CHAPTER ONE (continued 2)
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His commission to take pirates required a careful and exact account of every ship captured, her cargo, its value and all other details, to say nothing of French ships, whose condemnation was lifted entirely out of his hands. He did not attempt to explain all these irregularities. We are considering strictly the matter adduced on his trial. When we go beyond the record of that, and see, as we have, his conduct on his return home, it is clear as daylight that he was exercising over the property taken from the alleged French ships a private ownership entirely incompatible with this defense.
If the Quedagh Merchant was under a French pass, as he asserted, then that portion of her cargo which he brought to Oyster Bay in the St. Antonio was neither his nor Bellamont’s, nor Livingston’s, but the Government’s. No, the thing doesn’t seem to hold water; nobody concerned in the whole affair seems to have been straightforward.
And so, within a week of his conviction, Captain William Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock, on the margin of the Thames, where sailors setting out for the far places of the earth thus received England’s farewell admonition that honesty is the best policy.