The captain spent the autumn preparing his newly built 34-gun ship, the Adventure Galley. He set sail on 27th February, 1696, but was barely underway when a Royal Navy warship stopped the privateer and impressed many of Kidd’s best crewmen, leaving him with barely enough sailors to manage the ship, let alone wage war against well-armed pirates. When Kidd resumed his voyage, he set out not for the Indian Ocean, but for New York. There, he recruited 85 new seamen to replace those who had been impressed.

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Kidd’s unscheduled stopover severely threatened his chances of fulfilling a major stipulation of his commission–that he return to New York with his spoils by 20th March, 1697. September arrived before Kidd finally left port bound east, and December before he passed beneath the Cape of Good Hope. A few weeks later, he and his crew still had not taken a prize, and it was obvious that he could not fulfil his obligations to the Board of Trade by the agreed-upon deadline.

From this crossroads in Kidd’s life, he followed one of two paths. According to his own description of what happened next, he simply attempted to fulfil his mission, disregarding his deadline but otherwise adhering to the terms of his contract. According to his accusors, he turned to piracy himself.

Since English law did not allow pirates to be tried in the colonies, Kidd was transported back to England, but the fallout from his voyage preceded him. The identity of his Whig party sponsors became public in 1698, and the revelation led to an uproar over the Government’s practice of making personal profits from the commissioning of privateers. The Tory opposition in Parliament initiated proceedings of censure and even impeachment against leading Whig lords, which failed to achieve results when Whig MPs closed ranks to vote them down.

In Kidd, the Tories apparently saw a potential ally who could provide the shove needed to bring down the Whig ministry, if only he would disclose all the details of his commission and repudiate the Board of Trade. Whigs, on the other hand, had no interest in allowing the matter to be delved into too deeply, and rather than let a useful scapegoat go free, impeded Kidd’s defence by confiscating all his papers pertaining to the voyage, while insisting that his actions had been unsanctioned.

Kidd faced the court virtually defenceless, being denied access to counsel or even a clear statement of the charges against him. When the trial began, he learned to his surprise that, in addition to five counts of piracy, he also stood accused of murdering one of his crewmen. The whole affair, according to one modern writer, ‘can be viewed only as a monstrous combination of persons and events deliberately calculated to crush the blocked and frustrated Kidd.’

The defendant depicted himself as torn between the conflicting necessities of placating a riotous crew and honouring his commission. By the time he reached the coast of Africa, Kidd testified, his men were close to mutiny, and, starved for a richly laden victim, forced him to attack a fleet of 15 Mogul merchantmen. Kidd steered towards the merchant ships, but broke off the engagement and fled after finding that they were escorted by two armed Dutch ships and a Royal Navy vessel.

A month later, he stopped a Moorish ship, only to find she was commanded by an English captain and thus did not qualify as a legitimate prize. During Kidd’s inspection of the merchantman, the ‘blood-thirsty’ pirate allowed his crew to amuse themselves by slapping the Moors with the flat edges of their swords, and then detained the captain and his Portugese mate, to serve as a pilot.

Controversy piled upon controversy for Kidd. He chased down yet another potential prize only to find a fellow New Yorker in command. He allowed the ship to proceed unmolested, he testified, because he had ‘no commission to take any but the King’s enemies and pirates.’ The prosecution countered that Kidd let the ship go free because its captain proved to be a fellow pirate.

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