"The Pirate Hunter" by Richard Zacks

Kidd, Zacks proves to us, was a man of honor and principle, despite the numerous opportunities he had to live the pirate's life. Even so, "The Pirate Hunter" is still a pirate story, and a pirate story needs pirates: Zacks gives us lots of them, starting with James Gilliam, whom we meet on the book's first page. Gilliam was a ruthless fellow -- he once slit the throat of an English East India captain and made off with his ship -- and he might have gotten away with any number of atrocities if it weren't for one telltale scar across his genitals. (He had been forcibly circumcised during a stint in prison in India; after he was arrested on charges of murder and piracy, he claimed to be an innocent merchant, but upon examining him, the British authorities took the scar as proof that he was indeed the pirate Gilliam.)

It was no small indignity that Gilliam should be betrayed by a mark on what was certainly a pirate's most prized possession. Zacks describes the typical pirate with five sharp adjectives: "Drunk, cursing, hungry, horny. And violent." They were men who chose to lead "a merry life and a short one," as one contemporary observer noted. The picture-book image of pirates dressed in bright, mismatched, garish clothes isn't far off the mark: Fine cloth was often part of the booty seized from stolen ships, and since any pirate worth his salt knew how to mend a sail, he could also lend his sewing skills to the task of stitching up outlandish trousers. The men would also hobble around with their feet crammed into illicitly acquired pumps that didn't fit them properly. (Somewhere in the annals of minor pirates, there might have been a Long John Bunion.)

There's some disappointing news in "The Pirate Hunter": Zacks informs us that "pirates rarely sailed under the black flag with skull and crossbones on it, and certainly not in the 17th century." (Instead, faking friendliness, they'd raise the flag of whatever country would be most likely to lure a neighboring ship close enough for capture.) What's more, "pirates rarely buried treasure but drank it up or spent it on whores." And that means no treasure maps. "Not a single authentic treasure map has ever been preserved," Zacks tells us. Sad news for 8-year-olds with shovels everywhere.

But if there are no treasure maps, at least there are stories: Stories of pirates like Kidd's nemesis and alter ego Robert Culliford, a man who readily committed every illegal deed Kidd refused to do -- and ultimately walked off scot-free. But most vivid of all is Kidd himself, whom Zacks presents as, if not a hero, then at least a model of crusty integrity. If the first half of Zacks' book is exhilarating but ominous, the second half is an outraged, mournful wail.

Zacks details Kidd's long, wrongful imprisonment, during which he wasn't even told what he had been charged with. He describes how Kidd, after being imprisoned (largely in solitary confinement) for months in Boston, was finally loaded, along with numerous other pirate prisoners, onto a ship -- the Advice -- that was bound for London, and his trial. His wife, Sarah, had tried everything to free him; at the last minute, she even tried to help him effect a jailbreak -- unsuccessfully, of course:

"The men pulled at the oars of the Advice's longboat: Kidd watched them feather amid the ice, he was inhaling deeply his first fresh sea air in seven months. The prisoners were tied and hauled like sacks up into the ship. Once aboard, three of the prisoners were chained together in the gunroom, which had been converted to a jail. Captain Kidd was once again kept in isolation, chained, in cabin steerage. After his brief stint in the longboat, he was now in a windowless, low-ceilinged room, chained to the wall. The ship's familiar rocking calmed him. Sarah awoke on shore to find her husband gone."

Zacks is fully sympathetic to the wronged "pirate" Kidd, right up to the town-square spectacle of his hanging in London in 1701. (Kidd, brave until that point, got rip-roaring drunk on his way to the gallows -- and can you blame him?) In the 400-some pages leading up to that cruel end, "The Pirate Hunter" asks and answers numerous questions with a few swift strokes: Do we ever really want our legends debunked, cut down to human size? Is it preferable to keep them larger than life by never finding out the true story? In Kidd's case, it's better to know more. Zacks digs up facts that are more fascinating than legend, proving that history isn't just stranger than fiction, but more riveting. If he had made it all up, it couldn't have been any better. Or sadder.

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