If Kidd had been guilty of the crimes of which he was accused, this in itself would have been a remarkable circumstance: for some of these poor men might have been expected to reconcile their consciences to the saving of their own lives by giving evidence against him. Not one of them did so. The only witnesses who could be found to testify against him were two rogues, who on their own admission had deserted him at Madagascar, and joined Culliford in open piracy against all nations. These men had imprudently returned to London, where unfortunately for themselves and Kidd, they were unearthed by emissaries of the prosecution before the trial came on. Their lives would justly have been forfeited if they had not agreed to give the evidence on which their old commander and comrades were convicted. What that evidence amounted to, will be seen in due course. Another hardship to which the accused were subjected in those days was this, that besides being deprived of the assistance of counsel to cross-examine and comment on the evidence, they were left in ignorance sometimes to the last moment of the charges to be made against them. Kidd had every reason to believe, when brought into Court for trial, that the only charge he had to meet was piracy. He had been committed by Bellamont for piracy, and examined before the Admiralty and the House of Commons on that charge. The great men with whom he had been associated were supposed to have employed him because he was a pirate. No suggestion had been made that he had been guilty of any other crime. And yet when he came into Court, the first charge against him was not that he had been a pirate, but that he was guilty of an offence of a totally different character, a charge of which no notice whatever had apparently been given him, and to meet which he had had no opportunity of obtaining legal advice or preparing his defence. Nor was this all. He was a man of substance in America when arrested. But in gaol in England he was without money or friends to prepare for his trial. Although the Court had ordered fifty pounds to be paid to him that he might have legal advice, the money was not delivered to him till the night before he was tried. What was, if possible, unfairer than any of these things was the deliberate withholding from him by the officials of the papers, which the House of Commons had ordered to be delivered to the Admiralty for the purposes of his trial, and in particular the two French passes, on which he relied to prove that he had been justified in taking the two prizes, in respect of which he was accused of piracy. No wonder that he pleaded hard for the production of these papers and the postponement of his trial, until he was allowed access to them. That there can be no question of the accuracy of the foregoing statements, appears clearly from the verbatim report of his trial, perused and approved by the judges and counsel who took part in it. Take first this extract from that report.