He reached New York in July and did not leave it till September. In the interval the French ship which he had captured was condemned by the authorities as a lawful prize; and according to Kidd’s narrative of these events, “the produce thereof purchased provisions for the _Adventure Galley_ for her further intended voyage.” It must have been anything but an easy job to get the requisite number of men to fill up the vacancies in his ship’s company. The Colony was not over populated, nor was there any lack of work for those who cared to take it. The only terms he was authorized to offer, “No purchase, no pay,” were not likely to be accepted by skilled and experienced seamen, who had the chance of earning a good living at home by smuggling, or of going out and making their fortunes, as some had lately done in the East under such captains as those whom it was now Kidd’s business to catch. Nor was the catching of their old friends for hanging purposes likely to be a popular employment in that part of the world. He probably picked up some adventurous boys, eager to go to sea at any cost, in ignorance of the fate to which they were consigning themselves. Of the older men who joined, Darby Mullins, a rolling stone who had gathered no moss, may perhaps be taken as a fair sample. From so much of his previous history as this poor man told to the chaplain at Newgate, it appears that he was an Irishman, born near Londonderry, kidnapped when young and shipped for the plantations, where he had followed various honest avocations without any conspicuous success. Most of Kidd’s grown-up recruits, it is to be feared, were men of this kind, who for one reason or another were indisposed to remain long in any one employment, and likely to abandon the enterprise as soon as they got tired of it. Whilst picking up one and another of these men during his last stay at his home in New York, Kidd, one would think, must often have regretted that he had embarked on this miserable business. But he seems to have been upheld not only then but till the day of his death by a childlike belief in the great men whose service he had entered, a belief which was possibly shared by his wife. Money was not a matter of great importance to either of them. It is not unlikely that she was pleased to hear about her husband’s great friends, his interviews with them in London, and what they were likely to do for him and her when he had successfully completed his task. It is possible that she may have looked forward with some complacency, poor soul, to the prospect of herself associating with the women folk of these great people. Perhaps she even dreamed of becoming a great lady herself. Why not? What more likely than that her husband would be knighted by the King for his services and that she would become Lady Kidd?