tan merchants in the crowd were, many
of them, quietly dealing in the merchandise fetched home by pirates who
were lucky enough to steer clear of the law.

This was a shady industry in which New York took the more active part,
sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravaged the waters of
the Far East and made their haven at Madagascar, and disposing of the
booty received in exchange. Governor Fletcher had dirtied his hands by
protecting this commerce and, as a result, Lord Bellomont was named
to succeed him. Said William III, "I send you, my Lord, to New York,
because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these 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