Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Captain Kidd : A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal - Samuel Marquis

Captain Kidd

A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal

By: Samuel Marquis

Paperback | 18 June 2026

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $39.99

$35.75

11%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.94 with

 or 

Ships in 10 to 15 business days

2025 Readers' Favorite Book Awards Gold Medal-winner

2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award Finalist

A breakneck adventure of war, romance, and politics in the golden age of piracy.

Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious “pirate” outlaws ever, but his legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Having captivated imaginations for more than three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, troubling questions remain. Was he really a criminal or is the truth more inconvenient: that he was a buccaneer’s worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians?

In Captain Kidd, his ninth-great-grandson, bestselling author Samuel Marquis, reveals the real story. Kidd was an English American privateer and leading New York husband and father. The King of England himself dubbed Kidd “trusty and well-beloved,” and some historians describe him as a “worthy, honest-hearted, steadfast, much -enduring sailor” who was the “victim of a deliberate travesty of justice.” With honors far more esteemed than the menacing Blackbeard, or any other sea rover at the turn of the seventeenth century, how can Kidd be considered both gentleman and pirate, both hero and villain?

Marquis’ biography recreates Kidd’s perilous world of explosive naval warfare and the daring integrity he exemplified as a pirate hunter, as well as the political scandal that entangled Kidd in British–American history, rocking the New World and the Old, and threatening England’s valuable trade with India.

Captain Kidd is both thrilling and tragic. Behind the legend is a real man woven into the tapestry of early America, rendering him a unique colonial hero and scapegoat whose life story was fascinating, exciting, bizarre, and heartrending.

More in History

Bondi Terror : The tragedy, the courage, the aftermath - Sharri Markson
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea : Journeys through Ancient Literature - Emily Wilson
Betrayal : Trump, Putin and The New Age of Conquest - Luke Harding
Queens and Kings : An Unusually Personal History - Lucy Worsley

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
A Suitable Man : The Eccentric Empire of Fletcher Jones - Jock Serong
The Most Interesting People You've Never Heard Of - Riley Knight
The Burning Blue : Stories of the Navy's warriors in the skies - Mike Carlton
Biological War : A Scenario - Annie Jacobsen

RRP $36.99

$29.75

20%
OFF
Blackbirding : A reckoning with the Australian slave trade - Ryan Butta
How the World Works - Noam Chomsky

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

RRP $22.99

$19.75

14%
OFF
Athens and Sparta : The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece - Adrian Goldsworthy
All We Say : A History of the United States in Fifteen Speeches - Ben Rhodes