The Pirate Hanged Twice In One Morning

William Kidd is one of the most tragic figures in the history of maritime justice — a Scottish sea captain who went from respected privateer to public scapegoat, executed not because he was the worst pirate of the age, but because he was the most convenient. His death was botched, his body desecrated, and the truth of his case buried so deep that historians are still arguing about it three centuries later. Kidd was born around 1654 in Dundee, the son of a Presbyterian minister.

By his thirties, he was a respected ship captain in New York, married to a wealthy widow, with a house on Wall Street. In 1695, the British government — desperate to curb piracy in the Indian Ocean — commissioned him as a privateer, gave him a letter of marque, and promised him a share of any prizes he took. He sailed to the Indian Ocean, spent months hunting pirates, and then, in 1698, he captured the Quedagh Merchant — an Armenian ship sailing under French papers, carrying treasure from the Mughal Empire. Kidd believed it was a legitimate prize under his commission. The British government, facing furious protests from the Mughals, declared it piracy.

The Horror

Kidd was arrested in Boston in 1699 and shipped back to England in chains. For a year he rotted in Newgate Prison while the politicians who had commissioned him distanced themselves. His trial in May 1701 was a foregone conclusion — the government needed a body, and Kidd was it. He was found guilty of piracy and the murder of a mutinous crewman, William Moore, whom Kidd had struck with a bucket.

On 23 May 1701, he was taken to Execution Dock at Wapping, where the Thames mudflats served as the traditional gallows for pirates. The noose was placed around his neck. The cart pulled away. And then the rope snapped — or the knot slipped — and Kidd plunged into the thick mud below. He had to be dragged out, covered in filth, and hauled back up to the scaffold. The executioner tied a fresh rope. The second hanging succeeded. But the humiliation was not over.

By custom, the bodies of executed pirates were treated as warnings. Kidd’s corpse was tarred and placed in an iron gibbet cage — chains and hoops of iron — and hung from a gallows at Tilbury Point on the Thames estuary. For three years, his body swayed in the wind, visible to every ship sailing up the Thames, a blackened, rotting advertisement of what happened to men who crossed the Crown. The birds picked at him. The tide washed over him. And the men who had sent him out to hunt pirates sailed past in silence.

The Modern Relic

The relic is the river. Execution Dock is gone — the site is now a luxury hotel and apartment complex near Wapping Old Stairs, a few minutes from the Tower of London. But the Thames still flows past the spot where Kidd fell into the mud and was hanged a second time. Tilbury Point, where his body hung in chains, is still there, now part of the Port of London. And the Quedagh Merchant — the ship that made him a pirate — was found in 2007, scuttled off the coast of the Dominican Republic, its timbers still preserved in the Caribbean shallows. Kidd’s trial papers are in the British National Archives. His letter of marque — the document that was supposed to protect him — did not save his neck. The rope did that, eventually. But only on the second try.

← Back to the archive