Captain Kidd? Hide the booty! Get the women below decks! Pray for divine deliverance! Surely that diabolical cur will put us all to the cutlass?
Actually, good sir, there is no cause for alarm. Your apprehension is based on nothing but myth, shadow and whimsy. William Kidd was a respectable merchant and sea captain, and wouldn’t harm a hair on your fair heads.

But ... Kidd is a notorious scourge of the seven seas! I thought he was as real and as terrible as the giant squid and sea dragons who drag ships beneath the waves.
Now look here, my quivering friend. We all love a good salty yarn, but it seems that in reality Kidd wasn’t a pirate. He was a war hero and privateer. The captain was issued with a licence to hunt down marauders and take back their plunder.

And who, may I ask, sees fit to contradict centuries of ignorant hearsay?
Richard Zacks is who. He put in five years of intensive research for his new book, The Pirate Hunter:
The True Story of Captain Kidd. In the process, he uncovered plenty of original evidence that overturns most of the old notions about Kidd and the pirate life in general.

Such as?
For starters, Kidd was born in Dundee, not Greenock, in 1654. He was the son of a seaman, not a preacher. And he was a patriotic and dazzling international money-man, who considered investing £500,000 of his own money in the Darien project, an attempt to establish a Scottish trading empire in Central America.

Hmpf. Surely that doesn’t prove he wasn’t a gleeful cut-throat and ravisher of women?
Well, according to the diary of William Willcock – a “no hype, just facts” document that Zacks found in the London Public Record Office, written by a prisoner on the ship of Kidd’s rival Robert Culliford – these sea captains were comparatively decent men. Kidd had an adoring wife and daughter back at home. In a lovely, tasteful house in Wall Street, New York.

Hah! A convenient masquerade of respectability.
If you insist. Kidd’s friends included James Emmet, the sharpest lawyer in New York, and attorney-general James Graham.

Pirates by any other name. They should all have been keel-hauled.
Okay, enough with the seafaring clichés. If he was such a sterling chap, why did they hang him?

Good question. Perhaps Mr Zacks will give us the answer in another five years’ time.

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