Captain Kidd
A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 13 May 2025
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- £19.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £19.99
Publisher Description
A breakneck adventure of war, romance, and politics in the golden age of piracy.
Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious “pirate” outlaws ever, but his legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Having captivated imaginations for more than three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, troubling questions remain. Was he really a criminal or is the truth more inconvenient: that he was a buccaneer’s worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians?
In Captain Kidd, his ninth-great-grandson, bestselling author Samuel Marquis, reveals the real story. Kidd was an English American privateer and leading New York husband and father. The King of England himself dubbed Kidd “trusty and well-beloved,” and some historians describe him as a “worthy, honest-hearted, steadfast, much -enduring sailor” who was the “victim of a deliberate travesty of justice.” With honors far more esteemed than the menacing Blackbeard, or any other sea rover at the turn of the seventeenth century, how can Kidd be considered both gentleman and pirate, both hero and villain?
Marquis’ biography recreates Kidd’s perilous world of explosive naval warfare and the daring integrity he exemplified as a pirate hunter, as well as the political scandal that entangled Kidd in British–American history, rocking the New World and the Old, and threatening England’s valuable trade with India.
Captain Kidd is both thrilling and tragic. Behind the legend is a real man woven into the tapestry of early America, rendering him a unique colonial hero and scapegoat whose life story was fascinating, exciting, bizarre, and heartrending.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
