The Old Merchant Marine | Page 7

abuses down, and because I believe you to be such a man."
Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd,
respectable master mariner in the merchant service, was employed by

Lord Bellomont, royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, and
Massachusetts, to command an armed ship and harry the pirates of the
West Indies and Madagascar. Strangest of all the sea tales of colonial
history is that of Captain Kidd and his cruise in the Adventure-Galley.
His name is reddened with crimes never committed, his grisly phantom
has stalked through the legends and literature of piracy, and the Kidd
tradition still has magic to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every
beach, cove, and headland from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if
truth were told, he never cut a throat or made a victim walk the plank.
He was tried and hanged for the trivial offense of breaking the head of
a mutinous gunner of his own crew with a wooden bucket. It was even
a matter of grave legal doubt whether he had committed one single
piratical act. His trial in London was a farce. In the case of the captured
ships he alleged that they were sailing under French passes, and he
protested that his privateering commission justified him, and this
contention was not disproven. The suspicion is not wanting that he was
condemned as a scapegoat because certain noblemen of England had
subscribed the capital to outfit his cruise, expecting to win rich
dividends in gold captured from the pirates he was sent to attack.
Against these men a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain
Kidd was sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorable
distinction in earlier years, and fate has played his memory a shabby
trick.
It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonial
pirates, who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewing
wine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem more
like hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlantic coast.
Charleston lived in terror of him until Lieutenant Maynard, in a small
sloop, laid him alongside in a hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut
off the head of Blackbeard to dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy.
Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seaman more
typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who became the first
royal Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692. Born on a
frontier farm of the Maine coast while many of the Pilgrim fathers were
living, "his faithful mother," wrote Cotton Mather, "had no less than

twenty-six children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to
them all was William, one of the youngest, whom, his father dying, was
left young with his mother, and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in
Ye Wilderness until he was eighteen years old." Then he apprenticed
himself to a neighboring shipwright who was building sloops and
pinnaces and, having learned the trade, set out for Boston. As a
ship-carpenter he plied his trade, spent his wages in the taverns of the
waterside and there picked up wondrous yarns of the silver-laden
galleons of Spain which had shivered their timbers on the reefs of the
Bahama Passage or gone down in the hurricanes that beset those
southerly seas. Meantime he had married a wealthy widow whose
property enabled him to go treasure-hunting on the Spanish main. From
his first voyage thither in a small vessel he escaped with his life and
barely enough treasure to pay the cost of the expedition.
In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richly ladened
galleon which was said to have been wrecked half a century before off
the coast of Hispaniola. Since his own funds were not sufficient for this
exploit, he betook himself to England to enlist the aid of the
Government. With bulldog persistence he besieged the court of James
II for a whole year, this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster,
until he was given a royal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up
more silver from the sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other
patrons to outfit him with a small merchantman, the James and Mary,
in which he sailed for the coast of Hispaniola. This time he found his
galleon and thirty-two tons of silver. "Besides that incredible treasure
of plate, thus fetched up from seven or eight fathoms under water, there
were vast riches of Gold, and Pearls, and Jewels . . . . All that a Spanish
frigot was to be enriched withal."
Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of 1687,
with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as her freightage of
treasure. Captain Phips made honest division with his backers and,
because men of his integrity were not