Life & Mortality Quote by William Kidd

Cold-blooded practicality is doing a lot of work here. William Kidd, an explorer-turned-pirate in the public imagination, isn’t mourning a dead gunner; he’s running a cost-benefit analysis. The line feels like a confession, but it’s really a performance of confidence: the death matters less than the narrative around it, because narrative is what determines whether you hang.

The key phrase is “other passages of my voyage.” Kidd shifts attention away from a single, potentially prosecutable incident and toward a broader, hazier itinerary. It’s legal fog as a survival tactic. In early modern maritime life, a voyage was a chain of encounters that could be framed as trade, privateering, self-defense, or outright piracy depending on who was telling the story and which political winds were blowing. Kidd signals he understands that the courtroom won’t be arguing about morality; it will be arguing about classification.

Then comes the bluntest subtext: “I have good friends in England.” That’s the real weapon. He’s invoking the era’s corruption and patronage networks, where “friends” meant sponsors, investors, or officials with reputations to protect and incentives to rewrite facts. “Bring me off” is almost casual, a bit of sailor’s idiom that lands like a shrug: acquittal as something arranged, not earned.

The intent is twofold: to minimize culpability for a violent death and to remind listeners (and perhaps himself) that power travels farther than justice. It’s a line that exposes how empire ran on connections as much as cannons.