without the dangers of a battle or the delays of a trial. The
rewards of protecting the lawful trade were likely to be
comparatively small. Such as they were, they would be got only by
first fighting with desperate ruffians who would rather be killed
than taken, and by then instituting a proceeding and obtaining a
judgment in a Court of Admiralty. The risk of being called to a
severe reckoning might not unnaturally seem small to one who had
seen many old buccaneers living in comfort and credit at New York
and Boston. Kidd soon threw off the character of a privateer, and
became a pirate. He established friendly communications, and
exchanged arms and ammunition, with the most notorious of those
rovers whom his commission authorised him to destroy, and made
war on those peaceful traders whom he was sent to defend. He
began by robbing Mussulmans, and speedily proceeded from
Mussulmans to Armenians, and from Armenians to Portuguese. The
Adventure Galley took such quantities of cotton and silk, sugar
and coffee, cinnamon and pepper, that the very foremast men
received from a hundred to two hundred pounds each, and that the
captain's share of the spoil would have enabled him to live at
home as an opulent gentleman. With the rapacity Kidd had the
cruelty of his odious calling. He burned houses; he massacred
peasantry. His prisoners were tied up and beaten with naked
cutlasses in order to extort information about their concealed
hoards. One of his crew, whom he had called a dog, was provoked
into exclaiming, in an agony of remorse, "Yes, I am a dog; but it
is you that have made me so." Kidd, in a fury, struck the man
dead.

News then travelled very slowly from the eastern seas to England.
But, in August 1698, it was known in London that the Adventure