On July 29, 1689, beneath a sweltering Caribbean sun, William Kidd scanned the deck of the wooden frigate Sainte Rose, taking in the swarthy faces of the dozen French privateers guarding the gunship. The tide was going out and it was time to make his move. He and the seven other Englishmen making up a small part of the man-of-war’s predominantly French, 118-man crew had been sailing, fighting, tossing back rum, and swapping stories with these rugged yet jovial Frenchies for the past six months—but that was all over now.
It was time to attack and seize the ship.
He inhaled a deep breath of the salty air of Basseterre Harbor, a stretch of emerald water off St. Christopher’s, or St. Kitts as it was better known, situated in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. Though his mind and body were on high alert, the veteran sea warrior felt calm and composed as he prepared to give the signal to his men to do battle and take the Sainte Rose as a prize.
The plan he, Robert Culliford, William Mason, Samuel Burgess, John Browne, and the three other Anglo-American privateers had surreptitiously agreed to only minutes before called for them to kill or incapacitate every last one of the twelve remaining Frenchmen onboard guarding the 16-gun warship, seize the privateering vessel by force, and sail her swiftly to nearby English-controlled Nevis Island to fight for king and country. With war recently declared between Mother England and France, their Gallic comrades in arms—at this moment smoking their pipes, sharpening their knives, and throwing dice—had transformed overnight from fellow Brethren of the Coast into mortal enemies.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
The chain of events leading up to war and the sticky situation in which William Kidd now found himself had begun nine months earlier in the fall of 1688. In a bloodless coup, the Catholic King James II of England had been usurped by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart and her Dutch husband, Prince William of Orange, who as the nephew and son-in-law of James stood as a viable Protestant alternative for the English throne. In an aggressive military gambit and political power grab, William had “invaded” England and marched to London as a preemptive maneuver to commandeer England’s vast financial, naval, and military resources for his planned Dutch alliance in the war against France. Aided by disaffected and high-ranking officers in the English army and navy, the Dutch prince crossed the Channel and landed without resistance at Devon in November 1688. Turning against their Catholic king and siding with the more muscular coalition, many English officers and government officials had defected to join William and his Stuart wife, who vowed to rule as co-monarchs. Meanwhile, James II had fled to France and the court of Louis XIV, the Roi du Soleil or Sun King, who offered the deposed Catholic English king sanctuary and became his protector.
Parliament swiftly transferred the throne to William and Mary once they had signed off on a Bill of Rights ensuring constitutional and civil-rights protections for Parliament, with the new queen soon leaving governance to her Dutch husband. The Whig Protestant lords who helped orchestrate the coup, ardent opponents of the pro-monarchist Tory Party, proclaimed the seizure of power a “Glorious Revolution.” Thus, the usurpation was portrayed as a spontaneous political uprising by united Britons when it was, in truth, a bloodless takeover spearheaded by the Dutch army and navy and a seditious, fiercely anti-Catholic Whig wing of England’s Parliament.
The end results of the coup d’état were the security of the Protestant succession, the death knell of royal absolutism, and the establishment of the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy in England. With the steadfast backing of the Whig aristocracy, the bellicose William III promptly declared war upon France and plunged England into a global conflagration of unprecedented cost. The hostilities would become known as the “War of the English Succession” in England and “King William’s War” in English America, and they would drain the treasuries of the belligerent powers for nearly a decade.
“Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal”
> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
Where to find it:
Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries Libby: E-books and audio books NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwideSunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.
The news that England had formally declared war on Catholic France on May 18, 1689, took nearly two months to reach William Kidd and his fellow Anglo-American privateers, who had been busy fighting the Dutch and Spanish aboard the Sainte Rose in the Caribbean. Since reports of the war between the European superpowers had first reached them a fortnight earlier, the Protestant Englishmen had been waiting for an opportune moment to side with their king and country and strike the French as licensed privateers.
That moment had arrived today.
For the better part of two decades now, William Kidd had been a roving privateer and merchant seaman sailing to and from the Caribbean, the American colonies, and the metropole of London. As a privateer, he had been legally licensed by various English and French colonial governors, or lower-ranking officials, to attack and plunder the enemy in wartime. Though he preferred to sail with “Englishmen” of his own nation—those who hailed from the British Isles or North American colonies—he had little choice but to serve as an occasional mercenary under French or Dutch colors due to royal betrayals and the constant shifting of European alliances.
He had joined the crew of the Sainte Rose back in February 1689 at Admiral Henry Morgan’s famous launching pad for patriotic strikes against the Spanish Main: Île-à-Vache, or Cow Island, off the southwestern coast of French Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti). The vessel’s crew, mostly French Protestant Huguenots, weren’t picky when it came to rounding out their motley roster: experienced sailors were always in short supply, and they welcomed Kidd and his fellow Protestant English salts with open arms. When it came to privateer crews, religion often trumped nationality, and the Frenchmen of the Sainte Rose stood closer in allegiance to English-born Protestants like Kidd and his compatriots than to French Catholics, who had driven them and their families from their homeland, across the Atlantic, and into the New World.
Armed with a legal privateering commission from a French Hispaniola official, the crew set out in the Sainte Rose in tropical waters to prey on Dutch merchant ships. Like the other seamen, Kidd hoped to become a “gentleman of fortune”—but with a legitimate government commission to back him up. With France then at war with the Netherlands and at peace with England, he opted to take his opportunities for plunder with the French. Like most state-licensed privateers and outlaw pirates in the Age of Sail (1500–1850), the crew’s 110 Frenchmen and 8 Englishmen were mostly young, hardy men who knew how to handle a dagger, cutlass, pistol, and musket in violent combat. Privateering—piracy on the high seas made legal and respectable by a simple piece of parchment—was a hard combination of seamanship and waging war that only the rugged and adventurous could survive.
? Listen here!
Go deeper into this story in this episode of The Daily Sun-Up podcast.
Subscribe: Apple | Spotify | RSS
Within a week of setting sail from Île-à-Vache, the Sainte Rose spotted a Dutch merchant ship. Kidd and Company promptly seized and transported the Dutchman north to sell their plundered cargo to the pious Puritan traders of New England and outfit for a longer voyage. From Boston, the multifarious crew headed south to a friendlier port for both commissioned privateers and renegade pirates: New York. Here they moored their 16-cannon gunship in the bustling harbor, refitted the vessel by loading up with fine New York biscuit and other provisions, and held council on where to venture next in the war against the Dutch.
The well-liked Kidd, a longtime veteran of the Caribbean and Atlantic trade routes, had made New York his home port since 1688 and knew many people in town, including a certain young and attractive woman named Sarah Bradley Cox, who, regrettably, was married to a Dutch flour merchant twice her age. Kidd and Sarah had a romantic history, and he visited the future Mrs. Captain Kidd during his time in port, where he owned multiple real-estate properties close to the harbor.
After spending a fortnight outfitting the Sainte Rose and drinking and carousing in the city, the crew was ready to continue harassing the Dutch and seek their fortune along the West African coast. With the trade winds pushing them along, they sailed across the Atlantic to the Cape Verde Islands, located off modern-day Senegal.
Here they came across seven ships-of-war bristling with cannon, the flotilla commanded by the legendary French captain Jean-Baptiste DuCasse. Over the next few weeks, they fought alongside DuCasse and his 44-gun flagship, Le Hasardeux, eventually returning to the Western Atlantic and Caribbean. At DuCasse’s request, Kidd and his mostly French crew captured a Spanish vessel, seized all her valuables, and took the gunship as a prize, then joined the commander in unsuccessful assaults on the well-fortified Dutch colonies at Surinam and Berbice.
Then, in mid-July 1689, as the French fleet approached Barbados, Kidd and the other crew members received stunning news: England boasted a new king and had declared war on France. The declaration of hostilities suddenly put Kidd and his cohorts in a precarious position, since they were now armed “Englishmen” operating in the midst of a massive French fleet. But the French flibustiers pegged them as selfish mercenaries who cared more about capturing booty than fighting on behalf of king and country. Despite the new hostility between the French and English, neither DuCasse nor the captain of the Sainte Rose, Jean Fantin, suspected that Kidd and his seven Anglo-American privateers would have the gumption to steal the ship and sail her to an English colony.
The French soon set their sights on the wealthy island of St. Christopher, which the two countries jointly owned and consisted of profitable sugar and tobacco plantations under enslaved labor. Between July 17 and 19, 1689, the French fleet of 22 ships and a force of Irish Catholics, tired of their lowly status as the White menial laborers of the English Caribbean, launched attacks across the island. The embattled English population of 450 fighting men and a thousand women and children managed to retreat to the safety of Fort Charles, a solidly built fortress on the coast. Over the next two weeks, the French pounded away incessantly at the English defenders but were unable to dislodge them.
That looked to William Kidd like it was about to change.
He peered over the railing toward St. Christopher, a lush and mountainous volcanic island of sixty-five square miles. The French—led on land by Charles de Roche-Courbon, Comte de Blénac, governor-general of the French West Indies, and at sea by Captain DuCasse—were in the midst of a formidable assault on the island that included 98 of the Sainte Rose privateers. The gentle lapping of water against the hull was broken by the far-off crackle of gunfire, and Kidd smelled gunpowder in the tropical ocean breeze of Basseterre Harbor. From his vantage point, the fall of St. Christopher to the French appeared imminent.
Now he and his fellow Britons made eye contact as the small talk and laughter of the preoccupied Frenchmen drifted across the bow and over the blue-green water. He signaled the assault team that they would make their move any minute now, with the tide rolling out and no sign of rowboats returning to the ship. At thirty-four, Kidd was one of the senior seamen and had been voted by the English crew as the leader of the privateer insurrectionists.
In his own day, William Kidd was described as a “hearty,” “lusty,” and “mighty” warrior of “unquestioned courage and conduct in sea affairs,” as well as a man of exceptional physical strength and skill in swordsmanship. Taking part in an occupation where violent hand-to-hand combat was the norm rather than the exception, the tall, robustly built, and pugnacious colonial English-American privateer felt no qualms about killing a sworn enemy in close quarters with sharpened steel and snarling lead pistol shot. He was, in essence, a seventeenth-century U.S. Navy Seal.
The twenty-three-year-old Robert Culliford, twenty-seven-year-old William Mason, and thirty-eight-year-old Samuel Burgess stood poised nearby waiting for Kidd’s command to seize the Sainte Rose. Some of the other men were standing next to the railing and by the water barrels, pretending to make small talk; others were smoking their long-stemmed pipes, sharpening their knives, and staring out over the railing toward the shore. Although they were all playing their casual, scripted roles to lure their French comrades into a false sense of security, they were tense and alert as they waited to make their deadly move.
All they needed was for one Frenchman to step away to do his daily business, so the numbers would be more in their favor. Soon the opportunity they had been anxiously awaiting presented itself. Kidd felt his heart rate click up a notch, as he saw a French flibustier stand up from the game of dice and head toward the “seat of ease”—a wooden plank with a hole near the bow. Kidd scanned the shoreline to make sure none of the troops was returning. The coast was clear. With a mere tip of his head, he now gave the signal to move into position and take out their designated targets.
Discreetly removing their daggers and swords, Kidd, Culliford, Mason, Burgess, Browne, and the others stepped quickly but nonchalantly toward the unsuspecting Frenchmen. For the honor of king and country, but mostly for a new prize ship and the spoils of war that would belong to them and them alone, they were about to betray and kill shipmates who had been their brothers in arms for the past six months. Despite their mixed feelings, they moved in swiftly for the kill, for to hesitate could very well mean failure. If their attempt to dispatch the enemy and steal the ship proved unsuccessful, they would all be summarily executed. And if their adversaries somehow managed to ring an alarm bell or fire one of the cannons, the Anglo-Americans’ chances of escape would be slim, even if they managed to eliminate or incapacitate all twelve of the French enemy who had remained behind to guard the Sainte Rose.
As it turned out, the Frenchmen never saw them coming.
The Gallic chatter ceased abruptly as the startled enemy seamen, finally cognizant of what was happening, looked up with alarm from their pipes, rum bottles, and games of chance. Kidd and his small but highly motivated squadron pitched into their former Brethren of the Coast and newfound enemies with their stabbing, thrusting, and slashing steel weaponry—dispatching some instantly and wounding others. The lightning quickness of the attack was astounding, and the deck swiftly turned to a confused melee. Bodies flew past in a blur; crimson sprays and mists of blood spurted across the deck; caught-off-guard victims collapsed with loud thuds on the hardwood planking; and primitive-sounding screams and grunts filled the air as England and France made war in miniature aboard the privateer Sainte Rose.
The battle soon wound down, leaving the deck drenched with blood. It flowed into the scuppers and turned the shimmering aquamarine Caribbean waters a diluted red. Though outnumbered three to two, the Britons had suffered not a single man killed in the engagement and only two wounded, compared to twelve Frenchmen either killed outright or wounded and thrown overboard to swim ashore. Once they had won the battle and taken control of the ship, they bandaged their two wounded comrades and prepared to make quickly for Nevis before DuCasse and de Blénac realized they had been duped.
Having already been voted captain, the senior sailor Kidd took charge of the vessel. There wasn’t time to take up the anchor with the French forces all around them, so the victors chopped the thick anchor cable and hauled on the jib’s halyard. Even though the prize vessel lay in less than thirty feet of water, the anchor was embedded in the sandy bottom with around eighty feet of cable laid out. To bring up the anchor with the grindingly slow capstan and winch would take too long: the French navy would be on them before the anchor reached halfway to the ship’s hawsehole. With the braided rope cable cut and the sails unfurled, they sped southward along the jagged, sandy coastline and toward the Narrows. This was the two-mile-wide strait they had to cross to safely reach the nearby English-controlled island of Nevis. Kidd and the seven Anglo-American privateers making up his new crew swiftly put a half league (a modern mile and a half) between themselves and St. Christopher.
But they were not home free just yet.
Samuel Marquis was born and raised in Colorado. He is the ninth-great-grandson of legendary privateer Captain William Kidd, and the author of “Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal” and “Blackbeard: The Birth of America.” He has written a total of 12 American histories, historical novels, and works of suspense. Marquis works by day as a professional hydrogeologist with an environmental consulting firm. He and his wife live in Louisville, Colorado, where they raised their three children.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( “Captain Kidd” navigates shifting allegiances on the high seas )
Also on site :