouparelle, taken in November 1697. A pass declared a ship to be under French protection. Under Kidd's authority against French shipping, such papers were the difference between piracy and lawful prize.

Both survive here in transcription rather than in facsimile. They were rediscovered among Board of Trade papers in 1910 and printed in the House of Commons Journal, and are transcribed in J. F. Jameson's 1923 edition of the colonial privateering papers. The Quedagh Merchant pass is recorded as signed by Francois Martin, the founder of Pondicherry, at Hugli on 14 January 1698. These readings come through Jameson's transcription of the Commons Journal, not from the original manuscripts, which is why the textual claims below are held at highly probable rather than confirmed. The present-day location, though, is established: both passes survive as copies enclosed with Bellomont's correspondence at The National Archives, CO 5/860 No. 64 ii (the Rouparelle pass, undated) and No. 64 iii (the Quedagh Merchant pass, signed at Hugli on 14 January 1698), and both are digitised in the TNA image library.

Papers of this kind were ordinary instruments of seventeenth-century trade, not exotica. Merchant vessels in contested waters carried whatever documents would get them past whichever navies and licensed raiders they expected to meet, and a prudent owner might hold protection from more than one power. That ordinariness cuts both ways in Kidd's case. It makes the presence of French passes aboard an Indian-owned ship entirely plausible. It also means a pass, by itself, tells you what protection a ship claimed, which is not always the same as what she was.

Orientation: how to read a pass

In reading a pass, look for three things. Who issued the pass, because the issuer determines what protection it claimed. Which vessel it names, because the defence turns on matching paper to prize. And its date, because protection had to hold at the moment of capture.

Then read it the way the trial never did: alongside the capture. The legal question was never whether French passes existed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. It was whether these papers, on this ship, on that January day, brought the capture within Kidd's authority.

What they establish

The custody question

For these documents, where they travelled matters almost as much as what they say. The working chronology runs: taken at the capture, carried by Kidd on his return in 1699, surrendered into official hands, held by the government while the trial ran in May 1701, absent from the courtroom, and resurfacing among Board of Trade papers by 1910. The first and last links are the strong ones, and the courtroom absence is confirmed by the trial record itself. The middle of the chain, which hands held them, under whose authority and with what instructions, is not yet established, and this room states only the links the record confirms.

What they do not establish

The passes support a defence around particular captures. They do not prove Kidd innocent of everything alleged across the voyage, and they have no bearing at all on the death of William Moore. Treating them as a general acquittal repeats, in reverse, the trial's own mistake of deciding the case without weighing them.

Limitations of this room

The repository reference is secure, but no facsimile is shown, so this room describes the documents rather than showing them, and it carries no transcription or translation. The chain of custody between capture, official hands and the trial is the key open question, and this page does not state it as settled.

One further honesty. The passes survive the way most seventeenth-century evidence survives: as papers that passed through interested hands. Kidd surrendered them expecting them to save him, and officials received them with their own stakes in what they proved. The documents can be read. The uses everyone intended for them have to be reconstructed, and no record yet read completes that reconstruction.

The description above is the room, and it claims nothing the documents have not already been confirmed to support.