In May 1701, Captain William Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock in London, his body subsequently tarred and suspended in a gibbet over the Thames as a warning to pirates. History remembered him as one of the high seas' most notorious criminals. However, archival evidence discovered centuries later reveals that Kidd was victimized by a political cover-up reaching the highest levels of the British government.
In 1695, Kidd was commissioned as a privateer by elite Whig nobles—including the Governor of New York and the First Lord of the Admiralty—to hunt French ships and pirate vessels in the Indian Ocean. Problems arose when Kidd captured the Quedagh Merchant, a vessel laden with rich Armenian cargo. Kidd maintained that the ship was a lawful prize because it carried French passes, making its capture legitimate under wartime privateering rules.
However, the ship was captained by an Englishman and carried cargo belonging to the powerful British East India Company. Facing immense diplomatic fallout from Indian rulers and political pressure from Tory rivals, Kidd's noble backers abandoned him to save their own reputations. When Kidd was brought to trial at the Old Bailey in 1701, he pleaded that the French passes seized from the captured ships would prove his innocence.
The prosecution claimed these passes were lost, denying Kidd the critical evidence needed for his defense. In the early 20th century, researchers uncovering 17th-century Admiralty records at the Public Record Office in London discovered the exact French passes Kidd had cited, misfiled and suppressed for over two hundred years. The documents proved Kidd acted lawfully, making his execution a tragic judicial murder.