LATE in the seventeenth century, when King William commissioned the Earl of Bellomont as Governor of New York and Massachusetts, he admonished that noble to suppress those flagrant piracies that had become the disgrace of the colonies.
Landing in New York the Earl looked about him for a man of red blood and iron nerve, capable of ridding the sea of its bloodthirsty buccaneers. Captain William Kidd, a retired British navigator living upon a comfortable competency in New York, was recommended to the Governor by Robert Livingston and other citizens of prominence.
Kidd was the son of a non-conformist preacher who, after suffering torture by the boot, had died and left his young offspring to carve out a career for himself. The lad had gone to sea when very young and had soon made himself known as a skipper who knew no fear. Before the new Governor of New York selected him to rid the
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sea of its freebooters, he had fought against the French and had done brave service for the cause of the American colonies, thus winning an award from the Council of the City of New York.
The Earl of Bellomont found the retired skipper more than willing to embark upon his new mission. At that time life in New York was not the merry whirl that it is in our time. There were blue laws that restricted individual liberty and Kidd had been sighing, of late, for a more exciting environment. To the Earl of Bellomont he made the boast that with a single ship of thirty or forty guns he would sweep off the face of the mighty deep every pirate craft that dared fly the "Jolly Roger" twixt the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Malacca.
Bellomont believed Kidd and organized a private company which was to take from the buccaneers of the seven seas all of their booty and divide it among the King, Captain Kidd, his crew and a list of noble shareholders, including Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Romney, Lord Orford, the first lord of the admiralty, and the keeper of the great seal. A fund of six thousand pounds was sub-scribed and Captain Kidd was sent forth upon his mission in the "Adventure," a galley of two hundred and eighty-seven tons, armed with thirty guns. He bore with him not only the customary
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letters of marque but two commissions under the great seal-one to act against the French and the other to take pirates.
After cutting a bloody swath off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia Kidd darted off for the Orient whence after three years of captures he returned home by way of the West Indies. Here he arrived with an India ship, said to belong to the Great Mogul and to be chock-full of priceless treasure. Then, under the bright sun of his fourth summer out he came sailing peacefully up our coast in a sloop said to be full to the gun-wales with specie, gold, silver and jewels recovered from his numerous victims. After entering Delaware Bay upon a mysterious mission he returned to sea only to put into Long Island Sound, anchoring in Oyster Bay. Next he went to Boston to report to Governor Bellomont but that gentleman very rudely placed him in irons and shipped him with several of his men to England where, on May 24, 1701, he was, with nine of his crew, hanged on Execution Dock.
According to the charges preferred at his trial Captain Kidd, while pretending to hunt down pirates, had turned pirate himself. He was charged also with burning houses, massacring peasantry, brutally treating prisoners and particularly with murdering one of his crew. Some
believed that the noble lords who had backed Kidd's enterprise made him a scapegoat that their share in the profits might never be known, and a Parliamentary inquiry looked into the charge. But their lordships were vindicated.
After Kidd's execution booty to the value of only $70,000 could be recovered from his trove and no one would believe that this was the total harvest of his three years' enterprise. Hence, since his death every strip of beach along his various coast routes has been upturned in a search for the vast hoard which he was believed to have hidden between the time of his arrival in the West Indies and his arrest in Boston. A search for the Great Mogul's ship was instituted by Governor Bellomont and one theory was that she had been taken up the Hudson, run ashore and burned at the base of the Dunderberg, after all cargo of value had been carried off and buried. According to other evidence she was burned off Haiti after her treasure had been removed to the sloop in which Kidd returned to New York.
There was a story that after this sloop entered Delaware Bay a chest loaded with treasure was taken off her, but evidence as to the spot where this was buried has ever been vague. A clue to the burial of part of her cargo on Gardiner's Island, Long Island Sound, brought better results,
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for diggers here found several bales of goods and the treasure that constituted the bulk of the recovered $70,000. Some said that while Kidd's sloop lay off the island three sister craft received mysterious cargoes from her and proceeded north.
What became of the great bulk of Captain Kidd's treasure remains a mystery that has created more widespread popular interest, has been the motif of more extravagant boyhood dreams and has given inspiration to more lurid fiction plots than any other riddle of history. One favorite theory has been that $10,000,000 in gold, silver and jewels was buried by Kidd's crew in a deep pit upon Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Thousands of dollars spent for excavations upon that island resulted a century ago in a discovery that had the world by the ears for a considerable period. The spades of an army of patient diggers were said to lave one day struck a forbidding obstruction and there was revealed a mysterious shaft with oaken platforms. Ninety feet down this pit was found a stone slab containing characters which, when translated, are alleged to have read: "Ten feet below are buried 2,000,000 pounds sterling." As late as seven years ago a New York engineer renewed the excavations in this same shaft. But his efforts were as futile as have been all other attempts to solve the riddle.
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