Two Famous Pirates:
Captain Kidd and Major Stede Bonnet

by Marcel Schwob

translated by Michael Wooff

William Kidd (1645-1701)

There has been no consensus on the reason why this pirate was named for a young goat. The letter of marque, in which the king of England, William III, invested him with his commission on the galley The Adventure in 1695, begins with the words: “To Our Trusty and Well-Beloved Captain William Kidd, Commander, etc. Greetings...” It is certain, however, that, from then on, that was the name he went by when at war.

Some say that, being elegant and refined, he was always in the habit of wearing delicate kid gloves lined with Flanders lace for fighting and manoeuvring. Others affirm that, in the midst of perpetrating his worst massacres, he was wont to exclaim, “I am gentle and good like a kid newly born.” Still others make out that he put his gold and jewels into very floppy bags, made of kidskin, and that this custom went back to the day when he looted a vessel laden with quicksilver, with which he filled a thousand leather pouches that still lie buried on the side of a small hill in Barbados.

It is enough to know that his black silk flag was embroidered with a skull and the head of a kid and that his seal was similarly engraved. Those who seek the numerous treasures he hid on the coasts of Asia and America get a little black goat to walk in front of them, which is to bleat at the spot where the captain buried his troves of plunder. None have succeeded in finding them.

Blackbeard himself, acting on knowledge provided by one of Kidd's former sailors, Gabriel Loff, could only locate, in the dunes on which Fort Providence now stands, scattered drops of quicksilver oozing through the sands. And all these digs are useless, for Captain Kidd declared that his hiding-places would never ever be discovered because of “the man with the bloody bucket.” Kidd was indeed haunted by this man all his life, and Kidd's treasures since his death have been haunted and defended by him.

Lord Bellomont, the governor of Barbados, annoyed by the enormous depredations of pirates in the West Indies, fitted out the galley The Adventure and obtained from the king the commission of commander for Captain Kidd. Kidd had been jealous for a long time of the notorious John Ireland, who plundered all the convoys. He promised Lord Bellomont to seize his vessel and to bring him back with his shipmates to have them executed.

Adventure carried thirty cannon and a hundred and fifty men. First of all, Kidd docked in Madeira to provide himself with wine, then in Bonavista to take salt on board. Finally, he went to Galicia where he took on all the provisions he needed. From there he made sail to enter the Red Sea where, in the Persian Gulf, there's a place on a small island called the Key of Bab.

Here it was that Captain Kidd gathered his crew and got them to hoist the black death's head flag. They all swore on the axe absolute obedience to pirate regulations. Each man had a right to vote and was equally entitled to fresh victuals and strong liquor. Card games and dice were forbidden. Lights and candles were to be extinguished at eight o'clock at night.

If a man wanted to drink later than that, he drank on deck, in the dark, out in the open. The company would not receive either a woman or a young boy. To smuggle them aboard in disguise would be punishable by death. Cannons, pistols and cutlasses had to be maintained and polished. Quarrels were to be settled on land with a sword or a pistol. The captain and the quartermaster would have a right to double shares of spoils, the first mate, the bo's'n and the gunner to a one and a half share and the other officers to a one and a quarter share. For musicians, the sabbath would be a day of rest.

The first ship they encountered was Dutch, commanded by a skipper named Mitchell. Kidd ran up the flag of France and gave chase. The ship straightaway struck French colours, prompting the pirate to hail them in French. The skipper had a Frenchman on board, who answered. Kidd asked him if he had a passport. The Frenchman said yes.

“Well, by God, by virtue of your passport, I take you to be captain of this ship.” And immediately he had him hanged at the yardarm. Then he had the Dutchmen led out one by one. He questioned them and, pretending not to understand Flemish, gave the order for each prisoner: “A Frenchman: the plank!” A plank was attached to the bowsprit. All the Dutchmen ran upon it, naked, pushed forward by the point of the bo's'n's cutlass, and jumped into the sea.

Just then Captain Kidd's gunner, Moor, raised his voice: “Captain,” he cried, “why are you killing all these men?” Moor was drunk. The captain turned round and, grabbing a bucket, brought it down on his head. Moor fell down, his skull split open. Captain Kidd had the bucket, to which some of Moor's hair had stuck with blood that had clotted, washed. No member of the crew after that was willing to soak a mop in it. The bucket was left tied to the ship's rail.

From that day forward, Captain Kidd was haunted by the man associated with the bucket. After seizing the Moorish vessel Queda, crewed by Hindus and Armenians, with ten thousand pounds of gold on board, when it came to the division of the spoils, the man with the bloody bucket was sitting on the ducats. Kidd saw him clear as day and swore. He went down to his cabin and swallowed a cup of bumbu. Then, going back on deck, he had the old bucket thrown into the sea.

After boarding the Mocco, a rich merchant vessel, no receptacle was found to measure out the captain's share of gold dust. A voice behind Kidd's back said, “Fill a bucket.” He slashed the air with his cutlass and wiped his foaming mouth. Then he had some Armenians hanged. The crew seemed to have heard nothing.

When Kidd attacked the Hirondelle, he stretched out on his bunk after the share-out. When he woke. he found himself wet through with sweat and summoned a sailor to ask him for something to wash himself in. The man brought him water in a pewter bowl. Kidd stared at him and yelled: “Is this how a gentleman of fortune conducts himself? Wretch! You've brought me a bucket full of blood!” The sailor fled. Kidd had him disembark and marooned him with a rifle, a powder horn and a bottle of water.

Kidd had no other reason for burying his plunder in different solitary spots, amid sands, than his personal conviction that the murdered gunner came every night with his bucket to empty the hold where the gold was kept and throw it into the sea.

Kidd was apprehended off the coast of New York. Lord Bellomont sent him to London. He was condemned to the gallows. They hanged him on Execution Dock with his red coat and his gloves. When the hangman pulled over his eyes the black hood, Captain Kidd struggled and shouted: “Good God! I knew he'd put his bucket on my head!” His blackened corpse hung there in chains for more than twenty years.

Stede Bonnet (1688-1718)

Major Stede Bonnet was a pensioned-off army officer who lived on his plantations on the island of Barbados circa 1715. His fields of sugar cane and coffee trees gave him an income, and he pleasurably smoked tobacco that he grew himself. Though he had been married, he had not been happy domestically, and it was said that his wife had addled his brain. Indeed his mania only started to take hold of him late in his life and, to begin with, his neighbours and his servants had innocently acquiesced to it.

Major Stede Bonnet's mania took the following form. He began at every turn to deprecate terrestrial warfare and to praise the navy. The only names that he could talk about were those of Henry Avery, Charles Vane, Benjamin Hornigold and Edward Teach. They were, according to him, fearless navigators, enterprising men. They were at that time scouring the waters of the Caribbean.

If it came about that someone called them pirates in front of the major, he would exclaim: “God be praised then for having allowed these pirates, as you call them, to set an example of the candid and communal life led by our ancestors. Then there were no wealthy owners, or guardians for women, or slaves to provide us with sugar, cotton and indigo but a generous God dispensed these things and each of us received a share in them. This is why I so greatly admire free spirits who share and share alike and together lead the life of brothers-in-arms.”

Walking through his plantations, the major would often tap a worker on the shoulder: “Would you not do better, fool, to stow on some ship of the line or brigantine the bales of that miserable plant over whose shoots you expend so much sweat and labour?”

Nearly every evening, the major brought together his servants under the lean-tos for grain where he read to them by candlelight as all the while colourful insects buzzed about, the great deeds of pirates on Hispaniola and Tortuga Island, for these loose sheets of paper announced to villages and farms their acts of plunder.

“Vane's a paragon!” exclaimed the major. “So is Hornigold, a veritable cornucopia filled with gold! As for Avery: sublime, laden with the jewels of the Great Moghul Emperor and the king of Madagascar! And the list goes on...”

These were all speeches that the major's servants listened to taken aback and in silence, and his words were interrupted only by the slight dull thuds of small lizards as they fell down from the roof, fright having loosened their suction pads. Then the major, shielding the candle with his hand, traced with his stick among leaves of tobacco all the naval manoeuvres of these great captains and threatened with ”the law of Moses” (the name pirates give to a beating consisting of forty blows) whoever might fail to understand the finer points of buccaneering strategy.

In the end, Stede Bonnet gave in to temptation. Having bought an old, ten-cannon sloop, he fitted it out with everything relating to piracy, not neglecting to include several black flags emblazoned with the white skull and crossbones and the name of his vessel: the Revenge. He forthwith embarked seventy of his servants and set out to sea at night, heading due west towards Saint Vincent.

He knew nothing about maritime things. He had taken on board no provisions, counting on plundering them. During that first night, however, no ship was visible. Major Stede Bonnet decided they would need to attack a village.

Finally, going by what he remembered from reading about these things, he had them each swallow a pint of rum. This they did but, contrary to what was normally supposed to happen, their faces did not, as a result, become ferocious. They moved more or less in formation to port and to starboard and, leaning over the rails, vomited. After this the Revenge arrived at Saint Vincent and, staggering, they disembarked.

It was early in the morning and the astonished faces of the villagers did not incite them to anger. Even the major himself was in no mood to yell. He purchased rice and dry vegetables with some salt pork, paying for them — in pirate fashion and most nobly it seemed to him — with two barrels of rum and an old hawser. After this, his men, with some difficulty, managed to re-launch the Revenge and Major Stede Bonnet, cock-a-hoop with his first conquest, returned to the sea.

He sailed all day and all night, not even knowing by what wind he was driven. Toward dawn on the second day, having nodded off against the helmsman's binnacle, much hampered by his cutlass and his blunderbuss, Major Stede Bonnet was awoken by a cry: “Ahoy there in the sloop!”

And he saw before him, at a cable's length, the bowsprit of a vessel moving up and down. A man with a very big beard was standing at the prow. A small black flag was waving at the mast.

“Run up our pirate ensign!” said Major Stede Bonnet.

And, remembering his title was a land army rank, he decided on the spot to take another name, following illustrious precedents. He replied instantaneously: “Sloop the Revenge, commanded by myself, Captain Thomas, with my brothers-in-arms.”

At this the bearded man began to laugh: “Well met, brother,” he said. “We can sail in convoy. And come to drink a little rum on the Queen Anne's Revenge.”

Major Stede Bonnet then realised that he had met Captain Teach — Blackbeard — the most famous of those he admired. But his joy was less than he thought it would have been. He had a premonition he was going to lose his pirate's freedom. He was taciturn going aboard, though Teach received him, glass in hand, most graciously.

“Brother,” said Blackbeard, “I like the cut of your jib. But you navigate imprudently. If you'll take my advice, Captain Thomas, you will stay on our good ship and I'll have Richards here, a capital fellow and very experienced, take charge of your sloop. On Blackbeard’s ship, you'll have plenty of time to take advantage of the life of freedom that we gentlemen of fortune enjoy.”

Major Stede Bonnet did not dare refuse. His cutlass and his blunderbuss were taken off him. He swore his oath of allegiance on an axe — for Blackbeard could not stand the sight of a Bible — and they assigned to him his ration of ship's biscuit and rum, along with his putative share in future seizures.

The major had not imagined that the life of a pirate could be so regimented. He was now subjected to both Blackbeard's rages and the agonies of navigation. Having left Barbados as a gentleman of leisure in order to become a pirate as the fancy took him, he was in this way forced, on the Queen Anne's Revenge, now to be a pirate in earnest.

He led this life for three months, during which he helped his master seize thirteen ships, then found a way to go back on his old ship, the Revenge, still under the command of Richards. In this he was prudent for, the following night, Blackbeard was attacked in the inlet to his island of Ocracoke by Lieutenant Maynard, who had come there from Bath Town. Blackbeard was killed in this battle and the lieutenant ordered that his head be cut off and attached to the end of his bowsprit, which was done.

Poor Captain Thomas, however, fled in the direction of South Carolina and sailed on sadly for several weeks. The governor of Charleston, warned of his approach, delegated Colonel Rhett to arrest him on Sullivan's Island.

Captain Thomas let himself be taken. He was brought to Charleston with great pomp and ceremony under the name of Major Stede Bonnet, which he reclaimed as soon as he could. In Charleston he was put in jail till 10 November 1718 when he appeared before the Vice-Admiralty Court. The Chief Justice, Nicholas Trott, condemned him to death in the very fine piece of oratory that follows:

“Major Stede Bonnet, you have been found guilty on two counts of piracy but you know in your own mind that you have pillaged at least thirteen vessels so that eleven further counts could be brought against you. But two will suffice for us for they breach God's commandment in Exodus: Thou shalt not steal. But you are also guilty of homicide, and murderers will have their place in the fiery lake of burning sulphur, which is the second death.

“Oh! Major Stede Bonnet, I have reason to fear that the religious principles your youth was imbued with have been corrupted by the bad life you've led and by your excessive interest in the literature and the vain philosophy of this age, for if your delight had been in the law of the Lord and you had meditated on it day and night, you would have found that His word was a lamp to your feet and a light for your path. But this you have not done.

“All that is left to you now is to trust in the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, who came to save what was lost and who has promised never to drive away whoever comes to Him so that, if you want to go back to Him, though belatedly, like the workers of the eleventh hour in the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, He will still receive you. Nevertheless, it is the verdict of this court that you be taken to a place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck until dead.”

Major Stede Bonnet, having listened contritely to Chief Justice Nicholas Trott's closing speech, was hanged the same day in Charleston as a thief and a pirate.

Copyright © ab 1894 by Marcel Schwob (1867-1905)
Translation © 2025 by Michael Woof

Proceed to the translator’s commentary: “Two of the Imaginary Lives of Marcel Schwob.”