Captain William Kidd was a 17th-century Scottish sailor who became one of the best-known privateers of his time. He began his career as a legitimate English Privateer before he was tried and executed for piracy in 1701.
William Kidd was born in Dundee, Scotland, in about 1654 to Captain John Kyd and his wife, Bessie Butchart. When he was just a boy, his father was lost at sea, and a local society financially supported his family. When he was old enough, he went to work as a privateer for European royals to attack foreign ships.
A privateer was a non-military person or ship that engaged in maritime warfare under a commission of war. Privately owned merchant ships, licensed by the crown, could legitimately attack and take vessels deemed pirates or privateers from opposing nations. Captured ships were then sold with the proceeds divided between the privateer sponsors, shipowners, captains, and crew. In practice, the legality and actions of the privateers were often vague.
After working for various buccaneer crews, William became a respected privateer in his own right by the 1680s. At about this time, Kidd set sail for America and settled in New York City, where he befriended many prominent colonial citizens, including three governors.
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By 1689, Kidd was a member of a French-English pirate crew sailing the Caribbean under Captain Jean Fantin. During one of these voyages, Kidd and other crew members mutinied, ousted the captain, and in August, sailed to the British colony of Nevis in the Caribbean Sea. The ship, equipped with 16 guns, then became part of Nevis Governor Christopher Codrington's small fleet, was renamed the Blessed William, and William Kidd became its new captain. Governor Codrington's small fleet was tasked to defend Nevis from the French, with whom the English were at war.
As tensions increased between England and France, Captain Kidd's influence grew as he was tasked with protecting English ships, not only in the Caribbean but also along the coast of New England. By 1690 he was an established sea captain and shipowner in New York City, where he owned property and, at various times, was dispatched by both New York and Massachusetts to rid the coast of enemy privateers.
On May 16, 1691, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, an English woman in her early twenties. Despite her young age, Oort had already been twice widowed and was one of the wealthiest women in New York, largely because of her inheritance from her first husband.
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