Daily Inspiration Quote by William Kidd

A pirate captain trying to sound like a responsible officer is still a pirate captain, and Kidd knows it. The opening address, "My lord", is courtroom choreography: deference as armor. He frames the scene as a tidy "case" with facts, distance ("within a league"), and chain of command. That legalistic cadence isn’t accidental; it’s an attempt to convert a potentially damning act of aggression into the language of duty and procedure.

The real drama is in the slippery distribution of agency. Kidd positions the impending capture of "the Dutchman" as something happening around him rather than because of him. The men "were making a mutiny" and the gunner "told the people" he could "put the captain in a way" to take the ship "and be safe". Safety becomes the moral alibi. He implies restraint and reluctance, as if violence is being negotiated down to a controlled operation, not escalated into piracy. It’s an early modern version of leadership-by-deniability: the crew is unruly, the specialist offers a plan, the captain is merely being guided.

Context sharpens the intent. Kidd operated in the hazy borderland between privateering and piracy, where a single seizure could be argued as sanctioned warfare or criminal theft depending on whose papers were recognized after the fact. This quote is built for that ambiguity. He’s not just narrating a moment at sea; he’s pre-building a defense that says: if anything unlawful occurred, it was pressure from below and tactical advice from others, not a captain’s criminal will.