The Rope Snapped
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Today’s history story begins with a rope breaking.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
May 23rd, 1701.
Execution Dock, Wapping.
Low tide on the Thames.
Mud glistening.
Tar. Salt water. The stink of the river.
And dangling over it all: Captain Kidd.
Or rather not dangling.
Not yet.
Because the first rope broke.
Snap.
Can you imagine the sound?
The crowd gasping. Some cheering. Some perhaps crossing themselves. For one electrifying instant people must have thought Providence itself had intervened. God had spared the pirate.
No such luck.
They hauled Kidd back up and hanged him properly the second time.
That’s London for you.
Efficient.
Brutal.
Maritime.
Theatrical.
And deeply fond of a public spectacle.
Because pirates were box office.
Everybody came to see them swing.
Sailors. Watermen. Hawkers. Pickpockets. Apprentices skiving off work. Dockside riffraff. Respectable citizens pretending they were only “passing by.” Every execution in London drew a crowd. But a pirate execution? That was premium entertainment.
And this was no ordinary gallows.
Execution Dock belonged to the Admiralty. Crimes committed at sea were punished at the water’s edge. Pirates and mutineers were hanged beside the Thames itself, their bodies left long enough for three tides to wash over them before they were cut down.
A nasty little flourish.
The river participating in the execution.
Which somehow feels exactly right for old Thames-side London.
And if you want to get properly immersed in that vanished world, the taverns, the press-gangs, the pirates, the mudlarks, the smugglers, the river thieves and the execution docks, well, London Walks has precisely the thing for you: Dan Parry’s Pirates, Press-Gangs and Execution Dock walk.
And Dan, incidentally, is not merely some chap who once watched a pirate film and bought a striped shirt.
Former BBC documentaries producer. Author of the National Maritime Museum’s biography of Blackbeard. Interviewer of Neil Armstrong and President George Bush. Former cowboy. Actual cowboy.
Which somehow feels perfectly appropriate because this old riverside world was gloriously improbable.
Today the Thames is joggers, luxury flats, wine bars and people photographing sunsets.
Back then it was another species of existence entirely.
A floating underworld.
A place of tar, rope, tobacco, mud, sweat, sea salt and danger.
The making of empire.
And also its dark side.
Which brings us back to Captain Kidd.
Though here’s the first twist in the tale.
Kidd did not start out as a pirate.
He started out as something much more respectable.
A privateer.
Which was essentially piracy with legal paperwork.
Governments absolutely loved privateers. Hugely convenient arrangement. You handed violent men ships and cannon and permission to rob your enemies. Everybody took a cut and civilisation marched onward.
Kidd was Scottish. Probably born in Greenock sometime around the 1640s. He first surfaces properly in the Caribbean fighting the French. Tough. Experienced. Ruthless enough to survive. Smart enough to rise.
Eventually he settled in New York, married well, moved in good circles and made influential friends.
And then came the grand scheme.
In the 1690s piracy in the Indian Ocean had become a huge problem. So Kidd and a group of powerful backers cooked up a plan. He’d sail east aboard the Adventure Galley, hunt down pirates, seize treasure and return a rich and respectable hero.
His investors included some very grand political names indeed.
Which sounded splendid.
Until things started going wrong.
Very wrong.
Because once Kidd reached Madagascar and the Indian Ocean the line between pirate-hunter and pirate became blurrier than a Wapping tavern window after midnight.
He attacked ships.
Some legally.
Some considerably less legally.
His crew became mutinous and ugly.
And then came the moment that would haunt him.
During an argument Kidd smashed his gunner, William Moore, over the head with a wooden bucket reinforced with iron hoops.
Moore died.
A bucket.
There’s something almost shockingly mundane about that detail. Not a cutlass. Not a pistol. A bucket.
And then Kidd captured the Quedah Merchant, a fabulously rich prize vessel loaded with treasure.
Kidd insisted the seizure was lawful.
His enemies insisted it was piracy.
And powerful commercial interests, especially the East India Company, wanted blood.
That’s one of the things Dan’s walk gets exactly right. Piracy wasn’t just adventure and parrots and eye-patches. It was economics. Politics. Global trade. Vast fortunes sloshing around the oceans.
And whenever vast fortunes are involved somebody eventually gets sacrificed.
In this case Captain Kidd.
He sailed back west hoping his powerful patrons would protect him.
Instead they abandoned him with astonishing speed.
Political winds shifted. Governments changed. Men who had once toasted his success suddenly developed urgent memory problems.
Kidd was arrested in Boston and dragged back to London.
Which brings us once again to Wapping.
To Execution Dock.
To the rope.
And here’s the thing about London.
This city never really loses its ghosts.
Walk those old riverside streets today and you can still feel traces of that vanished maritime underworld. The taverns. The alleys. The smell of the river at low tide. The sense that somewhere just beyond the fog there’s a lantern swinging aboard a ship bound for Jamaica or Madagascar or the Spanish Main.
And after Kidd was hanged things became even grimmer.
His body was tarred and gibbeted in an iron cage downriver at Tilbury.
Left hanging there for years.
Swinging above the Thames as a warning to every sailor entering London.
Behave yourselves.
Or this awaits you.
And yet here we are, more than three centuries later, still irresistibly drawn to these stories.
Pirates.
Press-gangs.
Smugglers.
Execution docks.
The outlaw Thames.
The dark side of empire.
And perhaps that’s because old riverside London was the city at its rawest. Not polished. Not respectable. Not postcard London.
But the real engine room.
Dangerous.
Violent.
Thrilling.
And somewhere in the background, if you listen carefully enough, perhaps you can still hear it.
Snap.
That rope going taut. And breaking.
See you tomorrow.