till a Title to them, Piracy working
no change of Property.

"5--By this Grant a great Hardship was put upon the Merchants whose
Goods might be taken with the Pirates, for they had nowhere to go for
Justice. They could not hope for it in the Chancery, the Lord
Chancellor being interested; nor at the Board of Admiralty where the
Earl of Orford presided; nor from the King, all access to him being by
the Duke of Shrewsbury; nor in the Plantations where the Earl of
Bellomont was. So the only Judge who the Pirates were, and what goods
were theirs, was Captain Kidd himself."

Whatsoever may have been wrong with his contract or his commissions,
and Parliament sustained them by vote as already mentioned, Captain
Kidd cannot be held blameworthy on this score. And it is absurd to
call him a premeditated pirate who sailed from Plymouth with evil
purpose in his heart. His credentials and endorsements, his record as
a shipmaster, and his repute at home, cannot be set aside. They speak
for themselves. Nor is it possible to reconcile the character of the
man, as he was known by his deeds up to that time, with the charges
laid against him.

It is worth noting that the complaints made against his conduct in the
waters of the Far East came from the East India Company which denounced
and proclaimed him as a pirate with a price on his head. It was a case
of the pot calling the kettle black. Although the House of Commons had
decided five years before that the old Company should no longer have a
monopoly of English trade in Asiatic seas, the merchants of London or
Bristol dared not fit out ventures to voyage beyond the Cape of Good
Hope, and found it necessary to send their goods in the ships that flew
the flag of India House. The private trader still ran grave of being
treated as a smuggler, if not as a pirate. "He might, indeed, if he
was wronged, apply for redress to the tribunals of his country. But
years must elapse before his cause could be heard; his witnesses must
be conveyed over fifteen thousand miles of sea; and in the meantime he
was a ruined man."[3]

This powerful corporation which ruled the Eastern seas as it pleased,
confiscating the ships and goods of private traders, accused Kidd of
seizing two ships with their cargoes which belonged to the Great Mogul,
and of several petty depredations hardly to be classed as piracy. The
case against him was built up around the two vessels known as the
_November_ and the _