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Adventure Galley, also known as Adventure, was an English merchant ship captained by Scottish sea captain William Kidd. She was a type of hybrid ship that combined square rigged sails with oars to give her manoeuvrability in both windy and calm conditions. The vessel was launched at the end of 1695 and was acquired by Kidd the following year to ...
- Overview
- Design and purchase
- Voyages of the Adventure Galley
- Bibliography
, also known as Adventure, was an English sailing galley captained by William Kidd, the notorious privateer. She was built to an unusual design that combined conventional square rigged sails with oars to give her manoeuvrability in both windy and calm conditions. The vessel was launched at the end of 1695 and was acquired by Kidd the following year...
The vessel was acquired for Kidd by a consortium of investors who backed a scheme to hunt down pirates, recover their booty and redistribute it among the investors. He had enlisted the support of Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont and governor-general of the British Province of New York and the ambitious Robert Livingston the Younger, who later became the mayor of Albany, New York. With Coote's backing, Kidd obtained a commission from King William III to operate as a privateer. The other investors who came aboard the scheme after it met with the king's approval were the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, the Lord Chancellor, Sir Edmund Harrison and John Somers. The king himself was not an investor but was nonetheless entitled to one tenth of the proceeds.
The vessel was purchased for £8,000 (£968,571 today) in August 1696. She had been launched on 4 December 1695 from Captain William Castle's dockyard in Deptford on the outskirts of London. Her design combined sails and oars, an unusual combination for warships at that time, that incorporated three ship-rigged masts and two banks of oars. This allowed her to make 14 knots (26 km/h; 16 mph) under full sail and 3 knots (5.6 km/h; 3.5 mph) under oar. Although rowing was slow it enabled the ship to manoeuvre against the wind, or in calm conditions where other vessels that relied on sails alone could not make any progress. A number of British warships had been built to similar designs following the lessons learned from the wars against the Barbary pirates of North Africa, whose galleys had proved formidable opponents, and trading companies such as the East India Company (EIC) also built sailing galleys. Castle's yard, where Adventure Galley was built, was one of the largest private shipyards in England and was a supplier of vessels to the EIC.
After leaving Deptford on 6 April 1696, Kidd brought Adventure Galley along the coast to Plymouth in south-western England. He set sail from there on 23 April, bound for New York, and reached the city around 4 July. The ship was accompanied by a French fishing vessel that Kidd captured during the Atlantic crossing. He had the French boat condemned in New York as prize, and recruited more crewmen and set sail again on 6 September, heading for the Indian Ocean. Adventure Galley called at Madeira (reached on 8 October) and Boa Vista, Cape Verde (on 19 October) to pick up supplies en route. The long voyage down the western coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope took the rest of the year and it was not until 27 January 1697 that Adventure Galley made landfall at Tuléar (now Toliara), Madagascar. By this time Adventure Galley was in need of fresh sail and rigging. The fact that the ship's existing supplies had barely lasted eight months suggests that the dockyard may have installed substandard equipment. After staying a month in Tuléar, Adventure Galley sailed on to Johanna (now Anjouan) in the Comoros on 18 March, where East India Company ships often refitted. However, Kidd was unable to obtain credit from local merchants to buy new rigging or sails, and chose instead to take Adventure Galley to another island – either Mayotte or Mohéli – for careening, to clean her hull of encrusted barnacles and weeds. This was accomplished successfully over the course of a month but up to a third of her crew died in an outbreak of an epidemic disease, possibly malaria or yellow fever. Kidd sailed back to Johanna to find replacement crewmen and this time was able to raise the credit for new sails and rigging. According to Kidd's testimony, he "steered for India" on 25 April 1697. By now he was a year out of London and had no prize money to show for his efforts. He had failed to find any pirates and turned his own hand to piracy. Adventure Galley did not go immediately to India but travelled to the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, where she is said to have unsuccessfully tried to attack a Mughal convoy. In September 1697, Adventure Galley arrived on the Malabar Coast of India, where Kidd finally managed to capture two ships travelling under French passes – a pair of merchantmen called the Rouparelle and the Quedah Merchant. Unfortunately for Kidd, the latter ship was captained by an Englishman and when news of its capture reached London he was publicly condemned as a pirate.
's next and final stage of her voyage took her to the Île Sainte-Marie, a pirate haven off the north-east coast of Madagascar. By now, according to Kidd's narrative, "his gally [sic] was very leaky", probably because of a rotten hull. The ship arrived there about 1 April, accompanied by the Rouparelle (renamed November) and Quedah Merchant (renamed Adventure Prize). On arrival, most of the crew promptly deserted to another pirate captain, Robert Culliford and sank the November. Kidd was left with only thirteen men to crew the Adventure Prize and the now-unseaworthy Adventure Galley. According to one of her crew, William Jenkins, after the rest of the crew had deserted Kidd "run the Adventure Galley on shoar in Madagascar. They stript her furnishings and set her on fire to get her iron worke." This is contradicted by Kidd's own account, which stated that his skeleton crew "could not keep the galley from sinking, and went on board of the prize [i.e. Quedah Merchant]."
•Donnelly, Mark P.; Diehl, Daniel (2010). Pirates of New Jersey: Plunder and High Adventure on the Garden State Coastline. Stackpole Books. ISBN 9780811706674.
•Fumerton, Patricia (2006). Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226269566.
•Graham, Harris (2002). Treasure and Intrigue: The Legacy of Captain Kidd. Dundurn Press Ltd.. ISBN 978-1-55002-409-8.
•Lane, Kris E. (1996). Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500 - 1750. M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 9780765630834.
•Paine, Lincoln P. (2000). Warships of the World to 1900. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9780547561707.
•Thompson, Harold William (1979). Body, Boots, and Britches: Folktales, Ballads and Speech from Country New York. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815601609.
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Ship Description. Ship Stats. Adventure Galley. A ship captained by Captain. Kidd, the notorious privateer. The ship travelled thousands of miles across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. 50 40 70. Base Material: Cedar.
Adventure Galley, also known as Adventure, was an English merchant ship captained by Scottish sea captain William Kidd. She was a type of hybrid ship that combined square rigged sails with oars to give her manoeuvrability in both windy and calm conditions.
Adventure Galley, also known as Adventure, was an English sailing ship captained by William Kidd, the notorious privateer. She was a type of hybrid ship that combined square rigged sails with oars to give her manoeuvrability in both windy and calm conditions. The vessel was launched at the end...
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