Huzzah! To Pirate Women

Review by Kevin P. McDonald

The Pirate’s Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
By Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos
Hanover Square Press (Harper Collins)
November 2022, 288 pp.

In the late seventeenth century, New York was a place of enormous promise and potential. Located on the southern tip of a relatively small island, it was ideally situated for commerce. Naturally sheltered from the stormy Atlantic, the colonial outpost had direct access to the interior northern woodlands and its lucrative fur trade via the mighty Mahicanittuk River (i.e., the Hudson). Surrounded by a broad estuary with an enormous deep-water harbor, the settlement might easily accommodate hundreds of local and transatlantic trading vessels at any given moment. Though still emergent, its economic possibilities had been evident to the English, who took possession of the colony from the Dutch in 1664. Exactly two decades later, into the harbor sailed fourteen-year-old Sarah Bradley, whose life story is richly and imaginatively told by Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos in The Pirate's Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd.

When Sarah arrived from England with her father and two younger brothers, New York was very much still a peripheral colonial port on the western Atlantic littoral. While legitimate merchants and trade were the norm, in the next decade the town would develop into a full-blown pirates’ nest, precipitating an imperial crisis that eventually led to the recall of the governor and (spoiler alert) the trial and execution of the pirate captain, William Kidd, Sarah’s third husband and the father of two of her children. While the legend of Captain Kidd might be well known (especially the fantastical tales of his buried treasure), the history of Sarah Kidd is far less so. With colonial New York and its watery environs as the panoramic backdrop, Geanacopoulos frames the familiar saga of Kidd in new and important ways, focusing on both the public and clandestine ways in which Sarah Kidd assisted in her husband’s piratical enterprise, including his legal defense.

In crafting this story, the author makes good use of numerous archives, including the New York Public Library, the National Archives in London, as well as various collections scattered throughout New England; and the endnotes make clear she has also mined many of the numerous secondary sources on William Kidd. In doing so, she has produced a lively and entertaining biography of Sarah Kidd, from her arrival to the city through her multiple marriages and business dealings, with the book’s main focus on her relationship with William and the aftermath of his notorious demise. The narrative hits full sail when the privateer-turned-pirate returns from the Indian Ocean and Sarah becomes his accomplice in crime. Overall, the book is a stirring and fast paced yarn that helps reveal another layer of the Kidd saga, and more broadly suggests that the old axiom, “behind every great man is a great woman,” might be true even when dealing with pirates.

While the book is well-researched, a fundamental question must arise: is it a work of nonfiction? The book’s jacket seems to hedge on this point, referring to it alternately as “a compelling tale,” a “landmark work of narrative nonfiction,” and “a sweeping historical story of romance and adventure.” The author undoubtedly takes many creative liberties with the sources and there is much in these pages that ventures well beyond “narrative non-fiction” and into the realm of imagination and speculation, if not outright invention. From the outset, in a highly inventive prologue, the author smartly plays on the infamous “buried treasure” legend, vividly painting a scene of Sarah Kidd on her deathbed in 1744. As the harbor gulls cry out dramatically with alarm and her adult-aged children quietly scrutinize her last breath from the keyhole, the septuagenarian pirate widow passes from this world with the secret location of the buried treasure still intact. This is truly stirring prose and a great narrative hook to grab the attention of the reader. But this is not the last of the eavesdropping-at-the-keyhole passages, and “the desperate caw of seabirds” (p. 45) will likewise provide a theatrical leitmotif throughout the chapters.

If it is one thing to creatively craft such a scene in a prologue, it is another thing altogether when these imagined scenes appear throughout a book billed as “nonfiction.” While some of these inventions might seem small or trivial, such as the very specific but unrecorded meeting places of key events—a tavern here, an attic there, an overnight stay in a “pirate” ship’s cabin—other narrative elements are presented, or at least suggested, as being factual but without adequate substantiation for a work of history. Among these include the insinuation that William Kidd may have murdered Sarah’s second husband, John Oort, in order to make her available as a widow; and that Sarah helped author Kidd’s written legal defense, a document now in the colonial archives known as “Kidd’s Narrative.” Were this to be true, then the author’s argument that Sarah was “a street-savvy woman with keen instincts” (p. 132) is belied by the contents of the Narrative itself, which is riddled with falsehoods, as well as key omissions, which the London authorities pounced upon at William Kidd’s trial for piracy. The sources, as they were, are also manipulated for historical romance purposes: in an age when propertied women did not remain widows for long, Sarah nonetheless married William Kidd “for love” (p. 47); she helped decorate Kidd’s cabin to make it “more cozy,” then gifted him a perfumed linen handkerchief, with her embroidered initials, “that smelled like her” (p. 87-88); and the author describing her protagonist as, “feisty (and)…sexy in a no-nonsense way” (p. 200), are but a few of innumerable examples.  

The one area where historical imagination is unfortunately a necessity is uncovering the lives of enslaved persons, as archival sources across the board have very little, if anything, of substance to say. There are potential moments of such engagement in the book, as Sarah, William Kidd, and her other husbands were all slave owners and regularly relied upon enslaved laborers, whether in farming grain to produce flour at the grist mill or as seafaring slaves in the maritime trade. The author acknowledges this and describes the significance of enslaved laborers in colonial New York, and well as in the pirate trade with Madagascar, of which William Kidd engaged. Indeed, he returned from the Indian Ocean with several young enslaved Malagasy, “gifting” one young boy each to his collaborators, Robert Livingston and Duncan Campbell. Geanacopoulos does not shy from Sarah Kidd’s acceptance of slavery, even imagining a scene where Kidd’s own young children come face to face with these enslaved Malagasy, who would have been about the same age (p. 122). The author’s explanation for this slave trade, however, falls a bit short, as she describes it as “a business arrangement with the tribal leaders in Madagascar: pirate loot exchanged for enslaved people” (p. 121). Instead, it was much more complicated, with Euro-American pirates and brokers most often operating as the middle men. Indeed, when one colonial pirate broker attempted to enslave some of the local coastal Malagasy inhabitants, rather than the accepted practice of raiding distant kingdoms and communities for captives, the locals rose up and slaughtered dozens of the pirate-slavers.[1] Lastly on slavery, the “Great Negro Plot” of 1741 crops up in the concluding chapter but appears more as filler or background, as there was no tangible connection to these events with the protagonist or her family.

There are also a few, mostly minor, incorrect or questionable details, or at the very least, some areas that deserved a bit more historical context. In sailing out of New York Harbor, the direction is due south, so a bowsprit would not have been “pointed toward London’s River Thames,” which is east-northeast (p. 70); before receiving his privateer commission to capture pirates in 1696, Kidd had never sailed to the Indian Ocean, so it is not clear how he would have “understood the monsoon season” (p. 89), at least by experience; Governor Fletcher was recalled from New York to London not because colonial revenues were short, but from (mostly accurate) allegations he was dealing with pirates (p. 91); the Jolly Roger, as a pirate symbol, had not yet been invented in the 1690s and the red or “bloody” flag was commonly hoisted aboard men-of-war and privateer ships, signaling that “no quarter” would be given unless the targeted vessel surrendered (p. 134); there is no contemporary eyewitness evidence that Lord Cornbury dressed in women’s clothes (p. 201)--instead, the allegations were part of a politically-motivated character assassination;[2] and while the General History of the Pyrates (1724) is a fascinating read and many “contemporary pirate enthusiasts” (p. 204) might consider it to be an accurate account, its status is viewed much more problematically among academic scholars.

The minor flaws and many embellishments of the author should not obscure the fact that in a period when men were more often the ones who married multiple times, especially given the travails of childbirth in the early modern era, Sarah Kidd outlasted four husbands and raised five children, a truly extraordinary achievement on its own. That she was able to recover and thrive from the emotional and economic impact of her infamous husband’s piratical activities, trial, and execution make her that much more remarkable, especially as the marriages of other piratical couples, such as Captain Giles Shelley, and his wife, Hilligout, dissolved in the aftermath of the 1690s piracy cycle in New York.[3] In the end, it is a tribute to the author for exhuming the life story of Sarah Kidd in a lively and entertaining fashion, and shedding light on the all-too-often obscured personal and private lives of pirate wives and their families. The publishers might have more properly billed the book as, “richly imagined but based on a true story,” and if they have not done so already, it would not be at all surprising if the screenwriters come calling. In that spirit, this reviewer raises a cup to the author and cheers, “Huzzah!,” as the seagulls cry out from the harbor…

Notes

[1] See Kevin P. McDonald, Pirates Merchants, Settlers and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World (UC Press, 2015), p. 89.

[2] To be sure, Geanacopoulos is not the only recent author to repeat the assertion, but the cross-dressing myth was thoroughly debunked in Patricia Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (UNC Press, 1998).

[3] See Kevin P. McDonald, Pirates Merchants, Settlers and Slaves, p. 55-58.

Kevin P. McDonald is an Associate Professor of Colonial America and Atlantic World History, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. He has previously taught at The Cooper Union and New York University and is the author of Pirates, Merchants, Settlers and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2015), which explores a global pirate trade network and shows the illicit ways American colonists, especially New Yorkers, met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods.