Dropping off at Boston one day to secure a supply of tobacco, he was captured while watching the vast number of street-cars on Washington Street. He was taken to England, where he was tried and ultimately hanged. His sudden and sickening death did much to discourage an American youth of great brilliancy who had up to 1868 intended to be a pirate, but who, stumbling across the "Life and Times of Captain Kidd, and his Awful Death," changed his whole course and became one of the ablest historians of the age in which he lived.