How accurate?

If anyone wonders how accurate this movie is, the answer is very, very little.

A children's book Captain Kidd's cat by Robert Lawson, was far more accurate about Kidd's career, despite being narrated by the title character.

You might not want to take a talking cat's word for it, but many historians agree that there is little evidence that Kidd committed the crimes that made him notorious.

Little is known about Kidd's early life. He was a privateer in the West Indies before he became famous, and it is possible that he may have crossed the line into piracy during that period. But there is no reason to accuse someone of unrecorded crimes that he might possibly have committed, otherwise most of us could be accused of murdering people that nobody has any evidence ever existed, merely because we could possibly have done so.

As for the piracy Kidd was accused of, Kidd insisted that the two prizes he captured showed him French passes when he boarded them, and thus they were lawful prizes. And of course his argument was perfectly valid. Even if the ships had been one hundred percent English owned and manned, if they showed French passes when they were boarded Kidd did nothing wrong when seizing them.

Possibly Kidd and his crew could have been forced to return the merchandise to the merchants it was taken from if it was discovered that the ships had been really owned by Englishmen using French passes because they thought Kidd's ship was French.

But it would be nonsense to accuse Kidd and his men of piracy if they were shown French passes when they boarded the suspect vessels. No privateer would have been safe from execution if he could be punished for taking a prize on the base of enemy papers which later turned out to be false. Executing someone for piracy when the officers of the seized ships showed passes from enemy governments would have made privateering impossible. That would have been a good thing of course, but the English government was all in favor of privateering, so singling out Kidd for punishment as a pirate was unjust.

Kidd was unable to produce the French passes at his trial, but they were discovered two hundred years too late to acquit him of piracy.

When Kidd was convicted of piracy the goods he seized were taken by the admiralty as stolen goods and were eventually sold and the money used by the government. The Armenian owners of the goods sued to get them back or for compensation, saying that since the taking of the goods had been ruled piracy they should be given back to their rightful owners.

The admiralty replied that they didn't doubt the word of the owners but there was no legal evidence of ownership of the goods, merely untranslatable Persian inscriptions on the packages, and so they could not legally return the goods to those who claimed them. in other words, the admiralty, who had a lot of connections with merchants in the the biggest seaport in the world which carried out much trade with the Near East, could not take the trouble to look for someone who could read Persian and give them proof of ownership.

Not all acts of piracy were carried out on ships. Sometimes landlubber government officials could be at least as much pirates as Captain Kidd was.

As for the murder of William Moore "by the shore, by the shore", the testimony was that William Moore was urging and inciting Kidd and the crew to attack a Dutch vessel which was in sight, which would have been an act of piracy. Kidd hit him on the head with a heavy bucket and Moore later died of his injuries.

In the 1860s, a British merchant captain actually did what people joke about on boats -- he made boy stowaways "get out and walk" over sea ice to the shore. And he was acquitted of murdering those boys who didn't make it!

It would greatly increase my faith in the justice of British maritime law if the verdicts in those two cases were reviewed and reversed, with Kidd decreed innocent of Moore's murder and the other captain convicted of murder.

In short, many historians believe that Kidd was a very minor pirate, or even totally innocent of piracy, and that he was framed and railroaded by the English government for political reasons.