Legal preliminaries completed, Kidd’s ship, the _Adventure Galley_, was launched in Castle’s Yard at Deptford, on the fourth of December, 1695, and set sail between two and three months afterwards. Sir Edmund Harrison, described by Bellamont’s apologist as “a reputable city merchant,” had been at the pains to select the crew with great care so as to exclude all Scotch and Colonials, who were regarded as ineligible by reason of their supposed proclivities to smuggling and piracy. “That nothing might be wanting,” we are told by the same writer, “which the nature of the thing would admit notwithstanding the great difficulty of finding men at that time, Sir Edmund Harrison took such care of the crew that every officer in the ship and almost all the seamen had settled families in England.” “True it is,” he adds in the next paragraph, “that this care was in a great degree rendered ineffectual: for most of the crew were pressed before Kidd got out of the river.” Kidd himself in his artless narrative tells the tale more tersely, merely recording the fact that “on the first of March, when he came to the Buoy at the Nore, his men were pressed for the fleet.” Seeing that the First Lord of the Admiralty was one of the principal partners in the adventure, it may seem strange to those who have had no personal experience of official blunderings, that precautions had not been taken to prevent this untoward mishap, which made a hopeless enterprise more hopeless than ever. For it left Kidd no alternative but to get the bulk of his crew from America. With such of his men as had not been deemed worth taking by the press gang, he managed to get away from Plymouth about the end of April. On his way to America, he captured a small French vessel with salt and fishing tackle bound for Newfoundland, and brought her into port at New York. There in the head centre and hotbed of the smuggling and piracy, which the King desired to repress, he set to work to pick up the best substitutes he could find for the men who had been so carefully selected for him and so unceremoniously taken from him at the Nore.