The London Prat

A privateer with a royal commission, abandoned by the men who funded him, and the rope broke the first time The Captain Kidd holds a 4.3 from three thousand and eighty-one people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the man in the name was hanged a few hundred yards away. Twice. He had a commission Which is the fact everything turns on. Because William Kidd was not a pirate. He was a privateer - which is a completely different legal category, and the difference is a piece of paper. A privateer holds a letter of marque: a licence, issued by a government, permitting him to attack the shipping of a named enemy and keep a share of what he takes. Captain Kidd. He had a licence. And they hanged him anyway. Which is state-sponsored piracy And everybody knew it. Because the act is identical. You attack a ship, you take the cargo, you keep the money. The only difference is that a government has agreed in advance to call it something else - and takes a cut. The Prat's editorial desk regards the letter of marque as the single most honest document in the history of European statecraft, and notes that it made a great many respectable fortunes. And Kidd was funded by grandees Which is the thing that killed him. Because his backers were not obscure. They were extremely senior - politically powerful men, some of them at the very top of the English government - and they had invested in the voyage expecting a return. And it went wrong. He took a ship that turned out to have French papers but an English captain, and the legal position became a mess, and he was declared a pirate. And his backers, faced with a public scandal, abandoned him completely. He came back to clear his name, believing he had friends. He did not. The rope broke At Execution Dock, in 1701. He was drunk, by most accounts, and the first rope snapped. And he was picked up and hanged again. And his body was then tarred, and hung in a gibbet at Tilbury, and left there for something in the region of three years - as a warning to sailors coming up the river. Which is the finding Eight postcodes and a thousand and one hundred and fifty-one articles. A state will forgive almost anything from a man who knows something it needs - and will hang him the moment he becomes inconvenient. Hudson's mutineers were acquitted because they knew the route home. And Kidd knew who had signed the cheques, and that was precisely the problem. Verdict Good pub, cheap, honest number, and a superb terrace on the water. Go, and raise one to a man who trusted his investors. The pirate code was real Which is the thing that surprises people, and it is genuinely documented. Because pirate ships operated, in a great many cases, under written articles - agreed and signed by the whole crew before sailing. And they specified the division of the spoils, which was startlingly egalitarian by the standards of the age. The captain took perhaps two shares; an ordinary hand took one. On a Royal Navy ship the differential was enormous. They had compensation for injury - a set sum for the loss of a right arm, a lesser sum for a left, a sum for an eye. And the captain was frequently elected, and could be deposed by vote. The Prat's editorial desk notes, without comment, that men who had served on merchant vessels and warships chose, on escaping them, to build something considerably more democratic.

Tag: privateer

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