Empire: World History - 197. The Pirate Hunter

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Alongside legends like Blackbeard and Calico Jack, William Kidd is one of the most famous pirates to have entered the public consciousness, thanks to Hollywood, sea shanties and literary mythologization. A Scottish sailor and privateer living during the late 17th century, Kidd went from a life of prosperous respectability and high society on Wall Street; hunting down pirates and protecting the trade of the British Empire, to a life spent on the run, pillaging ships as he went. But what was the process by which Kidd turned to the dark side? And was it against his will? His fate changed in 1695 when a murky syndicate of aristocrats commissioned Kidd - with the authorisation of the government - to hunt down pirates and Frenchmen in the Indian Ocean, and protect the trade there. From that point onwards Kidd’s law-abiding life of respectability would spiral out of control… Join William and Anita as they discuss the thrilling and tumultuous early career of the elusive William Kidd: his conversion from family man to pirate, his alleged visits to the famous Pirate utopia in Madagascar, and the acts of violence that would change his life forever… Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. My name was William Kidd when I sailed when I sailed. My name was William Kidd when I sailed. God's laws I did forbid. And so wickedly I did when I sailed. I'd a Bible in my hand when I sailed when I sailed.

I'd a Bible in my hand when I sailed. But my father's great command, I sunk it in the sand when I sailed. Hello, welcome to Empire. With me, Anita Arlen. Me, William Durable. This is a part of a sea shanty, which was written just after the death of a man who you will have heard the name, thanks to Hollywood and fictionalisation, William Kidd, one of the most famous pirates who, has entered the public consciousness. But was he a pirate at all? Or was he a man who was set up

by a bunch of avaricious politicians? That's what we're going to be talking about today. It's part of our piracy series. And I know you're obsessed with pirates. It turns out, I mean, who knew? You're back in Indian. You've suddenly discovered a shelf full of pirate books. I've got a whole shelf of pirate books here, including some quite sort of interesting and scholarly ones. There is a character that you and I need to have come across before, who was an extraordinary Raj Archivist called Charles Gray, who for a long time with the near-do-wells in Ranjit Singh's Sikh army and produced an extraordinary book of all the mercenaries and misfits who were recruited into Ranjit Singh's force. And he's done a similar thing called Pirates of the Eastern Seas out of all

the Indian archives. And it turns out there's a huge amount of files in Indian archives between Lahore, Calcutta, Delhi and so on, of cases of piracy off the Indian coast. And there was a whole world of people who had stolen ships or gone awry, who particularly preyed on the Mughal Hajj traffic. You had all these people going from Gujarat over to what's now Saudi Arabia. And these guys prayed on them, caught the ships, took the gold and often enslaved the Hajis. Let's do a whole episode on that. I think we should.

I think it's the most extraordinary story. Yeah, but let's talk about Kidd. in this one, because it's a really complicated thing. You talk about archives, and I think this is a man who's been quite badly served by archives that were produced near the time because of political agendas. But I'll tell you why. So first of all, who is William Kidd? More commonly known as Captain Kidd, you're like this because he was Scottish, a Scottish sailor and privateer who lived during the late 17th century. It's a very interesting matter how much, not only the pirates themselves were often Scots, but the mythologizers of pirates were Scots.

Robbie Lou and Stevenson, for example. Treasure Island. Well, I was just going to say, Treasure Island makes reference to Kid, directly to Kid. And Treasure Island was written in my hometown of North Berwick, looking onto the Bass Rock, and it's always said in North Berwick law,

that the Bass Rock was his model when he drew a map of Treasure Island is actually drawing a map of Bass Rock, same shape. The Bass Rock, for those of you've missed it, is basically, it's a very potter name for a thing made of Seagore shit. It just sort of sticks out of the water. I'll give it a grand description myself, but yeah, it has got a lot of Gannets on it and a lot of Gannett shit. Yes, Gannett's shit island.

But look, Stevenson was particularly affected by the story, because he must have grown up with the stories of William Kidd. He doesn't name him in Treasure Island, but the whole idea of this buried treasure is directly taken from William Kidd's life because William Kidd was said to have buried a huge horde of treasure, which people are still looking for, even now. Genuinely, yeah. I mean, there are expeditions to find it, yeah. And Washington Irving, another writer who's written about Captain Kids' treasure in 1820, he wrote the sketchbook. Not just Washington Irvin, but another major American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote a William Kidd short story. He was a very big figure in 19th century New York.

The Americans are obsessed with him, and that's partly you can tell because there's this fantastic. I've re-watched it. I watched it ages ago, but it's a 1945 film starring Charles Lawton. You know, famous Charles Lawton, who played Henry VIII. So Charles Lawton is Kid in this. And he does the role very seriously in the first one. And then he does it with Abbott and Costello again in 1952. But what I loved was the Charles Lawton original film where he is this really, I mean, skulldogorous, nasty.

You know, the opening scene of the film, Captain Kid, is him burying his treasure and then shooting a man and leaving the dead body on top. And he does these great lines like, dead men can't talk and things like that. And he calls all his crew gallows and meat and things like that. But the reason I wanted to talk about the film was because Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that it was Joseph Stalin's favourite film. He loved it. I did not see that coming. No.

I know. And do you know why it was his favourite film? Because Stalin identified with Kit who in this film is actually quite a shitty fellow. It sort of comes up from, you know, the rough streets and wants to mingle in high society. I can see that because one of the things about kids' life, I mean, it's very difficult to tell what's true or what's not, but he seems always to be steering a line between hunting pirates and being a pirate himself. And that's very sort of Stalin-esque. Stalin started off by robbing banks as a young man and ended up as president.

Yeah. And the whole film, I mean, you talked about, you know, the pirates in your shelf who were targeting Mughal treasure. And that's also the plot of the film. And actually, there is truth in this because even, you know, pirates who were off. operating out of Scotland or privateers, when they were hired as privateers, often to attack enemy ships and to protect the East India Company trade. But some of them said sod this. We know where the treasure is. It's on the muggle ships. We're going to switch sides. So this is the backdrop to the piracy stories that we're telling. And I think beyond that backdrop, there's this

fascinating idea of a world where at the beginning of this period in the mid-17th century, the British are absolutely on the margins of everything, and they can just be the records. They can be the pirates who are just stopping to raid Portuguese and Spanish treasureships, raid whatever they like of the Mughals. And they are basically a nation of pirates, which is what the Spanish ambassador calls the first crew of the East Indian companies where they set off pirates, pirates, pirates. But by the end of the story, though, the British are in charge, and they now have to enforce their authority, and there's no room for pirates.

What's interesting is that Britain is described variously as a nation of pirates and the nation of shopkeepers, you know, so the characterisation of it. Napoleon famously said that. But let's talk about kids. So William Kidd was born in Scotland in Dundee in 1645. And I think it's really important to talk about formative years. Although we don't know much detail, we do know what Dundee was like in 1645. Do you think it was a pleasant place to live, William, in 1645? Well, it has to say that there are different accounts. And there's another version of his early life, which is a measure of how elusive he is, which is a measure of how elusive he is, which is. has him in Greenock on the other side of Scotland and the son of a Presbyterian minister. So you've got these two completely different origin stories, which, like the rest of his life, you have to sort of pick and choose between completely different versions of events. I'll go with the Dundee version, because more modern scholarship would place him in Dundee. And you're right, the early stuff just completely is all over the map. But where he was born, and this is a place that was ravaged by the walls of the three kingdoms.

So, you know, there were people who supported the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, up against royalists who support King Charles I. and there are religious difficulties. And so this is a place that's sort of ravaged by war. And also he's born into a time of plague. So, you know, there is a terrible plague rampaging through. So there is death and decay and war and loss of life. That is his sort of childhood imprint.

We don't know everything about his family, but again, modern scholarship would suggest that he had a relatively modest background, the son of a man called John Kidd, who was a sailor himself, and a woman called Bessie Butchart. I love that name. I hope I'm saying, right. Is it a Scottish pronunciation for Butchart that I'm getting wrong? B-U-T-C-H-A-R-T. But-Chart.

B-chart. Sounds better than Butchart. And his father dies at sea when he's five years old. So he's with this mother who's struggling to bring up this child. And she remarries. And clearly that is not a happy situation for Little William, because he runs away to see when he's just a teenager. And again, this sort of throws you into this world where people grew up a lot faster. in those days. And he first enters the record as a seaman in the 1680s where he is on a ship where there is a mutiny. And this is a, you know, a privateer ship, which is supposedly under license, as you know, we were saying, privateers were hired by the British government to go and protect British interests and attack Dutch ships, French ships in particular, and anybody

else who was challenging this nascent trade that they were establishing with India. And he's on this ship and there's a mutiny. And the mutiny occurs. And for some reason, young kid is seen to have leadership qualities. And it's the first time you sort of get the impression that there is something about this lad that, you know, people want to follow. And that's what happens. But by 1689, this young sort of skinny lad, you imagine, from, you know, not a very lovely background, goes and he joins a privateer ship traveling the Caribbean under this man called Captain Jean-Fat-en. And this ship, again, you know, mutinies are really common because if you don't give your crew, and often the crews are sort of rough old sorts who are gathered together from prisons, a lot of them.

You know, only those people put up with life at sea. So a lot of, you know, people are sort of harvested from the Marshall Sea or Newgate prison. They're desperate fellows. And life at sea, and I know you know about this, life at sea was terrible. I mean, just remind people in the mid-17th century, being on a ship for months at a time is not a pleasant thing. No, it's a very, very rough world, and very few people join the Navy if they have any other options. It's very much bottom of the pecking order. I think that's true elsewhere, too.

I mean, obviously the Ottoman galleys at the same time are largely filled with galley slaves. I mean, no one chooses to go to sea at this period. So there's a mutiny on the ship against Tata. And Kidd sort of rises up. And I think he renames the ship. He calls it the Blessed William. Very nice. And so he's off, sort of like a man in his own Ford,

Cortina for the first time, taking to the open seas or the open roads and, you know, sort of quite muscular. And he actually, like many privateers at the time, becomes not enlisted formally, but asked to defend a British territory. So he's asked to defend Nevis from French ships because they are surrounded by French ships. And, you know, he's young, he's strong, he's got a crew that likes him, he's on the Blessed William. And he does it. He does it really quite well. So he starts attacking the French islands of Marie Gallant and destroying a town and looting because, you know, he's got these desperate men. He needs to feed, you know, the more of their greed. And he gathers around £2,000 sterling, which is an enormous sum of money.

More than you could get in Dundee at that time, certainly. And the poverty and the sort of misery that he's left behind. But he also gets rewarded by the authorities. Because if you are a successful privateer. And if you are attacking French interests, you get rewards. So you get 150 pounds for successful privateering in the Caribbean. So this is a man who knows the waters, which are going to be very, very important around another great trading route that is being established around the Caribbean. And he starts getting a name for himself. But you know what? If you have mutinous men on your ship, who's to say they're not going to mutiny against you? And his crew eventually gets sick of him as well, even though he's sort of quite successful for a while. And they dump him.

They dump him and they sort of sail off with the Blessed William. And he is just like Johnny Depp, trying to get the black pearl back. The man who's responsible for the dumpage is a man called Robert Culliford, who is a notorious pirate who steals his ship and his crew. Who we will meet later on in this tale. We absolutely will. And it is very much like Pirates Carabide. These characters who sort of do each other. down somewhere in the Caribbean, bump into each other again, somewhere quite different, like sort of Madagascar or off the coast of Kerala at Telly Cherry. And these guys are moving between these worlds, between praying on Portuguese and Spanish

shipping in the Caribbean, fighting the French in the Caribbean, raiding French islands there, or then sailing down, trying their luck off the coast of India, off the coast of French islands like what's now Reunion. And these guys are going backwards and forwards, their own trajectories. And at this point, he's basically with the law, isn't he? He's a privateer. He is. So shall I, shall I do the Anita question? What did he look like? Well, there is this portrait. You've got the portrait, I hope, in front of you, describe William. Because when I do, I get the cues of being lascivious. I don't think you can be very lascivious about this portrait,

but what does he look like in it? I don't think anyone would be very serious about this portrait. He looks like a sort of disgruntled clergyman who's just had his sermon snatched by a parishioner or something. He's got a sort of chin-length wig, not the full wig, but a sort of half-wig, which I think you associate with a lawyer at this period or a clergyman. He's got a white kerchief around his neck, a sort of white cravat, and he's got a colourless jacket. And he looks exactly more like a lawyer or a clergyman than he does a pirate in this picture. He does. And you know what? This painting is really interesting. God knows if it looks like him, because it was painted after he died by a man called Sir James Thornhill. Now, Sir James Thornhill, for those who know their art, was an English painter of great renown. But he never met the guy.

He sort of, you know, did this painting. He's also sort of more famous for doing Isaac Newton and people like that. But he was sort of fascinated by kid. He's also the man, by the way, James Thornhill, who did some of those enormous murals in the Royal Hospital in Greenwich. You can see he did those. I've never seen those. They're impressive. And paintings on the inside of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, that's Thornhill's work.

and you've got Thornhill doing sort of Chats with House and Wimpole Hall and all these really important places. But he gives us this portrait of a man of means. Compare that to the image that actually most of us have of kid. A desperate pirate, bandana around his head, snarly face and earring. Johnny Depp. And do you know where that comes from? It comes from a man. And again, I love the way this is a man who creates the images that then become historical truth.

So that image of the Johnny Depp type pirate comes to his courtesy of a man called Howard Pyle. Howard Pyle was a children's illustrator. And some 49 years after Kid died, he did illustrations for a story about Kid. You know, sort of painted him as a snarling evil. He reeks of evil. He sort of looks a little bit sort of like Lucifer. And that is the image that passes into the public consciousness. And we also have Howard Pyle to thank, by the way, for repurposing Robin Hood.

Really? Yes. the hat, the feather, the pixie boots, the pixie outfit, the Peter Pan outfit. That, again, is a Howard Pyle creation. Oh, amazing. Because bet your butt, he didn't look like that. But after these children's books, which, you know, all these other people would have read when they go on to make films or art in the future, that is the thing that sits in their

childhood mind. I think we should actually even do a whole episode on how these stories, which are rough, tough, murderous stories of desperate men end up bizarrely as children's literature. Do you think that is unusual? Because we have kids who grow up on cartoons, even from the earliest age, where cartoons where people take a big mallet and hit a smaller creature on the head and squish it. Is it a children's need or I'll need to scare children? I don't know. What do you think?

Interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But look, after he's sort of lost his blessed William to this terrible other pirate, because there is no honour among thieves, that is clear, in the pirate. and privateering world. He ends up going to America where he does become actually a reflection of that respectable portrait that you described before because he starts trade like other people. You know, he has maritime experience. And he marries an heiress. The richest woman, some say in New York. Sarah Ort is her name. Is that a Dutch name? Is that from the

Dutch community in New York? Does sound it, doesn't it? Around this time, I think it would have just stopped being New Amsterdam and become New York. So yeah, that would make sense that she has a Dutch name. But Sarah and William moved to this rather huge townhouse on Wall Street. How can you get more respectable than that? Literally on Wall Street itself. On Wall Street, actually on Wall Street. And I sort of did some digging to see what his life was like in New York.

And he was a pillar of the community. There is a church on Wall Street called Trinity Church. still stands to this day. And one of the people they have to thank for Trinity Church existing at all is William Kidd, not, you know, the snarly pirate, but William Kidd, the respectable man. Who endows churches? Not just endows, helped to build it. So I was looking through there's some records that go back to 1696.

Minutes of the vestry of Trinity Church. And it says, Captain Kidd has lent a runner and tackle for the hoising, it says, which I think should be hoisting, up of stones as long as he stays there. And a runner and tackle, do you know what that might be? You'd be something to lift stones, wouldn't it? Pullies, pulleys, like on a ship. And it says while he lives here. But we know that the church had a relationship with Kidd.

He probably never ever sat in the church because it wouldn't have been finished and he was already on the move by the time it was finished. But there was a rented pew in Captain Kidd's name, the most important pew, until years after he was, this is a Dauruple spoiler, hanged in disgrace. I know, I did it. Is you telling the end?

I'm just giving you a little foreshadowing of the fact that, you know, this is not how he thought his life would go. Yes, so in a sense, he's already lived an entire life trajectory. He's grown up poor, he's gone to the seas, he's then arrived in New York and ended up on Wall Street. You'd have thought that's the end of the story, but far from it. It isn't. No.

It would be for somebody. But he comes into the orbit of the governor of New York. Because if you are an important man with money and you give money to the church and you know, you're respectable and you've got a pew coming your way. By the way, it was a pew right at the front where all the important people sat for him and his family. But he meets the governor of New York and Massachusetts, a man called the Earl of Belmont. But the Earl of Belmont is having a right load of problems with ships being attacked. You know, this is a disaster because French vessels have been attacking British interests. And these are still, you know, sort of British interests.

And he needs somebody who knows the waters. So he says, look, I think we might need a man who has knowledge of those waters and also has worked with privateers and might have had a ship stolen out from under him so knows these people can't be trusted to come and work for us. And this is where this idea sort of develops, not just between him, but other members, really important members of the British ruling class, including the Lord Chancellor, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Master of Ordinance, and the Secretary of State. So they all start sort of thinking, we need to get a man who is going to fight for us. And that man is William Kidd. Let's take a break because this is not how the story eventually goes. Welcome back. So we're now at the point where William Kidd, respectable New Yorker, married to an heiress, living on Wall Street, is being tempted back into the privateer business. And in 1689, he is given what is called a letter of Mark, which I have in front of me. And this is the text. Now know ye, that being desirious to prevent the aforesaid mischiefs. And in the as much as in us lies to bring said pirates, freebooters and sea robbers to justice, we do hereby grant and give to said William Kidd, a commission as a private man of war, bearing the date 11th day of December 1695, and unto all who shall be under your command full power and authority to apprehend, seize and take into yours and their true and fully

authorised lawful custody, the said captains two, Ireland, wake, maize, and all others such pirates, freebooters and sea robbers being either of our own nation or other notions associated with them, which you shall meet upon the seas and coasts of America, or upon any other sea or coast with all their ships and vessels, and upon all such merchandise, money, goods and wares as shall be found on board. So that's quite a letter to set you off. It is quite a letter. So the letter of Mark was a real thing to co-opt and legitimise people who may have been involved in privateering to say, right, you're ours now, you work for us. Now, I never became the lawyer that my dad wanted me to be, but it is worth looking at the small print of that said

contract, the mark that you just said. Because what it also does is it ties kid up with these very powerful people. He gets the letter of Mark when he travels to London and he travels in his own ship, a ship called the Antigua. But the Antigua is not fast enough, not big enough, not musly enough to take on the pirates. So as part of the letter of Mark, there is a deal that is done that these very powerful rich men who are part of the Whig establishment are going to pay for this new ship that is going to be good enough and strong enough and fast enough with enough cannons to take on some of the very notorious pirates that were named in that letter of Mark, including True, who was really the worst of the worst deemed to be in England because you've been so successful robbing ships with

British interests. So four-fifths of the cost of building this new ship for kids, specifically for Kidd, is going to be put up by the Earl of Orford, Baron Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and a man called Sir John Summers. But they don't want to come to the forefront. They're going to fund the money, they're going to stump up the money, kid is going to have to sell the Antigua and use some of his tobacco money to pay for the rest. But the small, small print of that letter of Mark, is that whatever kid gets, whatever loot he gets, 10% of the loot is going to go to the king, to King William. It is reserved for the crown. So, you know, basically it's a commission-based system where the king also benefits. So you can't get much more of a blessing from the crown, from the government,

from power than this. I thought, very interesting thing in that letters, we've always talked about privateiers. I've never seen it written out in full as a private man of war. Yes, isn't it good. And that's what it is. That is exactly what it is. And what's so interesting is the more we look at early British colonial stories, the more we find that it is the state privatising stuff, whether it's to a corporation and leasing areas of Virginia and the right to start a foundation in Virginia or Hudson Bay or in India. But the same is going on with naval activity. You don't send off the Navy. You just get a businessman with business interests who has a little knowledge of the sea to do his own private Navy work, a private man of war. Yes.

But, you know, there is a question that I'm grappling with, having sort of spent a lot of time with William Kidd, which is why on earth would he want to do this? Because, you know, life on the sea is not as cushy as the life he's got on Wall Street. You know, it's just a fact. He's got money. He's got status. It is dirty. It is disease written on these ships. It is a rough life that he has known since he was a young teenager. Why would he? The answer that comes to, you know, the picture of Captain Kidd is that he was this wanton robber on the seas. He was almost sort of forced to do it because once the king has asked you to do a thing. Once the king has summoned you, can you say no? Can you come to London and be offered the letter of Mark and then say, no, I don't want to do it? And is there a sense in which the British are taking advantage of this sort of colonial who's turned up in London? Well, I mean, he's a Scot. He's a Nouveau-Rish Scott. So I think they think, you know, they own him and he owes them. I mean, that's sort of the attitude of the aristocracy at the time. So these shadowy wigs who are not putting their own names forward, who are in the background, are basically chancing his life rather than theirs.

Well, I mean, of course, they're not going to go to sea, are they? I mean, it's horrible. So, Kidd was going to be the captain of this new ship, this amazing new ship that is being built especially for him. And it's going to be called the Adventure Galley. And it is good. It's a good ship that they're building from. It's heavily armed. It's got 34 cannons, which is considerable for those times. Yeah, that's a big ship. You know, it has room for 150 men. So, again, we're talking sort of a really hefty bunch of people.

And it has oars, which at that time is, you know, sort of quite a quite an important modification for ships that you don't just rely on the winds. You have oars, so you can sort of take control and keep chasing if you need to. And you can manoeuvre better in battle against the front ships that largely don't have these oars at the time. And you can sail in dead water. You know, there's some of the seas that they're going to have to go through. You can be sitting there for weeks without moving, not a breeze to take you one inch. become, as they call it. That's exactly right. So what kid says, he has one stipulation, he says, look, this is great, I'll do this and thanks for the ship and everything, but I want to

select my own crew and I'm going to choose the very best of the best. And, you know, he's got experience. He knows people. He knows those who sail. So he wants to select the best sailors that he knows, who will be loyal to him. And that's fine. They say yes, of course, absolutely. But it screws up almost from the second that the Adventure Galley leaves British waters. It doesn't even leave British waters. It's a nutty thing. So he's sort of sailing out for the first inaugural voyage of the Adventure Galley. And they're going past a Navy yacht in Greenwich.

And custom dictates that Kid and his men should have saluted the naval captain. Not only, William, do they not salute, but when the Navy Yacht fires a shot to say, Oi, we're here, hands on heads, please. What do they do? They turn and slap their backsides at the naval yacht. It's like a sort of bunch of Scots train spotters out of some Irving Welsh novel. They moon the Navy. Because they think this is all hilarious. They're not sort of, you know, regarding themselves as, you know, the sort of the starched Navy.

But the naval captain does not like this, and he likes it so little, that he decides he's going to take almost half of kids' crew and press them into service in the Navy to teach them a lesson. And does this actually happen there and then, or do they wait till they dock and? There and then. Yeah. So poor kid, who's really carefully hand-selected these men that he knows who are going to be loyal to him, has now only got half a crew. It's a disaster. Because he's mooned the Navy. because they mooned the Navy.

It's too good to be true. It's true. So what he has to do, poor kid, I do feel sorry for a lot of this story. He has to then get criminals to fill the places. So like the film that I was telling you about, where Charles Lawton goes deliberately to the roughest prison, Newgate prison in the Marshall Sea, to select the most bloodthirsty of men for his crew.

Kid doesn't want to do this, but he has no option because he's got no one to sail. It's brand new adventure galley. And these are the only men that he can get, who often have been guilty of piracy and thrown into prison and are facing the noose in some cases. So he gets this sort of crew of half the people that he wants. Pleat near-do-else.

Hardened criminals, my friend. Brilliant. Who would slit your throat as soon as look at you. And they set sail for the Cape of Good Hope on the 6th of September, 1696. And it's all going well until they encounter a convoy of ships escorted by a man called Commodore Warren of the Royal Navy. Now, again, this is a ship, and the Royal Navy is up against it at the time. I think it's worth repeating, William.

You know, this is not the Royal Navy that we know now. This was a fairly beleaguered force that really couldn't keep up with the privateers and the attacks on British settlements. Which is why the privateers were that. Yeah, so, I mean, Commodore Warren then says, look, I need your men. The kids going, are you joking? He goes, I need some of your crew. I need to press them into service.

We need escorts. We need our ships protected. So you know what? I'm just going to co-op to you or at least half of your crew to come and do some work for me. And so what Kid does, he's like, bugger this. This has happened to me before. In the dead of night, he flees leaving these ships prone and vulnerable. And so he starts to get this reputation.

Not just a reputation. Commodore Warren actually takes revenge on him for scooting in the night. by writing a damning formal report to the Admiralty that describes him as a pirate. That's the first time he's described as a pirate. Because, you know, this impudent pup was issued a direct order by the Navy. But look, just think about it from kids' point of view, okay? Again, he knows what mutiny feels like. He's experienced it himself a couple of times.

He has promised these men, and especially the hardened criminals, that owe him no loyalty whatsoever, that they are going to get rich off the back of this voyage. they are going to make money. But if they're not going to do that, if they're going to be pushed into some kind of drudge escort service, which is what the Commodore wants, they're not going to get wealthy. So this is why he runs away.

In his head, he's been given a job, which is to hunt pirates, not to do the drudge work for some Commodore from nowhere. And you sort of get the sense a little bit. And you can see why Stalin might have liked the Lawton film of a man who just doesn't see this authority as being over him. He's a self-made man. He ran away from plague and war-torn lands to sea and made himself and ended up in Wall Street.

Who the hell are these people to push him around? So, yes, he gets the name of Pirate. And the East India Company is very, very vocal in criticising him because the ships that he was meant to be escorting, they were laden with East India Company goods. And so by abandoning them and not escorting them to Cape Town, which is what he was meant to do, he's now, you know, sort of not acting in British interest. So those are the letters that get back to London before he can even sort of, you know, put a pen to paper.

And so far we can kind of sympathise with how he's feeling. He's lost one half of his crew already in England. Now he's being told he has to give up the other half. And he's got a job to do, as you say. So so far, we're slightly on his side. That there's no sense that he's gone completely off the rails yet. But, you know, I sort of feel that luck is not on his side at all from the moment he accepts the mark, everything in his life turns crap.

So not only does he now sort of have the Navy, the East India Company, who hate him, London hearing that he's a pirate, not a privateer anymore, not somebody working for them. Which is a dangerous thing because it's putting a target on your head. Yeah, you named four pirates who are on a death list that were given to him in his letter of Mark. His name will be on one of those lists now because he too is deemed to be a pirate. Although in his head, he's just carrying on doing what he's meant to be doing. But then something else happens to him. A third of his crew gets cholera.

And this is again, you know, cholera in this era is the absolute devastation of a ship at sea. You get one person sort of coughing and spluttering under decks in close quarters and it could just decimate you. So he heads for Madagascar and we should talk about Madagascar because he needs a strong crew. And that is a terrific part of the story. I love it. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Madagascar at this time? Well, Madagascar is one of these places on the map that is. at this point in history is not claimed by the European Empire. And therefore, it's a place

where every sort of near-do-well is setting up. And we have an entire world of pirates. And he's heading there. And what we have to somehow work out from the very confusing sources we have is, is he going there to become a pirate and join in this sort of pirate utopia at Madagascar? It's a perfect place because no one's claimed it. There is lots of water. There's lots of land. And there's this whole world of sort of, you know, rather like the pub in Pirates of the Caribbean, where, you know, all these sort of near-do worlds with peg legs and hook arms. Yeah, it's a little hook arm. Drinking, spilling beer by trying to hold in their hook hands.

And so this is the point where we begin to see this ambiguity. He has this cover story that he's looking for pirates. But I think it's true. I don't think it is a cover story. I think he's still promising his little cholera ravaged, hated by everybody crew, that, you know what, we're going to take other ships. And we're going to take their booty. And you will be rich. Just, you know, stay with me, boys. We are going to. And we're best to find pirates than Madagascar. I'm sort of arguing the case from the other side.

You know, the story is that he goes to Madagascar because he wants to be with fellow pirates. But actually, he's going to hunt pirates. He's got the letter of Mark. That's how he's going to be rich. That's how he'll be rewarded. But if you were arguing the case for the prosecution. Yeah, let's argue. You can say that he's going there because, you know, he's one of these pirates. He's now on the list. So it's a very ambiguous situation. Tell me, Anita, about this sort of pirate utopia that we hear about occasionally in the sources, Libertalia. Tell me about that.

Libertalia or Liberation, depending on what you read, is meant to be this pirate colony that has a pirate king. And it's said to be under the leadership of a man called Captain James Mission, or just mission. And he sets up supposedly this place, Liberation or Libertalia. It's mentioned first of all, by the way, in this book in 1724, which is called a General. history of pirates with a Y, P-Y, R-A-T-E-S in volume two. And it describes this man, Captain Mission, who wants to have this whole new utopia, which actually sounds a little bit mager, to be honest, because they don't like big government, they don't like laws and rules, they don't like organised religion. It is a place that Mission supposedly wants to have

anybody from any background, from any strata of society with any caste or creed, can come and be a free man here. And they divide all the treasure and the cattle equally among themselves. It's a sort of socialist utopia. So it's a strange thing. You know what, though, it's probably all bullshit. It's written in this and again, people sort of go and run with it. But there isn't any archaeological evidence.

And people have gone there, you know, historians have gone desperate to try and find the children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, of anyone from Libertalia, and nobody's been able to find anybody. And is it meant to be in Madagascar? It's meant to be in Madagascar. The truth actually looks as though there were different pirate ports around Madagascar. Little places. It's a big island.

It's a big island. And little pirates sort of, not encampments, but little sort of towns that pirates set up. But not this one great pirate king and this pirate utopia where everybody drinks and slaves are freed. You know, that's where that idea of these people don't see black and white on the pirate king's utopia and liberal. Italia, that you are a free man, even if you are a formally enslaved person, you can come to Libertalia and be free. It means freedom. You know, it means freedom from all control. But as we know from later on in this story, sadly, that story of a freed slave utopia is very, very far from the pirate scene. And there was a story I remember that Murray Pittock once

told me that there was a whole bunch of Scottish pirates in Madagascar who trying to do a deal were the Jacobites, have I got this right? And they were going to use the slaves that they had gathered as collateral. So contrary to this lovely myth of a socialist utopia, in actual fact, these guys are vicious slavers. They are enslaving the locals, and they're prepared to trade them and offer the money to the Jacobites. So there's a whole variety of different sort of worlds colliding here, different myths being popped. And I think it's a pretty nasty world. But let's leave Kid there, because this is a crucial moment. He's about to go definitely over to the dark side or maybe over to the dark side.

Maybe because I think he's going over there to catch him some pirates. He's going pirate fishing because this is where the waters are thick with pirates. You just put your net in and you scoop them all up and you hang them and you come back and you get a bounty and you keep your ship and you think he's crossed over to the dark side. So let's just leave it there and join us for the next episode of Empire where we sort of examine this a little bit better and have to be. a bit more evidence of what happens to kill. And you know what? If you can't wait for the next episode, you don't have to. All you have to do is sign up for our club. Come and be in our club. Come and be in the cool gang. Empirepoduk.com. And you'll get all sorts of offers.

Our fantastic newsletter, which is amazing with book lists and all sorts of things and offers on books that we feature on this podcast. So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Dremple.