By 1691, Kidd had made it back to New York, where he married a wealthy young widow named Sarah Oort and began to join society, becoming acquainted with at least three governors and contributing to the construction of Trinity Church in Manhattan. At the behest of the British Crown, he was still employed off and on as a privateer, serving during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York and in the Caribbean. In December 1695, New York’s new governor, Richard Coote, the 1st Earl of Bellomont, tasked the “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” with taking command of a British privateer that was to attack both pirates and ships of the enemy French. Kidd could not refuse without destroying his reputation and so sailed to London to prepare for the voyage that would cost him his life and make him a legend. In England, he was given a new ship named the Adventure Galley, along with command of thirty-four cannons and a handpicked crew of 150. He carried a letter of marque signed by William III that licensed him as a privateer obliged to surrender 10 percent of his booty to the Crown. The Adventure Galley’s voyage got off to a bad start, though, when Kidd and his crew failed to salute a British navy yacht as they sailed down the Thames. When the yacht fired a shot across the bow to demand what was considered a proper show of respect, the Adventure Galley’s crew replied by presenting to the navy their backsides. Such unprecedented impudence resulted in the navy pressing virtually the entire crew of Kidd’s ship into its service. The Adventure Galley made it shorthanded back to New York, where Kidd was compelled to pick up a new crew, this one made up mostly of former pirates and hardened criminals.
By the autumn of 1696, the Adventure Galley was sailing off the coast of Madagascar, where a third of the crew died of cholera. The new ship began to spring leaks and Kidd failed to find any of the pirate ships he had told both his backers and his men would be there. With an increasingly discontented crew aboard the Adventure Galley, Kidd sailed to the entrance to the Red Sea, another popular pirate refuge, but again found no prizes to capture. Under pressure to deliver rewards to his backers (among them Governor Bellomont) and increasingly menaced by an unruly crew that regularly threatened mutiny, Kidd still refused to cross the line into piracy. That refusal would lead to a confrontation with a ship’s gunner named William Moore, who on October 30, 1697, was sharpening a chisel on the deck of the Adventure Galley when a Dutch ship appeared on the horizon. Moore demanded that they attack the Dutchman, but Kidd said he would not do it, knowing that to do so would infuriate Dutch-born King William. Kidd called Moore a lousy dog. Moore replied, “If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so,” and he accused the captain of bringing him and the rest of the crew “to ruin.” An enraged Kidd picked up an ironbound bucket and threw it at Moore, fracturing the skull of the gunner, who died the next day.
At his eventual trial, two members of Kidd’s crew would accuse him of savage abuses that included hoisting rebellious men and drubbing them with the dull edge of a cutlass. Others, not called to testify, said later that Kidd had punished his men only after they ransacked the trading ship Mary while he and the Mary’s captain were speaking in his quarters, and that this punishment consisted mainly of forcing the crew to return what they had taken. Only those who refused were beaten.
It was not until January 1698 that the Adventure Galley finally took a great prize. This was the four-hundred-ton Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship under hire to Armenian merchants, loaded with gold, silver, and a rich assortment of East Indian merchandise that included silks, satins, and muslins. The captain of the captured ship was an Englishman carrying passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French crown. When Kidd learned that the captain was English, he attempted to persuade his men to return the ship and its cargo, but the crew refused and Kidd, who at that point maintained only tenuous control over his men, backed down and agreed to keep the prize. That decision made him a criminal in the eyes of the British navy, which ordered its commanders to “pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices” for having committed “notorious piracies.” Kidd kept the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the captain’s French passes, hoping the latter would justify his capture of the ship. It was a calculated risk, as Kidd knew that British admiralty courts in North America frequently turned a blind eye to the trespasses of English-licensed privateers, especially if those trespasses were committed against the French.
Renaming the seized ship Adventure Prize, Kidd set sail again for Madagascar, where he encountered an old nemesis, the pirate Robert Culliford, who years before had stolen a ship and crew from Kidd. This time, Culliford stole only the crew—or most of it, anyway. With just thirteen men remaining, Kidd ordered the worm-eaten Adventure Galley to be burned at sea, then sailed the Adventure Prize across the Atlantic. Upon arrival in the Caribbean, Kidd discovered he was a wanted man and that at least four English men-of-war were hunting him. He abandoned the Adventure Prize in a concealed location and sailed a sloop toward New York. Avoiding apprehension by a series of clever maneuvers, Kidd came to his downfall by trusting Governor Bellomont, who lured him to capture in Boston. Kidd seems to have convinced himself that Bellomont and the various other Whig politicians (advocates of constitutional monarchy) who had backed him would come to his defense in the end, but the governor and the others were far more concerned about protecting themselves from the accusations of their rivals. Bellomont kept Kidd confined in Boston’s Stone Prison (often having him held in solitary confinement in the prison’s dungeon) and also ordered that Kidd’s wife, Sarah, be imprisoned in New York. After more than a year of that misery, Kidd was returned to England to be questioned before Parliament. The accused pirate quickly discovered that the newly elected Tory ministry was determined to use the now-infamous Captain Kidd as a tool to discredit his Whig sponsors. Kidd, though, was apparently still convinced that Bellomont and his other backers would come to his aid and refused to name names. Realizing Kidd was of no use to them, the Tories sent him to stand trial at the High Court of Admiralty in London on charges that included the murder of William Moore. While awaiting his trial, Kidd was lodged in the hellhole of Newgate Prison, where he busied himself by writing letters to King William pledging loyalty to the Crown and pleading for clemency.
The accused still imagined that his backers would help him at trial, but in fact Bellomont and the others withheld both the money and the evidence (including the French passes taken from the Quedagh Merchant) that might have helped him avoid being condemned to death. On the testimony of two former crewmen who had been granted pardons if they helped the prosecution, Kidd was convicted of murder and five counts of piracy. While awaiting execution, he wrote a letter to the speaker of the House of Commons in which he claimed that on the way back to New York from the Caribbean he had “lodged goods and Treasure to the value of one hundred thousand pounds.” This sum (equivalent to approximately $20 million in today’s money) he would happily surrender to the Crown if he were permitted to lead a ship to the spot where it had been buried, Kidd added. The request was refused and on May 23, 1701, he was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping. Afterward, Kidd’s body was displayed over the River Thames at Tilbury Point inside a gibbet (a metal cage affixed to a gallows) where it was left to rot for three full years as a warning to those who might contemplate following the dead man into piracy.
A broadside song about Captain Kidd called “Farewell to the Sea, or, the Famous Pirate’s Lament” became enormously popular in the weeks and months after his execution and spread the false notion that he had confessed to his crimes. The broadside also popularized the story that Kidd had buried treasure on his way back to New York from the Caribbean. “Two hundred bars of gold, and rixdollars [silver coins] manifold, we seized uncontrolled,” was the song’s most oft-repeated line. The legend of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure would make its way into the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. It would also lead to treasure hunts that stretched from Grand Manan Island on the Bay of Fundy (betwe
en Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) to the Vietnamese island of Phú Quc.
What cemented the idea that Captain Kidd’s treasure was on Oak Island, however, was the story of a confession made by an old sailor with his dying breaths. By the nineteenth century, the tale had become apocryphal to the point of cliché, but it seems to have originated in the story of Captain Kidd’s treasure that spread up the Atlantic coast of North America around the middle of the eighteenth century. On his deathbed, the story went, this sailor confessed to having been a member of Captain Kidd’s crew and claimed that he and the others had buried a treasure worth two million pounds on “an island.” In fact, a treasure buried by William Kidd on his return from the Caribbean already had been found on an island.
Gardiners Island (which still belongs to the Gardiner family and is today the only US real estate still intact as an original royal grant from the British Crown) is a six-by-three-mile piece of land standing just offshore from the town of East Hampton on New York’s Long Island. In 1701, shortly after learning that William Kidd had been arrested for piracy and was to face trial in England, John Gardiner contacted Governor Bellomont to tell him that Captain Kidd had anchored off his island in June 1699, when he had come ashore to say he wished to bury a chest filled with treasure and two boxes, one filled with gold and the other filled with silver. In the treasure chest were diamonds, rubies, Spanish coins, and candlesticks. The treasure was intended for Lord Bellomont, Kidd told the Gardiners, who agreed that the privateer might cache the two boxes and the chest on their property. In thanks, Kidd gave Mrs. Gardiner a length of gold cloth and a bag of sugar.
It was more than a year later when John Gardiner read that Captain Kidd was on trial for piracy in England. Gardiner contacted Bellomont and told him of the buried treasure. British soldiers were immediately dispatched to retrieve it. Once it was delivered to him, Bellomont shipped the loot to England to be used against Kidd at trial. During the proceedings at the Old Bailey, the value of what Kidd had cached on Gardiners Island was placed at around $1 million in today’s money—far less than the value of the booty Kidd was believed to have accumulated during his three years as a rover on the high seas. (The coins and effects Kidd had with him when he was captured were sold for £6,471—nearly $15 million in current value—in 1701, and used by the Order of St. Anne to establish Greenwich Hospital in London.)
So there was a not entirely unreasonable basis in the minds of eighteenth-century North Americans for the widespread belief that there remained a hidden Captain Kidd treasure on an island somewhere off the Atlantic coast. And that lent enough credence to the tale of the old sailor’s deathbed confession to let it take hold in the popular imagination. Jothan McCully in his 1862 article for the Liverpool Transcript observed that the early settlers of Mahone Bay had brought this story with them from New England and that Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Anthony Vaughan were all quite familiar with it. So it was no wonder that the three young men told prospective partners that they believed they had found the spot where Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried.
There is one other outstanding description of the connection between Captain Kidd, Oak Island, and the discovery of the Money Pit. In 1939, a ship’s captain named Anthony Vaughan, the grandson of the Anthony Vaughan who had been the friend of Daniel McGinnis and John Smith, gave an interview in which he added elements to the story that were previously unknown. Captain Vaughan, who was ninety-nine years old at the time of this interview—meaning his memories went back before the middle of the nineteenth century—said that the story of the Money Pit’s discovery he had heard started with a trip to England around 1790 made by a sailor who was a member of either the Smith or McGinnis family. While in England, this sailor had befriended an old fellow who claimed he had been a member of Captain Kidd’s crew and, out of gratitude for help he had been given, confirmed the story that Kidd had buried a huge trove of booty on an island in “New Anglia” that was “covered with oaks.” Months later, the younger sailor stopped over in Nova Scotia and related this story to family members there, whose excitement had led to a search of Oak Island and the discovery of the Money Pit.
The story may not be true, but it certainly doesn’t lack appeal. And that alone has been enough to keep it in circulation.
CHAPTER THREE
It was the spring of 1804 when a distant relative of Anthony Vaughan’s named Simeon Lynds became the first of many who have financed the search for treasure on Oak Island. Two versions of how this happened were published in the nineteenth century. According to the more colorful of the two accounts, John Smith’s wife, Sarah, was pregnant and refused to give birth to her child on Oak Island because of superstitions associated with the place. Instead she traveled to Truro, the largest nearby town, about seventy miles distant, to have the child delivered by a “Dr. Lynds.” Her husband, John, came along, of course, and immediately sized up the physician as the partner he had been hoping to find. After hearing Smith’s story, this version goes, Lynds visited Oak Island and was so excited by what he saw that he returned immediately to Truro and formed a company to finish the job that Smith and his two young friends had started. Among the problems with this account is that it seems in places to imply that the child delivered by “Dr. Lynds” was the Smiths’ first. Church records in Chester, though, show that the couple’s first child was christened on April 15, 1798, years before Lynd joined the probe of the Money Pit.
What R. V. Harris called the “more plausible version” of the story was that Simeon Lynds was a merchant, not a doctor, and he was in Chester to do business in early 1804 when he spent an evening with Anthony Vaughan’s father and heard the story of what Vaughan’s son and two other young men had found on Oak Island. The next day, Lynds went with the younger Vaughan to take a look at the Money Pit and was so impressed by what he saw that he hurried home to Truro to find other investors.
Whichever version is accurate (and almost certainly it’s the second), what can be known for sure is that Simeon Lynds quickly assembled an impressive collection of partners in this enterprise. Lynds’s first and more important get was Colonel Robert Archibald, the government surveyor who had first laid out the township of Onslow in 1780 and now served as the justice of the peace and town clerk there. Once Archibald had agreed to accept a position as director of operations for what was now being called the Onslow Company, he recruited his nephew Captain David Archibald, whose brother was about to become the speaker of the assembly in Nova Scotia and later would serve as attorney general of the province. Also added to the roster of investors was Thomas Harris, the sheriff of Pictou County. That men of such standing in their communities were willing to invest their time, their money, and their reputations in the Onslow Company says something about how convinced they were that a treasure of enormous value had been buried on Oak Island. And what had convinced them, clearly, was what they saw when the Money Pit was reopened. What they found when they dug deeper, though, is truly extraordinary, so extraordinary that it has driven men to follow after them for more than two centuries so far.
IN JUNE 1804, the company’s investors set sail from Onslow aboard a sloop loaded with tools and provisions, following a southwesterly course along the twisting shoreline that took them past the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. A passage of some 350 miles ended when the sloop anchored off Oak Island in what was then known as Smuggler’s Cove (today it is called Smith’s Cove). They were met onshore by McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan, along with a crew of local workmen who were mostly farmers looking to earn wages and hoping for a small piece of the Oak Island treasure, if there was one. After unloading their cargo and setting up a camp, the entire group went to inspect the Money Pit. They found that the Pit had caved in on top and formed “the shape of a sugar loaf resting on its apex,” as R. V. Harris paraphrased one early account, and that an enormous pile of mud had settled to the level of the log platform 20 feet deep. After their crew had cleared away the debris and mud, Lynds and his partners were delighted, according to the ear
ly accounts based on interviews with the members of the Onslow Company, to find that the sticks McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had driven into the ground around the Money Pit back in 1795 (if that was the actual year) were still in place, meaning that no one had disturbed the spot. Thus encouraged, the men began to work the ground with picks, shovels, and crowbars, building a wooden box cribbing that protected them from a collapse by reinforcing the surrounding walls as they descended, employing the same rope-and-bucket method McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had used years before to empty the pit, only with more rope, several buckets, and the best block-and-tackle system money could buy.
The Curse of Oak Island Page 4