Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (33 page)

Piracy, as Robert C. Ritchie notes in his interesting book
Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates,
was a growth area for the New York economy. Pirates could come to New York “to refit and reprovision their ships.” The local New York merchants also got involved in a clever entrepreneurial triangle trade with Madagascar: the Indian Ocean buccaneers could be outfitted and their booty exchanged for luxury goods, which, at enormous markups, could then be transferred to ships headed to Europe, thereby escaping the scrutiny of customs agents. All highly illegal, but New York merchants were shy neither about employing pirates nor about bribing the British colony's governor to look the other way.

“Encouraged by such lack of oversight,” writes Ritchie, “New York became notorious as a pirate haven and center for supplying the Indian
Ocean pirates. Its streets and alehouses were filled with buccaneers, and its citizens were kept awake by their lewd activities with prostitutes. ‘Turkey’ and ‘Araby’ gold and strange coins of all kinds added to the city's diverse currency. In a depressed economy this influx was highly welcome, and while New York was not quite as outrageous as Port Royale in its heyday, it enjoyed a similar reputation. It resembled any of the out-of-the-way places on the periphery of imperial control that enjoyed a living from sea robbery.”

This was the New York that now drew in Kidd. His ex-confederates had already left, but he found an interesting political situation. The town was split between the proponents of Jacob Leisler, a staunch Dutch New York Protestant who had led an insurrection against the British patricians and Papists, and the anti-Leislerians, who were the Establishment. Kidd threw his support (and cannons) behind the anti-Leislerians, which proved the winning faction. He was rewarded £150 for his services. He also now had powerful New York friends who helped set him up in business. Looking about, he took a bride in 1692, the wealthy widow Sarah Bradley Cox Oort. Soon after, they were ensconced in 119-21 Pearl Street.

There seems to have been much marrying of widows. It was, among other things, one of the easiest ways to secure local properties. But one mustn't cast mercenary aspersions on Kidd's conjugal motives; perhaps this was a love-match. As one who married a widow myself, let me say that those who bring consolation to widows, a second chance at love, deserve a special place in heaven. How often we must win back the recidivist hearts of our mates, who keep being drawn to the shades of their first husbands, finding them that much more perfect and empathetic, in retrospect, than ourselves.

So I sympathize with Kidd. He seemed to have every intention of settling down as a respectable burgher; he and his wife had a daughter, and purchased a pew in Trinity Church. In fact, he provided the block and tackle for hoisting the stones of the newly constructed church. “After a few more years,” the authors of
Gotham
(Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace) cheerfully tell us, “Kidd had acquired fine silverware, a large plot of land north of Wall Street, and an excellent wine cellar; his wife was the proud owner of the first ‘Turkey worked’ carpet seen in New York.”

After such splendor, he plateaued. Kidd saw his old compatriots, the pirates, spending their gold coins freely in the streets, having a good time,
reeling with grog, while he, nose to the grindstone, slaved away for more Turkish carpets. It made him itchy. Had to. But he was not ready just yet to throw off the legitimate life. So, with two of his patrons, wealthy merchant Robert Livingston (Scottish-born, like Kidd himself ) and the powerful Earl of Bellomont, he cooked up a scheme to extract a royal commission from the King of England to
—capture
pirates, in exchange for part of their spoils. It seems that piracy was undergoing a moral transition in people's minds, from a socially sanctioned activity to a deeply disapproved-of one: the age of scampish maritime risk was nearing an end; British merchants now wanted the seas made more orderly, to extend their trade in a safe, regulated manner. Kidd knew the hangouts and habits of privateers, he knew the players; what better use of his background skills could be made than to convert him into a sort of bounty hunter?

The King agreed. So Kidd was given a ship, the
Adventure Galley
(wonderful name), in 1696 for the purpose of catching pirates, and also to seize any French merchant ships he chanced upon, England and France being then at war. Having selected from the docks of New York a large crew of 155 rough-and-tumble sailors prepared for fights at sea and lured by a promise of shares, forthwith he set sail for Madagascar. Of course it would be Madagascar, because that was where the pirates hung out those days, in between runs—Madagascar and the Malabar coast; and the third place, we know now, was New York. Why he should not have stayed home and trapped pirates from his snuggery in Pearl Street, I am not entirely sure. At any event, such was his poor luck that when he got to Madagascar, it happened that all the pirate ships had already left that place in search of prey. He sailed on to the coast of Malabar, but here too he was unsuccessful. “His provisions were every day wasting, and his ship began to want repair,” reported Captain Charles Johnson in his book
Lives of the Most Notorious Pirates.
Most contemporary scholars now suspect Captain Johnson was none other than Daniel Defoe:
Lives of the Most Notorious Pirates
has the founder of the English novel's documentary flair, his wryness, his quick adoption of a persona; and, as we all know, Defoe loved pirate stories. To quote further from that charming account:

It does not appear all this while that he had the least design of turning Pirate, for near Mohill and Johanna both, he met with several Indian ships richly
laden, to which he did not offer the least violence, though he was strong enough to have done what he pleased with them; and the first outrage or depredation I find he committed upon mankind, was after repairing his ship and leaving Johanna, when he touched at a place called Mabbee upon the Red Sea, where he took some Guinea corn from the natives, by force.

After this he sailed to Bab's Key, a place upon a little island at the entrance to the Red Sea. Here it was that he first began to open himself to his ship's company and let them understand that he intended to change his measures; for happening to talk of the Mocha Fleet which was to sail that way he said,
we have been unsuccessful hitherto, but courage, boys, we'll make our fortunes out of this fleet.
And finding that none of them appeared averse to it, he ordered a boat out, well manned, to go upon the coast to make discoveries, commanding them to take a prisoner and bring to him, or get intelligence any way they could. The boat returned in a few days, bringing him word that they saw fourteen or fifteen ships ready to sail, some with English, some with Dutch and some with Moorish colours.

We cannot account for this sudden change in his conduct, otherwise than by supposing that he first meant well, while he had hopes of making his fortune by taking of Pirates; but now, weary of ill-success and fearing lest his owners, out of humour at their great expenses, should dismiss him and he should want employment and be marked out for an unlucky man; rather, I say, than run the risk of poverty, he resolved to do his business one way, since he could not do it another.

The rest of the story is an illustration of the adage that one might as well be hanged for a wolf as a sheep. Kidd plunders and seizes ships, robs the Indians, and even kills one of his crew, the gunner Moore, in a fit of rage by striking him over the head with a bucket, after Moore had railed at the captain for ruining them all. Yet what surprises us in the contemporary accounts is how cautiously Kidd acted, for the most part, even when his crew threatened to mutiny because he was being insufficiently piratical. Kidd was by no means the most ruthless pirate; but he became the most notorious, the subject of ballads and speeches in Parliament, largely because of bad timing. His protector, the Earl of Bellomont, being a Whig, the Tories seized on this connection to bring about a change in government;
so Kidd became the fall guy, the symbol of all who flew the Jolly Roger. Bellomont put as much distance as possible between himself and his former protégé. When Kidd sailed back to New York, in fact, he walked into a trap set by Bellomont, and was quickly arrested and sent to Boston, before being shipped to London for trial. Captain Kidd spent several years in the hideous Newgate Prison while awaiting trial (there were actually four trials of Kidd and his confederates). Later, Bellomont's damage control included a curious pamphlet issued in 1701, “A Full Account of the Actions of the Late Famous Pyrate, Capt. Kidd, with the Proceedings against Him, and a Vindication of the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Bellomont, Lord Coloony, Late Governor of New England, and other Honourable Persons, from the Unjust Reflections cast upon them, By a Person of Quality.” This whitewash of Bellomont shifts the blame to Kidd and Livingston. Kidd, for his part, insisted in court that his men had forced him into piracy, threatening to kill him if he did not do so, and that the case against him was based on perjured testimony. Defoe summarizes: “But the evidence being full and particular against him, he was found Guilty…. Wherefore about a week later, Capt. Kid, Nicholas Churchill, James How, Gabriel Loff, Hugh Parrot, Abel Owens and Darby Mullins, were executed at Execution Dock, and afterwards hung up in chains at some distance from each other, down the river, where their bodies hung exposed for many years.”

No question, Kidd engaged in piracy, though the moral meaning of that fact had shifted in his lifetime. Ritchie argues that ultimately he was “crushed by the forces of bureaucracy and the modern world.” Even his old haunt pulled away from the practice. “In New York the loss to pirates … of three of the four ships that went to Madagascar in 1698 dimmed the ardor of the New York merchant community.”

AS I WANDER DOWN PEARL STREET, I already know it is unlikely I'll find a shred of Captain Kidd's residence here, amid these glass towers. In 1695 New York, 119-21 Pearl might theoretically have fallen somewhere between Broadway and Broad Street; but in today's New York, that stretch covers a mere two blocks, and the buildings are so large that, by Broad Street, we have only arrived at number 32. Nevertheless, I am unwilling to
surrender, determined to find 119-21 Pearl Street and commune with
it,
because, even if it turns out to be located ten blocks away from the original site of Kidd's residence, it may still have some numerical, cabalistic significance.

How can this bland passageway with so little character be Pearl Street? Do streets have immortal souls? Will they speak to us still of what they have seen, even when they have been completely made over, inch by inch?

Pearl Street has gone through so much. The Dutch named it “da Paerle Straet,” from the mounds of oyster shells left behind by the Lenape Indians. When fewer than a hundred structures existed on the island, strings of houses already clustered on Pearl, as well as the first church built in Manhattan (“Edwardus Bogardus, Dominie, 1633,” the plaque informs us), along the East River shore. In typical Dutch fashion, they put in a Strand, a row of tall houses with stepped gables along the water. The city's first mercantile exchange was located on Pearl Street, and the Dutch West India Company erected a large warehouse there. When the English took over the colony, Pearl remained a thriving business street, with auction houses, retail shops, and wholesalers, who stacked their goods on the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians “to jump over boxes, or squeeze yourself, as best you can, between bales of merchandize,” wrote a contemporary witness. African slaves were traded in Pearl Street's countinghouses. Fraunces' Tavern, on the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets, was
the
fashionable watering-hole. Herman Melville was born on Pearl Street, the logical place for his successful merchant-father, Allan, to locate, before he overextended himself and went bankrupt. Georgian mansions gave way to Greek Revival style in the late 1820s; the Pearl Street House, a fine hotel for the business class, opened its doors. After the great fire of 1835, which burned down much of the district, the dry-goods and hardware establishments relocated uptown, which left Pearl more purely a financial center, honeycombed with bankers, brokers, and accounting and law firms. Orators railed against the sins of Wall Street and Pearl Street in one breath.

The blocks parallel and to the east of Pearl Street, which were added by landfill (Water Street, Front Street, and South Street, begun in 1798), absorbed the brunt of waterfront vice—the taverns, brothels, and crooked boardinghouses that shanghaied sailors—insulating Pearl, for the most part, from those depredations. Still, by the mid-nineteenth century,
women had taken to sitting on the decaying stoops of Pearl Street's tenements and brownstones, accosting men from the financial and waterfront districts. Then Chinese and Jewish residents started moving in, spilling over from their ghettos in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Pearl Street was losing its identity as a premier thoroughfare, on the way to becoming an afterthought in the consciousness of New York.

I pass by some Georgian and Federal style houses, including Fraunces' Tavern, reconstructed from scratch in 1907 in a hopeful manner. I like the way Ada Louise Huxtable calls it, in her
Classic New York,
“a fine, educated guess” and “a scholarly fake.” (New York schoolchildren, myself included, were brought here on field trips and told without qualification that here George Washington made his farewell address to the troops.) I pass by Coenties Slip, once an inlet of the East River, and then on to Hanover Square, where other vestiges of old New York, such as the brownstonefaçaded India House (first a brokerage house, then the Cotton Exchange, next a consulate, now a club) and Delmonico's Restaurant, continue to share the limelight with postmodernist behemoths. Hanover Square, formed by winding streets all debouching into it, and enclosed like a stage set, has a certain spatial resemblance to an Italian piazza, quite unusual for New York. From the second half of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, this square was the city's business center. You can still see elegant basement restaurants—like the oyster cellars of old, where New Yorkers once guzzled oysters as their birthright—now catering to a dignified, gray-suited, broker clientele.