In the year 1695, Captain Kidd chanced to be anchored in London port in his brigantine _Antigoa_, busy with loading merchandise and shipping a crew for the return voyage across the Atlantic. Now, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, an ambitious and energetic Irishman, had just then been appointed royal governor of the Colonies of New York and Massachusetts, and he was particularly bent on suppressing the swarm of pirates who infested the American coast and waxed rich on the English commerce of the Indian Ocean. Their booty was carried to Rhode Island, New York, and Boston, even from far-away Madagascar, and many a colonial merchant, outwardly the pattern of respectability, was secretly trafficking in this plunder. "I send you, my Lord, to New York," said King William III to Bellomont, "because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because I believe you to be such a man." Thereupon Bellomont asked for a frigate to send in chase of the bold sea rogues, but the king referred him to the Lords of the Admiralty who discovered sundry obstacles bound in red tape, the fact being that official England was at all times singularly indifferent, or covertly hostile, toward the maritime commerce of her American colonies. Being denied a man-of-war, Bellomont conceived the plan of privately equipping an armed ship as a syndicate enterprise without cost to the government. The promoters were to divide the swag captured from pirates as dividends on their investment. The enterprise was an alluring one, and six thousand pounds sterling were subscribed by Bellomont and his friends, including such illustrious personages as Somers, the Lord Chancellor and leader of the Whig party; the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Orford, First Lord of the Admiralty; the Earl of Romney, and Sir Richard Harrison, a wealthy merchant. According to Bishop Burnet, it was the king who "proposed managing it by a private enterprise, and said he would lay down three thousand pounds himself, and recommended it to his Ministers to find out the refit. In compliance with this, the Lord Somers, the Earl of Orford, Romney, Bellomont and others, contributed the whole expense, for the King excused himself by reason of other accidents, and did not advance the sum he had promised." Macauley, discussing in his "History of England" the famous scandal which later involved these partners of Kidd, defends them in this spirited fashion: