The pirate Captain Kidd made his infamous career during the late seventeenth century, a time when the waters off the American colonies were infested with pirates who preyed on the fishing vessels that frequented the cod-rich Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland, or attacked Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. Originally in the service of King William III, William Kidd turned pirate due to circumstances that are still debated today.
The epidemic of piracy during this time was encouraged by the governor of New York, Benjamin Fletcher, who offered a secure place for pirates. He benefited personally from the bribes the pirates handed out while the infusion of their plunder into the local economy allowed New York a greater degree of prosperity. Fletcher came into conflict with the English crown, which sought to eliminate piracy in the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. William III ousted Governor Fletcher in 1695 and installed Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, in the key position of governor of New York. Shortly after Bellomont assumed his post, he came to an agreement with Kidd whereby Kidd was required to capture pirates and act as a privateer in return for a percentage of the loot he would confiscate. Kidd was selected for this task due to his personal contacts and to his past services rendered. Kidd received recognition for his assistance to the English Crown during King William’s War (1689–1697) in which he fought the French at Mariegalante and during Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) in which he assisted in the establishment of royal authority.
Romanticized painting of Captain William Kidd (1645–1701) welcoming a young woman on board his ship at New York Harbor. Kidd was a privateer raiding under the auspices of the British government but was convicted and hanged as a pirate in 1701 for attacking an English ship. After his execution Kidd’s legend grew, both because he was portrayed as a cautionary tale, a formerly godly man who had turned to devilish ways, and because of tales of buried treasure. It was especially in this latter capacity that Kidd became an icon of American folklore, and to this day treasure hunters search the Atlantic Seaboard for a chance to find some portion of Kidd’s legendary wealth. (Library of Congress)
Kidd signed the agreement on October 10, 1695, which required him to enter Boston Harbor with his plunder by March 25, 1697. It is not known why Kidd chose to enter into an agreement that threatened to destroy him financially, since his marriage to the propertied Sarah Oort on May 16, 1691, gave him financial security. To accomplish these objectives, Kidd was given command of the Adventure Galley, which was outfitted with thirty-four cannons and possessed more than forty oars, enabling the vessel to overtake the speedy pirate ships that eluded the slower ships of the Royal Navy. Kidd’s inability to find a legitimate target in conjunction with a restless crew, who would not receive payment unless they plundered a ship, made for a potentially volatile situation during the Adventure Galley’s tumultuous voyage from 1696 to 1698.
While the Adventure Galley was in the Indian Ocean, Kidd killed one of the ship’s gunners, William Moore, over an altercation that is still shrouded in mystery. He subsequently committed acts of piracy, including the capture of the Rupparell and the Quedagh Merchant, the latter ship netting a prize of approximately £12,000. When Kidd returned to Boston, he was quickly apprehended by Bellomont on charges of piracy and sent back to England to stand trial. Kidd found it difficult to mount a defense at his trial as several former crew members testified against him. Further complicating the matter, he was unable to use the French passes that he seized from the Rupparell and the Quedagh Merchant as evidence. Although a number of people spoke positively of Kidd’s character, he was convicted on the charges against him and sentenced to hang. Kidd attempted to save himself from the hangman’s noose by asserting his innocence and informing the Speaker of the House of Commons, Robert Harley, that he had concealed a treasure worth more than £100,000 prior to his arrest. These attempts proved futile and the pirate was executed on May 23, 1701, before a jubilant crowd at Wapping in east London. Kidd’s execution generated a large body of folklore. According to legend, the condemned pirate threw a map, presumably indicating the location of his treasure, to a specific individual in the crowd. Although maps attributed to Kidd have since emerged, most famously the Kidd-Palmer charts, there is no evidence to substantiate this claim.
Kidd’s presence in folklore was enshrined immediately after his execution as his life and death became a source of entertainment in addition to providing a moral lesson on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Although Paul Lorrain, the chaplain at Newgate, failed to elicit a confession from Kidd, the chaplain did contribute to the folklore surrounding Kidd by writing two ballads. Three additional ballads were written shortly after Kidd’s execution, one of which, “Captain Kid’s Farewel to the Seas,” proved to be immensely popular in the British North American colonies. Another ballad that emerged shortly after his execution, “The Dying Words of Captain Robert Kidd,” recounted how against “God’s laws I did forbid / And so wickedly I did when I sail’d.” However, the moral of the ballad stated “Take warning now by me, and shun bad company / Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die.” It is interesting that although these ballads note Kidd’s piracy and possess a confessional tone, they fail to mention Kidd hiding the booty that he acquired from this piracy. This omission is not surprising since A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, which went through several editions in the first half of the eighteenth century, failed to mention buried treasure in its discussion of Captain Kidd.
Despite the absence of hidden treasure in the abovementioned sources, much attention in the American colonies was consumed with the hope of acquiring Kidd’s treasure. Kidd’s letters to Bellomont, Edward Russell, and Harley, concerning his concealed loot, combined with the reputed wealth of the Quedagh Merchant, have helped to keep alive such speculation. However, given that Kidd ascribed varying amounts to the treasure he concealed and the impossibility of ascertaining the exact number of vessels that he attacked, it is difficult to assess the amount of wealth Kidd concealed prior to his death. Shortly after Bellomont placed Kidd in Boston Jail, he sent a courier to Gardiner’s Island and recovered approximately £14,000 that Kidd left on the island. A marker was constructed near the site to commemorate this event: “Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried in this hollow and recovered 1699.” Despite the discovery of this cache, rumors of more buried treasure circulated in the American colonies, resulting in several attempts to search for Kidd’s treasure along the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada.
Since the eighteenth century, treasure hunters and folklorists alike have actively searched for the wreck of the Adventure Galley in the waters of the Hudson River. Many people have bought land along the riverbank to continue the futile search for Kidd’s abandoned ship. Further searches were carried out throughout New York. A History of New York, published in 1757, mentions the remains of numerous holes dug by people seeking the wealth that Kidd and other pirates hid. Newspaper articles, such as a 1925 New York Times piece titled “Captain Kidd’s Treasure Is Still a New York Mystery,” continue to keep the legend of Kidd’s treasure alive. Although the article questions the whereabouts of Kidd’s treasure, it asserted that “all stories” link Kidd to “kill[ing] the negro slave who helped him conceal it [the treasure] and buried him on top of the chest, so that no one living but himself would know the hiding place.” This article created a great deal of excitement when a decapitated skeleton, thought to be Kidd’s handiwork, was discovered in Sleepy Hollow, but no treasure was ever found. It should also be noted that folklore in various communities along the eastern seaboard of North America link pirates to murdering a slave or member of their crew for the purpose of creating a spirit to protect the treasure. Additional legends have linked Kidd’s treasure to other states that occupy the American seaboard, partly because he landed at several locations while traveling from Anguilla to Boston in 1699. According to legend, Kidd, while anchored at Milford, Connecticut, deposited some of his booty on Charles Island, where his specter still roams, hindering all attempts to uncover it. Kidd’s familiarity with Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast, has given rise to claims that he concealed his ill-gotten gains there at a spot named Rodman’s Hollow.
Aside from these locations in the United States, stories of Captain Kidd’s treasure have abounded in the folklore of Nova Scotia. Given the extensive area in which pirates operated in the waters of Nova Scotia, it is not surprising that such stories have been attributed to the coves and crags of that province’s many small islands. Oak Island in particular has been linked to Kidd’s treasure as excavations have been carried out at the Money Pit since the late eighteenth century. A nineteenth-century popular belief states that Captain Kidd hid his treasure on the island, a claim reflected in a miller’s journal, recording the continuation of excavations on Oak Island in search for “Kidd’s money.” This popular belief prompted individuals such as Captain H. L. Bowdoin and Gilbert Hedden to invest a significant amount of time and wealth at Oak Island in search of the fabled treasure. The media hype surrounding the Kidd-Palmer maps in 1935 led Hedden to hypothesize that Kidd was responsible for the construction of the Money Pit, and while subsequent investigations have debunked the connections between Oak Island and the charts, Hedden did not hesitate to name his headquarters at the excavation “Camp Kidd.”
Besides his legendary connection with treasure, Captain Kidd often appears in folklore in association with dark and sinister forces, which is not surprising given that he was executed for murder and piracy. Folklore highlights Kidd’s personal transition from a pious man into a godless one. One such story tells of him burying a Bible in the ground to symbolize his rejection of his former Christian faith and his newfound allegiance to the forces of evil. In the mid-nineteenth century, An Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments Respecting Captain Kidd’s Piratical Vessel promoted the belief that Kidd was able to elude the Royal Navy with the help of evil spirits: “Whenever he was closely pursued by the English men-of-war that were sent out for his capture, he would be rescued by interposition of some violent storm, or that the evil spirits themselves would come to his aid by some surprising manifestation.” It is this folklore connecting Kidd’s treasure to evil forces that Washington Irving utilized to frame his short story “The Devil and Tom Walker”: “The old stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of the money [Kidd’s treasure], and took it under his guardianship.”
It is evident that Captain Kidd has been a source of much folklore in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom due to his deeds and execution, which facilitated the connection between Kidd, treasure, and darker forces. More than three centuries have passed since Kidd’s execution, but the interest in Captain Kidd has not abated, as treasure hunters continue to search for his trove that is sure to make them wealthy individuals. Perhaps the real treasure is in the tourism that this folklore generates, as sites continue to advertise their connection to Kidd, evil spirits, and his treasure. But more importantly, the folklore surrounding Kidd is a cautionary tale about the effect that greed can have on men in both the temporal and spiritual worlds.
Brian de Ruiter
See also Bellamy, Samuel “Black Sam”; Hornigold, Benjamin; Rackham, John “Calico Jack”; Thatch, Edward “Blackbeard”; Vane, Charles
Further Reading
Baer, Joel H., ed. 2007. British Piracy in the Golden Age: History and Interpretation, 1660–1730. London: Pickering & Chato.
Lane, Kris E., and Robert M. Levine. 1998. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Woodard, Colin. 2008. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.