The Guardian

London,

One of the ironies of pirate history is that many of the great names that sent generations of small children diving under the bedcovers are either completely fictional or weren’t proper pirates at all. Take Long John Silver, who gave my guts a genuine twist of fear as a nine-year-old: Stevenson said he was based on W E Henley, who is well-documented as having been a law-abiding citizen sans parrot. Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard?

Nothing but a psychopathic loser who robbed fishing boats. Henry Morgan? A rum-sozzled soak better at torturing prisoners than capturing treasure. And Captain Kidd — the same frightful fiend who starred in such classics as the 1952 spellbinder ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd’?

Not quite. Richard Zacks has set about finding the real person behind the Kidd legend. It is not an easy task, but we know we are in good salty hands when his opening page has a confederate of Kidd identified by his prepuce. This is a rumbustious romp full of telling details, and is one of the best descriptions of pirate life since the great Captain Johnson’s ‘A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates of 1724’.

Kidd was hanged for piracy at Wapping, east London, in 1701. The fascination with him, however, is based more on the legend that his buried treasure lies somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Added to this is the spice of transatlantic rivalry. In one version — the one Zacks follows — Kidd was an adopted son of America, a freedom-loving diamond in the rough who was dragged back to London and hanged by turncoat toffs, men happy to pocket stolen goods and see the captain swing.

The story kicks off when Kidd is seduced by a gang of English lords into a hare-brained scheme to capture pirates in the Indian Ocean and share out their loot.

Zacks does not delay us with analysis of such things, nor does he dwell on the fact that Kidd must have seen the moral shadiness of the deal from the start. This Kidd is a salt-of-the-earth (and the seas) character with a temper and a romantic streak who believes, naively, that his backers will stand by him. Here in lies both the book’s strengths and its weakness. In taking sides, Zacks builds a compelling tale. On the other hand, by sticking to personal detail he loses the big picture.

After he set sail for the east, Kidd’s behaviour in the Indian Ocean was suspicious: he skipped the chance to attack the known pirate stronghold of Isle St Marie off the coast of Madagascar in preference to shadowing pilgrim fleets. Later, with a rebellious crew hungry for loot, he allowed the taking of the richly laden Quedah Merchant, an Indian-owned vessel with an English captain, Armenian flag and French papers. The capture was distinctly dubious: although England was at war with France, Kidd had raised French colours to elicit the French papers (ships routinely carried those of several nations).

Having satisfied his crew’s greed, he eventually sailed for St Marie where he tiptoed around a genuine pirate, Robert Culliford. Zacks’ book has many side plots and diversionary voyages along the way, but the main one — that of pirate Culliford — is a tour-de-force. Culliford had been a colleague of Kidd’s in the early Caribbean days but went “on account”, that is fully piratical, taking one of Kidd’s ships with him.

Again, I would have preferred the action to be delayed for just a moment to digest this properly, but Zacks never lets up: we’re off with Kidd back to New York for the carve-up by the evil Lord Bellomont, who strips what he can from his former protégé and then dispatches him to London to be tried. The trial itself was a travesty. Kidd was thrown into solitary confinement at Newgate prison — another memorable description here — and then hit with the unexpected charge of murder.

Despite its unapologetic partiality towards Kidd and a few geographical errors, this is a tremendous book, closely woven and cross-referenced, and full of verve and wit. The final image is of the corpse of Kidd, the half-hearted buccaneer, gibbeted at Tilbury Reach. Meanwhile, Culliford, the full-blooded pirate, walks free from Newgate, his treasure still intact. Here, at long last, is a true pirate to send the kids diving under the covers again.