On Thursday, May 8, 1701, Captain William Kidd, the Scot at the heart of the great London piracy uproar, entered the Old Bailey courtroom along with his fellow accused.
After two years of solitary confinement in Boston and London, he was at the mercy of the English system - and the system was out to get him.
Kidd, after his time in solitary, faced up to 400 MPS, Tories and Whigs in the House of Commons, the first accused pirate ever to appear there - and never gave them any admission whatsoever that he had been involved in piracy.
As Kidd had let the Admiralty board know earlier, he was never under secret orders to become a pirate. As Richard Zacks tells it in The Pirate Hunter, Kidd had chased pirates then his crew mutinied. But he was facing hell on earth.
