Fate has played the strangest tricks imaginable with the memory of this seventeenth century seafarer who never cut a throat or made a victim walk the plank, who was no more than a third or fourth rate pirate in an era when this interesting profession was in its heyday, and who was hanged at Execution Dock for the excessively unromantic crime of cracking the skull of his gunner with a wooden bucket.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Captain Kidd burying his Bible.]

Carousing at Old Calabar River. (From _The Pirates' Own Book_.)

As for the riches of Captain Kidd, the original doc.u.ments in his case, preserved among the state papers of the Public Record Office in London, relate with much detail what booty he had and what he did with it.

Alas, they reveal the futility of the searches after the stout sea-chest buried above high water mark. The only authentic Kidd treasure was dug up and inventoried more than two hundred years ago, nor has the slightest clue to any other been found since then.

These curious doc.u.ments, faded and sometimes tattered, invite the reader to thresh out his own conclusions as to how great a scoundrel Kidd really was, and how far he was a scapegoat who had to be hanged to clear the fair names of those n.o.ble lords in high places who were partners and promoters of that most unlucky sea venture in which Kidd, sent out to catch pirates, was said to have turned amateur pirate himself rather than sail home empty-handed. Certain it is that these words of the immortal ballad are cruelly, grotesquely unjust:

I made a solemn vow, when I sail'd, when I sail'd, I made a solemn vow when I sail'd.

I made a solemn vow, to G.o.d I would not bow, Nor myself a prayer allow, as I sail'd.

I'd a Bible in my hand, when I sail'd, when I sail'd, I'd a Bible in my hand when I sail'd.

I'd a Bible in my hand, by my father's great command, And I sunk it in the sand when I sail'd.

In English fiction there are three treasure stories of surpa.s.sing merit for ingenious contrivance and convincing illusion. These are Stevenson's "Treasure Island"; Poe's "Gold Bug"; and Washington Irving's "Wolfert Webber." Differing widely in plot and literary treatment, each peculiar to the genius of its author, they are blood kin, sprung from a common ancestor, namely, the Kidd legend. Why this half-hearted pirate who was neither red-handed nor of heroic dimensions even in his badness, should have inspired more romantic fiction than any other character in American history is past all explaining.

Strangely enough, no more than a generation or two after Kidd's sorry remnants were swinging in chains for the birds to pick at, there began to cl.u.s.ter around his memory the folk-lore and superst.i.tions colored by the supernatural which had been long current in many lands in respect of buried treasure. It was a kind of diabolism which still survives in many a corner of the Atlantic coast where tales of Kidd are told.

Irving took these legends as he heard them from the long-winded ancients of his own acquaintance and wove them into delightfully entertaining fiction with a proper seasoning of the ghostly and the uncanny. His formidable hero is an old pirate with a sea chest, aforetime one of Kidd's rogues, who appears at the Dutch tavern near Corlear's Hook, and there awaits tidings of his shipmates and the hidden treasure. It is well known that Stevenson employed a strikingly similar character and setting to get "Treasure Island" under way in the opening chapter. As a literary coincidence, a comparison of these pieces of fiction is of curious interest. The similarity is to be explained on the ground that both authors made use of the same material whose ground-work was the Kidd legend in its various forms as it has been commonly circulated.

Stevenson confessed in his preface:

"It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the 'Tales of a Traveler' some years ago, with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlor, the whole inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters--all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving.

But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the springtides of a somewhat pedestrian fancy; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye."

After the opening scenes the two stories veer off on diverging tacks, the plot of Stevenson moving briskly along to the treasure voyage with no inclusion of the supernatural features of the Kidd tradition.

Irving, however, narrates at a leisurely pace all the gossip and legend that were rife concerning Kidd in the Manhattan of the worthy Knickerbockers. And he could stock a treasure chest as cleverly as Stevenson, for when Wolfert Webber dreamed that he had discovered an immense treasure in the center of his garden, "at every stroke of the spade he laid bare a golden ingot; diamond crosses sparkled out of the dust; bags of money turned up their bellies, corpulent with pieces of eight, or venerable doubloons; and chests, wedged close with moidores, ducats, and pistareens, yawned before his ravished eyes and vomited forth their glittering contents."

The warp and woof of "Wolfert Webber" is the still persistent legend that Kidd buried treasure near the Highlands of the lower Hudson, or that his ship, the _Quedah Merchant_, was fetched from San Domingo by his men after he left her and they sailed her into the Hudson and there scuttled the vessel, scattering ash.o.r.e and dividing a vast amount of plunder, some of which was hidden nearby. Many years ago a pamphlet was published, purporting to be true, which was ent.i.tled, "An Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments Respecting Captain Kidd's Piratical Vessel." In this it was soberly a.s.serted that Kidd in the _Quedah Merchant_ was chased into the North River by an English man-of-war, and finding himself cornered he and his crew took to the boats with what treasure they could carry, after setting fire to the ship, and fled up the Hudson, thence footing it through the wilderness to Boston.

The sunken ship was searched for from time to time, and the explorers were no doubt a.s.sisted by another pamphlet published early in the nineteenth century which proclaimed itself as:

"A Wonderful Mesmeric Revelation, giving an Account of the Discovery and Description of a Sunken Vessel, near Caldwell's Landing, supposed to be that of the Pirate Kidd; including an Account of his Character and Death, at a distance of nearly three hundred miles from the place."

This psychic information came from a woman by the name of Chester living in Lynn, Ma.s.s., who swore she had never heard of the sunken treasure ship until while in a trance she beheld its shattered timbers covered with sand, and "bars of ma.s.sive gold, heaps of silver coin, and precious jewels including many large and brilliant diamonds. The jewels had been enclosed in shot bags of stout canvas. There were also gold watches, like duck's eggs in a pond of water, and the wonderfully preserved remains of a very beautiful woman, with a necklace of diamonds around her neck."

As Irving takes pains to indicate, the basis of the legend of the sunken pirate ship came not from Kidd but from another freebooter who flourished at the same time. Says Peechy Prauw, daring to hold converse with the old buccaneer in the tavern, "Kidd never did bury money up the Hudson, nor indeed in any of those parts, though many affirmed such to be the fact. It was Bradish and others of the buccaneers who had buried money; some said in Turtle Bay, others on Long Island, others in the neighborhood of h.e.l.l-gate."

This Bradish was caught by Governor Bellomont and sent to England where he was hanged at Execution Dock. He had begun his career of crime afloat as boatswain of a ship called the _Adventure_ (not Kidd's vessel). While on a voyage from London to Borneo he helped other mutineers to take the vessel from her skipper and go a-cruising as gentlemen of fortune. They split up forty thousand dollars of specie found on board, snapped up a few merchantmen to fatten their dividends, and at length came to the American coast and touched at Long Island.

The _Adventure_ ship was abandoned, and there is reason to think that she was taken possession of by the crew of the purchased sloop, who worked her around to New York and beached and sunk her after stripping her of fittings and gear. Bradish and his crew also cruised along the Sound for some time in their small craft, landing and buying supplies at several places, until nineteen of them were caught and taken to Boston. That there should have been some confusion of facts relating to Kidd and Bradish is not at all improbable.

Among the Dutch of New Amsterdam was to be found that world-wide superst.i.tion of the ghostly guardians of buried treasure, and Irving interpolates the distressful experience of Cobus Quackenbos "who dug for a whole night and met with incredible difficulty, for as fast as he threw one shovelful of earth out of the hole, two were thrown in by invisible hands. He succeeded so far, however, as to uncover an iron chest, when there was a terrible roaring, ramping, and raging of uncouth figures about the hole, and at length a shower of blows, dealt by invisible cudgels, fairly belabored him off of the forbidden ground.

This Cobus Quackenbos had declared on his death bed, so that there could not be any doubt of it. He was a man that had devoted many years of his life to money-digging, and it was thought would have ultimately succeeded, had he not died recently of a brain fever in the almshouse."

A story built around the Kidd tradition but of a wholly different kind is that masterpiece of curious deductive a.n.a.lysis, "The Gold Bug," with its cryptogram and elaborate mystification. In making use of an historical character to serve the ends of fiction it is customary to make him move among the episodes of the story with some regard for the probabilities. For example, it would hardly do to have Napoleon win the Battle of Waterloo as the hero of a novel. What really happened and what the author imagines might have happened must be dovetailed with an eye to avoid contradicting the known facts. Like almost everyone else, however, Poe took the most reckless liberties with the career of poor Captain Kidd and his buried treasure and cared not a rap for historical evidence to the contrary. Although Stevenson is ready to admit that his "skeleton is conveyed from Poe," the author of "Treasure Island" is not wholly fair to himself. The tradition that secretive pirates were wont to knock a shipmate or two on the head as a feature of the program of burying treasure is as old as the hills. The purpose was either to get rid of the witnesses who had helped dig the hole, or to cause the spot to be properly haunted by ghosts as an additional precaution against the discovery of the h.o.a.rd.

What Stevenson "conveyed" from Poe was the employment of a skeleton to indicate the bearings and location of the treasure, although, to be accurate, it was a skull that figured in "The Gold Bug." Otherwise, in the discovery of the remains of slain pirates, both were using a stock incident of buried treasure lore most generally fastened upon the unfortunate Captain Kidd.

Most of the treasure legends of the Atlantic coast are fable and moonshine, with no more foundation than what somebody heard from his grandfather who may have dreamed that Captain Kidd or Blackbeard once landed in a nearby cove. The treasure seeker needs no evidence, however, and with him "faith is the substance of things hoped for."

There is a marsh of the Pen.o.bscot river, a few miles inland from the bay of that name, which has been indefatigably explored for more than a century. A native of a statistical turn of mind not long ago expressed himself in this common-sense manner:

"Thousands of tons of soil have been shovelled over time and again. I figure that these treasure hunters have handled enough earth in turning up Codlead Marsh to build embankments and fill cuts for a railroad grade twenty miles long. In other words, if these lunatics that have tried to find Kidd's money had hired out with railroad contractors, they could have earned thirty thousand dollars at regular day wages instead of the few battered old coins discovered in 1798 which started all this terrible waste of energy."

The most convincing evidence of the existence of a pirates' rendezvous and h.o.a.rd has been found on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. In fact, this is the true treasure story, _par excellence_, of the whole Atlantic coast, with sufficient mystery to give it precisely the proper flavor. Local tradition has long credited Captain Kidd with having been responsible for the indubitable remains of piratical activity, but it has been proved that Kidd went nowhere near Nova Scotia after he came sailing home from the East Indies, and the industrious visitors to Oak Island are therefore unknown to history.

The island has a sheltered haven called Mahone Bay, snugly secluded from the Atlantic, with deep water, and a century ago the region was wild and unsettled. Near the head of the bay is a small cove which was visited in the year of 1795 by three young men named Smith, MacGinnis, and Vaughan who drew their canoes ash.o.r.e and explored at random the n.o.ble groves of oaks. Soon they came to a spot whose peculiar appearance aroused their curiosity. The ground had been cleared many years before; this was indicated by the second growth of trees and the kind of vegetation which is foreign to the primeval condition of the soil. In the center of the little clearing was a huge oak whose bark was gashed with markings made by an axe. One of the stout lower branches had been sawn off at some distance from the trunk and to this natural derrick-arm had been attached a heavy block and tackle as shown by the furrowed scar in the bark. Directly beneath this was a perceptible circular depression of the turf, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter.

The three young men were curious, and made further investigation. The tide chanced to be uncommonly low, and while ranging along the beach of the cove they discovered a huge iron ring-bolt fastened to a rock which was invisible at ordinary low water. They reasonably surmised that this had been a mooring place in days gone by. Not far distant a boatswain's whistle of an ancient pattern and a copper coin bearing the date of 1713 were picked up.

The trio scented pirates' treasure and shortly returned to the cove to dig in the clearing hard by the great oak. It was soon found that they were excavating in a clearly defined shaft, the walls of which were of the solid, undisturbed earth in which the cleavage of other picks and shovels could be distinguished. The soil within the shaft was much looser and easily removed. Ten feet below the surface they came to a covering of heavy oak plank which was ripped out with much difficulty.

At a depth of twenty feet another layer of planking was uncovered, and digging ten feet deeper, a third horizontal bulkhead of timber was laid bare. The excavation was now thirty feet down, and the three men had done all they could without a larger force, hoisting machinery, and other equipment. The natives of Mahone Bay, however, were singularly reluctant to aid the enterprise. Hair-raising stories were afloat of ghostly guardians, of strange cries, of unearthly fires that flickered along the cove, and all that sort of thing. Superst.i.tion effectually fortified the place, and those bold spirits, Smith, MacGinnis, and Vaughan were forced to abandon their task for lack of reinforcements.

Half a dozen years later a young physician of Truro, Dr. Lynds, visited Oak Island, having got wind of the treasure story, and talked with the three men aforesaid. He took their report seriously, made an investigation of his own, and straightway organized a company backed by considerable capital. Prominent persons of Truro and the neighborhood were among the investors, including Colonel Robert Archibald, Captain David Archibald, and Sheriff Harris. A gang of laborers was mustered at the cove, and the dirt began to fly. The shaft was opened to a depth of ninety-five feet, and, as before, some kind of covering, or significant traces thereof, was disclosed every ten feet or so. One layer was of charcoal spread over a matting of a substance resembling cocoa fibre, while another was of putty, some of which was used in glazing the windows of a house then building on the nearby coast.

Ninety feet below the surface, the laborers found a large flat stone or quarried slab, three feet long and sixteen inches wide, upon which was chiselled the traces of an inscription. This stone was used in the jamb of a fireplace of a new house belonging to Smith, and was later taken to Halifax in the hope of having the mysterious inscription deciphered. One wise man declared that the letters read, "Ten feet below two million pounds lie buried," but this verdict was mostly guess-work. The stone is still in Halifax, where it was used for beating leather in a book-binder's shop until the inscription had been worn away.

When the workmen were down ninety-five feet, they came to a wooden platform covering the shaft. Until then the hole had been clear of water, but overnight it filled within twenty-five feet of the top.

Persistent efforts were made to bail out the flood but with such poor success that the shaft was abandoned and another sunk nearby, the plan being to tunnel into the first pit and thereby drain it and get at the treasure. The second shaft was driven to a depth of a hundred and ten feet, but while the tunnel was in progress the water broke through and made the laborers flee for their lives. The company had spent all its money, and the results were so discouraging that the work was abandoned.

It was not until 1849 that another attempt was made to fathom the meaning of the extraordinary mystery of Oak Island. Dr. Lynds and Vaughan were still alive and their narratives inspired the organization of another treasure-seeking company. Vaughan easily found the old "Money Pit" as it was called, and the original shaft was opened and cleared to a depth of eighty-six feet when an inrush of water stopped the undertaking. Again the work ceased for lack of adequate pumping machinery, and it was decided to use a boring apparatus such as was employed in prospecting for coal. A platform was rigged in the old shaft, and the large auger bit its way in a manner described by the manager of the enterprise as follows:

"The platform was struck at ninety-eight feet, just as the old diggers found it. After going through this platform, which was five inches thick and proved to be of spruce, the auger dropped twelve inches and then went through four inches of oak; then it went through twenty-two inches of metal in pieces, but the auger failed to take any of it except three links resembling an ancient watch-chain. It then went through eight inches of oak, which was thought to be the bottom of the first box and the top of the next; then through twenty-two inches of metal the same as before; then four inches of oak and six inches of spruce, then into clay seven feet without striking anything. In the next boring, the platform was struck as before at ninety-eight feet; pa.s.sing through this, the auger fell about eighteen inches, and came in contact with, as supposed, the side of a cask. The flat chisel revolving close to the side of the cask gave it a jerk and irregular motion. On withdrawing the auger several splinters of oak, such as might come from the side of an oak stave, and a small quant.i.ty of a brown fibrous substance resembling the husk of a cocoa-nut, were brought up. The distance between the upper and lower platforms was found to be six feet."

In the summer of 1850 a third shaft was sunk just to the west of the Money Pit, but this also filled with water which was discovered to be salt and effected by the rise and fall of the tide in the cove. It was reasoned that if a natural inlet existed, those who had buried the treasure must have encountered the inflow which would have made their undertaking impossible. Therefore the pirates must have driven some kind of a tunnel or pa.s.sage from the cove with the object of flooding out any subsequent intruders. Search was made along the beach, and near where the ring-bolt was fastened in the rock a bed of the brown, fibrous material was uncovered and beneath it a ma.s.s of small rock unlike the surrounding sand and gravel.

It was decided to build a coffer-dam around this place which appeared to be a concealed entrance to a tunnel connecting the cove with the Money Pit. In removing the rock, a series of well-constructed drains was found, extending from a common center, and fashioned of carefully laid stone. Before the coffer-dam was finished, it was overflowed by a very high tide and collapsed under pressure. The explorers did not rebuild it but set to work sinking a shaft which was intended to cut into this tunnel and dam the inlet from the cove. One failure, however, followed on the heels of another, and shaft after shaft was dug only to be caved in or filled by salt water. In one of these was found an oak plank, several pieces of timber bearing the marks of tools, and many hewn chips. A powerful pumping engine was installed, timber cribbing put into the bottom of the shafts, and a vast amount of clay dumped on the beach in an effort to block up the inlet of the sea-water tunnel. Baffled in spite of all this exertion, the treasure-seekers spent their money and had to quit empty-handed.

Forty years pa.s.sed, and the crumbling earth almost filled the numerous and costly excavations and the gra.s.s grew green under the sentinel oaks. Then, in 1896, the cove was once more astir with boats and the sh.o.r.e populous with toilers. The old records had been overhauled and their evidence was so alluring that fresh capital was subscribed and many shares eagerly snapped up in Truro, Halifax and elsewhere. The promoters became convinced that former attempts had failed because of crude appliances and insufficient engineering skill, and this time the treasure was sought in up-to-date fashion.

Almost twenty deep shafts were dug, one after the other, in a ring about the Money Pit, and tunnels driven in a net-work. It was the purpose of the engineers to intercept the underground channel and also to drain the pirates' excavation. Hundreds of pounds of dynamite were used and thousands of feet of heavy timber. Further traces of the work of the ancient contrivers of this elaborate hiding-place were discovered, but the funds of the company were exhausted before the secret of the Money Pit could be revealed.

Considerable boring was done under the direction of the manager, Captain Welling. The results confirmed the previous disclosures achieved by the auger. At a depth of one hundred and twenty-six feet, Captain Welling's crew drilled through oak wood, and struck a piece of iron past which they could not drive the encasing pipe. A smaller auger was then used and at one hundred and fifty-three feet cement was found of a thickness of seven inches, covering another layer of oak.

Beyond was some soft metal, and the drill brought to the surface a small fragment of sheepskin parchment upon which was written in ink the syllable, "vi" or "wi." Other curious samples, wood and iron, were fished up, but the "soft metal," presumed to be gold or silver, refused to cling to the auger. It was of course taken for granted that the various layers of oak planking and spruce were chests containing the treasure.

During the various borings, seven different chests or casks, or whatever they may be, have been encountered. It seems incredible that any pirates or buccaneers known to the American coast should have been at such prodigious pains to conceal their plunder as to dig a hole a good deal more than a hundred feet deep, connect it with the sea by an underground pa.s.sage, and safeguard it by many layers of timber, cement, and other material. Possibly some of the famous freebooters of the Spanish Main in Henry Morgan's time might have achieved such a task, but Nova Scotia was a coast unknown to them and thousands of miles from their track. Poor Kidd had neither the men, the treasure, nor the opportunity to make such a memorial of his career as this.

Quite recently a new company was formed to grapple with the secret of Oak Island which has already swallowed at least a hundred thousand dollars in labor and machinery. For more than a century, sane, hard-headed Nova Scotians have tried to reach the bottom of the "Money Pit," and as an attractive speculation it has no rival in the field of treasure-seeking. There may be doc.u.ments somewhere in existence, a chart or memorandum mouldering in a sea chest in some attic or cellar of France, England, or Spain, that will furnish the key to this rarely picturesque and tantalizing puzzle. The unbeliever has only to go to Nova Scotia in the summer time and seek out Oak Island, which is reached by way of the town of Chester, to find the deeply pitted area of the treasure hunt, and very probably engines and workmen busy at the fine old game of digging for pirates' gold.

Let us now give the real Captain Kidd his due, painting him no blacker than the facts warrant, and at the same time uncover the true story of his treasure, which is the plum in the pudding. He had been a merchant shipmaster of brave and honorable repute in an age when every deep-water voyage was a hazard of privateers and freebooters of all flags, or none at all. In one stout square-rigger after another, well armed and heavily manned, he had sailed out of the port of New York, in which he dwelt as early as 1689. He had a comfortable, even prosperous home in Liberty Street, was married to a widow of good family, and was highly thought of by the Dutch and English merchants of the town. A shrewd trader who made money for his owners, he was also a fighting seaman of such proven mettle that he was given command of privateers which cruised along the coasts of the Colonies and harried the French in the West Indies. His excellent reputation and character are attested by official doc.u.ments. In the records of the Proceedings of the Provincial a.s.sembly of New York is the following entry under date of April 18, 1691: