Guinness Just Named The Oldest Pirate Who Ever Lived.
Guinness World Records has certified Captain William Kidd as the oldest pirate who ever lived, a Scottish sea captain who was approximately 56 years old at the time of his execution at Execution Dock in Wapping, London, in May 1701, having spent his final years as the most wanted man on the seas after a career that began not with a choice but with a mutiny. Born in Scotland around 1645, Kidd had become a highly respected privateer by middle age, settled in New York City, owned property, married well, and was commissioned by the British Crown in 1695 to hunt down pirates and enemy French ships in the Indian Ocean. He set sail on a vessel called the Adventure Galley with a crew of 150 men and strict legal papers authorizing him to act on behalf of the Crown. Within two years, cholera had killed a third of his crew, his replacement crewmen were, in the words of one historian, the dregs of the dockside taverns, and the mounting threat of mutiny had pushed Kidd into a series of decisions he would later insist were not his own choice but his only available one. When a gunner named William Moore began fomenting open rebellion and Kidd struck him on the head with an iron-bound bucket, fracturing his skull, Moore died the following day.
What happened next became legend. Kidd captured a large Armenian merchant vessel called the Quedagh Merchant in 1698, sailing under a French flag that he argued made it a legitimate target under his commission, and returned toward New York to discover he had been denounced as a pirate. He buried some of his treasure on Gardiners Island, hoping to use its location as a bargaining chip, but was arrested in Boston in 1699 and sent to England in chains. His trial in 1701 lasted two days and was, by most accounts, thoroughly rigged: the French shipping licenses that would have supported his defense conveniently went missing before proceedings began, and his backers in the British aristocracy, who had funded the voyage and stood to be implicated in its actions, had every incentive to ensure he was convicted rather than acquitted. He was found guilty of murder and five counts of piracy and hanged twice, the first rope breaking before a second was found. His body was gibbeted over the Thames as a warning to other would-be pirates. Kidd protested his innocence to the end, and more than three centuries later, some historians agree the trial was deeply unjust. Guinness certified his age at execution as the oldest on record for any pirate in history, and noted that Captain Kidd has spent the centuries since his death inspiring novelists, treasure hunters, and the eternal question of whether a man who never wanted to be a pirate should be remembered as one.
