The Real Captain Kidd

It is to be feared that honest and well-meaning men have not infrequently incurred the odium of posterity, not so much by reason of any enormities of which they have themselves been guilty, as because it has been their misfortune to be set to impossible tasks by employers or comrades, to whom they have been only too faithful. Few, if any, of such men have less deserved their fate than Captain Kidd, one of the unluckiest men that ever lived, who left this world on Friday the 23d of May, 1701, after woeful experiences at sea of the doings of an unruly crew, and on shore of the schemings of unscrupulous politicians and lawyers at Boston, Newgate, the Old Bailey, and the Execution Dock at Wapping.
To most of those who woo her, reputation is a coy and fickle mistress. But she occasionally evinces a very embarrassing attachment to men and women, whose innate modesty and reticence have prompted them throughout their careers to give her as wide a berth as possible. She has clung most unfairly and pertinaciously for more than two centuries to poor Kidd, who in common with most men of his calling, had no desire whatever to obtrude himself on the public notice.