Robert Culliford was an English pirate of the Pirate Round era whose career is best remembered for one thing: twice taking a ship out from under William Kidd. He was never as famous as Kidd, but he outlasted him, and very likely outlived him too.
From Shipmate to Mutineer
Culliford and Kidd served together as privateersmen aboard the French-flagged Sainte Rose in 1689. When the English crew mutinied and seized the ship, renaming it the Blessed William, Kidd initially held command. In February 1690, Culliford led a second mutiny that took the ship away from Kidd himself, leaving him ashore in the Caribbean without a command – the first of two times Culliford would cost Kidd a crew.
Captivity and the Pirate Round
Culliford went on to serve as quartermaster aboard a captured French vessel and later took his own command. Around 1692 he was captured by Mughal authorities after a raid near Mangrol on India’s western coast and spent roughly four years imprisoned before escaping in 1696. He resurfaced in Madras, where he commandeered an East India Company ketch, and by 1697 had joined the crew of the pirate ship Mocha, becoming its captain after the death of its previous commander, Ralph Stout.
Taking Kidd’s Crew a Second Time
By 1698, Kidd – by then hunting pirates under a government commission rather than sailing as one – arrived at the pirate haven of Île Sainte-Marie off Madagascar and found Culliford anchored there. Rather than falling in with Kidd, most of Kidd’s own crew deserted to join Culliford instead, stripping Kidd of the men he needed to continue his voyage. In September 1698, Culliford and a fellow captain, Dirk Chivers, captured a richly laden vessel in the Red Sea, reportedly carrying on the order of £130,000 in cash and goods – one of the larger single hauls of the Pirate Round period.
A Pardon That Didn’t Hold
In 1699 the Crown offered pirates at Madagascar a royal pardon under the Act of Grace, and Culliford accepted it. It didn’t save him: when he returned to England he was arrested on 1 August 1700 and held in Marshalsea prison, and his pardon was later ruled invalid at trial because it had technically expired before he claimed it. He avoided the gallows only because prosecutors needed him as a witness against a fellow pirate, Samuel Burgess, in a separate case. After testifying, Culliford disappears from the historical record; what became of him afterward is not known.
Why He Matters
Culliford rarely gets more than a supporting role in accounts of William Kidd’s downfall, but his own career runs through several of the defining episodes of the Pirate Round: the mutinies that launched it, the Mughal reprisals that made the Indian Ocean dangerous for pirates, the pardon offer meant to end it, and the prosecutions that followed. Where sources give conflicting years for parts of his imprisonment and escape, this account follows the fuller documented timeline (capture around 1692, escape in 1696) rather than the compressed version found in some secondary retellings.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “Robert Culliford”; goldenageofpiracy.org, “Robert Culliford.”