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According to Historic UK, Captain William Kidd was an accomplished privateer by the 1690s. During a period of war between England and France, he was commissioned by the British government to defend English and American trade routes with the West Indies from pirates in the Indian Ocean. Captain Kidd's publicly ordered mandate was strictly to rid the seas of pirates, but his government supporters almost certainly knew about, if not encouraged, the capture of enemy ships, settlements, and their cargo.
So, on September 6, 1696, Captain Kidd left New York in command of the Adventure Galley, a 32-gun warship manned by a crew of 150, for the Indian Ocean. However, History Today states Captain Kidd eventually turned to piracy. Kidd would hoist a blood-red flag or a French flag to capture merchant ships, and in one instance, he hit crew member William Moore in the head with an iron bucket, inflicting an ultimately fatal wound. In 1698, Captain Kidd's crew took the Quedah Merchant, which was carrying a trove of valuable trade goods like silk, sugar, and opium, off the southern tip of India. Kidd renamed the vessel Adventure Prize and arrived in the West Indies in April 1699, where he found he had been deemed a pirate by the British government.
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