Books: Scapegoat, Will-o'-the-Wisp?

CAPTAIN KIDD & HIS SKELETON ISLAND —Harold T. Wilkins—Liveright ($3).

Give a dog an ill name, says the proverb, and he'll soon be hanged. Hang a man for piracy and he'll be known as a bloody pirate to all posterity. Captain Kidd, who ended his career in a gibbet on Execution Dock, has become the legendary archetype of brutal buccaneer. Says Biographer Wilkins: poor Captain Kidd was a much-maligned man. In a 411-page examination of the contemporary documents in Kidd's case, Sleuth Wilkins sniffs the cold, obscured trail like an eager beagle. His beaglish enthusiasm, indeed, takes Author Wilkins in a wide circle: after attempting to show that Captain Kidd was no rope-worthy pirate, he goes on to assert that Kidd's treasure island actually exists, and he knows where.

William Kidd was a Scotsman born (about 1645), though his parentage is as much in doubt as his early life. A seafaring man of some sort he became, and by the time he was 45 he was well known in the little colony of New York as a competent skipper and a man of substance. Where he learnt his competence and where he got his substance is conjectural: probably the East Indies. As a citizen of Manhattan, Kidd married a twice-widowed lady, built a house on the Hudson and traded in real estate. One of the lots he sold is now No. 56 Wall Street. When Trinity Church was being repaired, Captain Kidd lent a runner & tackle to hoist stones.

In the late ith Century piracy was a flourishing business—not only in the Spanish Main but off the North American coast, in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the East Indies. And the line between pirate and privateer was as thin as the line between hijacker and bootlegger. The scheme that led Captain Kidd to the gallows, according to Author Wilkins, was a technically legal venture in privateering. And it was not Kidd's idea in the first place. Robert Livingstone of Albany and Lord Bellomont, Governor of New York, concocted the scheme, got Kidd a letter of marque from William III and sent him out on the Adventure Galley to prey on pirates and incidentally make his backers some money.

With luck, Author Wilkins thinks Kidd might have stayed on the right side of the law. But his luck was out. His crew, a hard lot, was mutinous, more than half piratical from the start. And when he did bump into a pirate he sometimes embarrassingly turned out to be an old friend. At that Kidd managed to capture several apparently legal prizes.