Today the temperature soared to near 40˚ Farenheit. Spring-like. It won’t last, of course, but we feel as if we deserve it. Or if not, we’ll take it and hope whoever monitors these things doesn’t add it to our bill.
The big activity today was a visit from my friendly plumber, who extracted a clog from my bathroom sink drain (must have been some clog, judging from the time it took), and then extracted a wad of my substance from my credit card. Even with the loyalty club discount, it seemed excessive. But I suppose the man who has no power snake must be servant to the man who does.
Kids, go into plumbing as a career. You’ll love the sense of power.
Then I watched the old 1945 film, Captain Kidd, starring Charles Laughton and Randolph Scott. Ahoy, mates – yonder be cheese! Laughton has a high reputation as an actor, but I never liked him much. In this one he marlin-spikes the overacting meter pretty constantly. And Randolph Scott is convincing neither as a sailor nor as an Englishman. Barbara Britton was lovely, though. Wikipedia says this was one of Stalin’s favorite films, according to Khrushchev.
Captain Kidd himself is an interesting, and rather pathetic, historical character. Opinions of his career vary. Some historians say he was innocent and should not have hanged, others say he was guilty and deserved it by the standards of the time. All agree he was nothing like the fearsome figure he cuts in legend and fiction.
He was, in fact, pretty bad at being a pirate. He set out to hunt pirates, had no luck, and seems to have allowed his crew to pressure him into marginal activities. Rather than a psychopathic monster, he seems to have been an incompetent commander – the kind who let discipline drift until he finally blew a fuse and killed a man. Hanging seems a heavy price to pay for poor management skills, but the British admiralty was not a merciful institution, and the killing did complicate it all – even if he only brained the guy with a bucket.
When I was a kid, I was a fan of Robert Lawson’s juvenile historical novels about the pets of great historical figures. One was Captain Kidd’s Cat – a strange story to include in an essentially lighthearted series, considering that the main character hangs in the end. Lawson’s take on Captain Kidd seems to have been influenced by the story of the pirate Stede Bonnet, who claimed he took to freebooting to get away from a nagging wife. In the book, William Kidd is a henpecked husband whose wife sends him on his voyage with strict instructions to bring her home a Turkey Carpet (the same thing as a Persian carpet, I assume). His whole tragedy springs from his successive, blundering attempts to secure that rug.
Why did Captain Kidd go into legend as a monstrous sea wolf? Probably because of his connections to New York City, and the rumor that he left a treasure buried on nearby Gardner’s Island. The legend of that treasure sparked a lot of imaginations in old Gotham.