Spring’s early smile was broadening to a merry laugh amid the bushes
and hedgerows of old England when the _Adventure_ drew out of Plymouth
for the East Indies, by way of New York. Past the fishing boats,
the west coasters and an anchored man-of-war she slipped, on one of
the most unusual errands that had ever engaged a ship clearing from
that ancient port. It was probably a great morning on which to begin
a voyage, with a sparkle on the waters and an edge to the sea air
that must have sent the chanty rolling up from hardy throats and put
a snappiness in strong muscles that labored zestfully at rope and
windlass.
Putting out to sea on a fine morning is one of the peculiar delights
of healthy folk. At such a time one does not reckon on never
returning--that might be the fate of the other man, not ours--yet of
the eighty men obeying Kidd as captain that morning many had set their
last foot on the soil of home.
Like the new broom of adage, the _Adventure_ bowled across the Atlantic
to the western colony in seaman fashion in the quite creditable time of
a month. She was not, in fact, a sound ship. Long before the Indian
seas had been harvested her crew were calling her names, such as “Leaky
and crazy” and what not. It turned out that she had the qualities of
a good sponge, being absorbent at almost every seam and requiring
constantly to be squeezed dry with the pumps.
So it was something to reach New York without misadventure. Off the
Banks they took in a small French fisherman unlucky enough to get in
their way. She was sent into New York for condemnation. This appears to
have been the first and last time that Kidd lawfully employed himself
under his two commissions. A trifling take it was, to be sure, but it
gave Kidd’s arrival in New York quite the air of officialism.
Kidd purposed to recruit eighty more men at New York; evidently he
esteemed the colonial sailorman as much as him of the mother country.
To do this he caused to be printed and set up in various gossip spots
about town enticing handbills inviting adventurers. The meat of the
call was that there was plunder a-plenty to be taken from the East
Indian pirates, and lots of fun for a stalwart man in the taking.
Men accepted would be placed upon a fair share basis, after deducting
twenty-five per cent of the profits for the ship. He had no trouble
attracting a crew. In fact so hearty was the response that there were
fears in the colony that its man power would be depleted. Strong arms
were needed against the Frenchman, Indians and whatever other perils
might befall an isolated community far from the protection of the
mother country in times such as those were.
Contemporaries do not speak squeamishly about an element of Kidd’s
crew. Well, the captain asked no disingenuous questions and for
more than one fellow in a tight pinch it was a lucky way of escape.
Many others were no doubt decent, respectable men intrigued by the
prospect of vividly imagined gains. The less definite the harvest of
a speculation the more it seems will men greedily pursue it. So Kidd
finally herded some one hundred and sixty men all told on the deck for
watch divisions when the _Adventure_ was geared for sea.
This outfit was rather more than merely master and men; they were
co-partners. Forty shares were to go to the ship and the remainder was
to be parceled out in lumps of average weight according to a scale
agreed upon by all. Bellamont and Company supplied arms and equipment
at a charge.
The late winter ice still cluttered the Hudson River when the
_Adventure_ at length turned its prow toward the Indies, Madagascar and
Fortune. Kidd, according to the proprieties of the sea, kept himself
a cabin, the rest of them shifted in forecastle and hold as well as a
hundred and sixty men in a small ship might. With the best they could
do conditions of life must have become very serious and in a way
invited the heavy sickness that fell upon them when the hot regions of
the East were reached.
At the Madeiras the voyage was broken briefly, then off again to India.
Summer was torrid on land and sea when the company finally “watered and
victualled” at Madagascar. And now for some months Kidd cruised up and
down the coast without any overt act under his commissions, cruised,
that is, with a ghastly plague aboard which tumbled four or five men
a day over the bulwarks and into the oily, turgid deep. When one
conjectures the sanitation of the _Adventure_ it is marvelous that any
one escaped the calamity.
What could the captain have been thinking of as he loafed aimlessly
up and down the Indian coast? He did business with neither pirate
nor merchantman, just seems to have gone here and there as the wind
blew him. He may have been acquainting himself with the nature of the
commerce of those parts; it may have been a period of debate with
him as to whether to persist as a law officer or strike out in the
new line of law breaker. It is hard to think that Kidd arrived at
Madagascar with a formed pirate purpose; perhaps they may be right who
say that after carefully appraising the situation as a whole he chose
the plundering line. However that may have been, Kidd’s first major
operation in those parts was not against pirates, according to his
commission, nor the French, but against merchantmen in their peaceful
pursuits.
At this point let us get the lay of the land, or sea, as it may
happen. The captain leaving New York shot across the Atlantic to
Madeira Islands, from which he right-angled down to the Cape of Good
Hope. Swinging around this broad pedestal of Table Mountain, he ran
up the coast of Africa, probably by way of the Mozambique Channel to
Madagascar. He stopped here long enough to refresh his stores, then
beat up toward India.
Roughly, Madagascar, for Kidd’s purposes, may be thought of as the
apex of a sort of isosceles triangle, with the Red Sea for one angle
and Bombay for the other. Within these boundaries the captain had the
Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean to navigate, with
Madagascar to run back to from time to time.
Sea traffic, such as it was, around the cape was not attractive to the
pirates, at least so much as that which passed more quickly from India
through the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and gulf countries. Compared
with Africa, India, of course, had an old and rich civilization and
it was for the products of that country that the mouths of pirates
watered; the costly silks, linens, spices and gold and silver treasures
which had become the traditions of sailors’ dockhead stories.
As it happened, however, it was not a cargo going from India which
first enticed Captain Kidd, but cargoes going thence from the gulf
region, more particularly the fat freight of what was known as the
Mocca Fleet.
“Men,” said Kidd, as he swung the _Adventure’s_ nose suddenly about at
the end of his dallying days in the Indian Ocean, “we are off to Bab’s
Key and the Mocca Fleet. We will ballast our good ship with gold and
silver from this Mocca Fleet.”
Thus did Kidd treat his commission as a scrap of paper, to be quite
modern, and thus, with a roaring cheer, another terror was added to the
troubles of honest commerce.