Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal

Marquis (Soldiers of Freedom), a descendant of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd, argues that his ancestor was scapegoated by a greedy English Crown in this riveting revisionist history. Drawing on a deep well of scholarship, Marquis aims to show that William Kidd, a Scottish-born, New York–made privateer, was not the villainous pirate he was portrayed to be ahead of his 1701 execution. Instead, Kidd was notable, according to Marquis, for actually obeying the “letters of marque” issued to him, only targeting enemy vessels or pirates (unlike other English privateers, who would frequently “turn pirate”). Kidd was so upstanding, Marquis contends, that it was his loyalty to his crew that got him in trouble: he fled from an English warship whose inept captain (“Wrong-Way Warren,” whose crew had largely perished from scurvy when he got lost crossing the Atlantic) was attempting to impress Kidd’s sailors into service. Thereafter, denouncing Kidd became a convenient propaganda tool for the English Crown, which was desperate to prove that it was taking piracy seriously to the Mughal emperor—who, irate over his ships being plundered, had halted trade with England, damaging the country’s coffers. Marquis’s meticulous version of events feels credible, not least because of how it casts the era’s English empire as an “authoritarian regime” riven with incompetence and grift, setting the scene for such an unscrupulous plot. The result is a caustic takedown of a centuries-old hit job. (May)