The Pirate Who Had to Be Hanged Twice: Captain Kidd
On May 23, 1701, Captain William Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock in London — though the rope broke on the first attempt, and historians still argue whether he was a pirate at all.
The crowd at Execution Dock in Wapping, London, got more than it bargained for on May 23, 1701. When the hangman dropped Captain William Kidd, the rope snapped. Kidd tumbled to the mud beneath the gallows. Some in the crowd cried that it was a sign from God and called for his release. The hangman fetched a stronger rope — and hanged him again. This time it held.
Kidd's story had begun respectably enough. A Scottish sailor born around 1645, he was a successful shipowner in New York when, in 1695, powerful English backers commissioned him to hunt down pirates in the Indian Ocean. Among his investors was the royal governor of New York, Lord Bellomont — the same man who would later order Kidd's arrest. He sailed from Plymouth in May 1696 aboard the Adventure Galley, carrying both a privateering commission and letters of reprisal against the French.
The voyage went wrong almost from the start. Months passed with no booty, the crew grew mutinous, and Kidd — by his own account defending his authority — struck and killed his gunner, William Moore, in a quarrel. Desperate for prize money, Kidd turned to attacking merchant ships himself, most famously the Quedagh Merchant, an Armenian-owned vessel carrying rich cargo. Kidd insisted that his French passes — documents proving the ship was sailing under French protection, and therefore a legitimate prize under his commission — justified the seizure. But those papers vanished before his trial, and without them his case was hopeless.
Politics sealed his fate. By the time Kidd returned to the Americas in 1699, the government in England had changed, and the new Tory ministry was eager to embarrass the Whigs who had backed him. Arrested in Boston in July 1699 and shipped to England, Kidd spent nearly two years in Newgate Prison before facing the High Court of Admiralty. The money set aside for his defense was misplaced until the morning the trial began, leaving his lawyers almost no time to prepare. He was convicted of murder and five counts of piracy.
After the hanging, his body was tarred and hung in an iron cage — gibbeted — over the Thames at Tilbury Point, where it remained for years as a warning to sailors. In the early 20th century, the missing French passes resurfaced, misfiled among unrelated government papers in a London building, casting doubt on how guilty Kidd really was. Historians still argue whether he was a bloodthirsty pirate or a privateer betrayed by his backers and condemned by a rigged trial.
Legend was kinder to Kidd than the law. Rumors that he had buried treasure along the New England coast inspired centuries of treasure hunts, and his name became pirate shorthand — helping inspire Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Whatever the truth of his guilt, the man who had to be hanged twice at Execution Dock remains the most famous pirate England ever executed: the privateer who sailed out to hunt pirates and came home as one.
No verified, freely licensed image of Captain Kidd exists in a landscape format suitable for this story, so this story is presented without a photograph.
