Captain Kidd's Buried Treasure

The account

William Kidd began as a respectable sea captain and a Crown-licensed privateer, hired to hunt pirates, and ended as the most famous pirate of them all, mostly because they hanged him for it. On his last voyage home in 1699, knowing the authorities were closing in, he put in at Gardiners Island off the tip of Long Island and buried a cache of gold, silver, and jewels, asking the island's owner, John Gardiner, to keep it safe.

It did not stay buried long. When Kidd was arrested in Boston, the colonial governor had the Gardiners Island cache dug up and inventoried, gold and silver and precious stones, and shipped the lot to England, where it was laid out as evidence at his trial. Kidd was convicted and hanged in London in 1701, his tarred body hung in an iron cage over the Thames as a warning to other ambitious sailors.

That should have been the end of it. Instead it was the start of a legend that never died: that the cache dug up on Gardiners Island was only part of it, and that Kidd, a careful and frightened man, salted the rest away at other quiet anchorages before he sailed into the trap. For three hundred years that single idea has put shovels in the ground from the Hudson to Nova Scotia.

Most of it is moonshine. But here is the splinter that keeps working its way deeper: the core of the story is true. Kidd really did bury treasure, on that island, and it really was there. Which means the question is not whether a pirate could hide gold on the American coast. It is whether the most wanted pirate in the world hid all of it in the one place he told the authorities about, and almost nobody who hears it can quite believe that he did.

Known intelligence

• Kidd buried a cache of gold, silver, and jewels on Gardiners Island in 1699 and asked owner John Gardiner to safeguard it.
• After his arrest the cache was dug up, inventoried, and shipped to England to be used as evidence at his trial.
• Kidd was convicted of piracy and hanged in London in 1701; his body was left in an iron cage over the Thames.
• No further verified Kidd cache has ever been found, despite three centuries of searching.

Theories of the hunt

• Kidd hid more treasure at other quiet anchorages along the American coast before his capture.
• The Gardiners Island cache was the whole of it, and the rest is pure legend.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The only verified cache was on Gardiners Island, recovered in 1699 and shipped to England. Kidd's documented 1699 stops, Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and Long Island Sound, are the rational corridors for any rest.
• Court records of Kidd's trial inventory exactly what was recovered, which lets researchers estimate what, if anything, is unaccounted for from his known plunder.
• His prize ship the Quedagh Merchant was found scuttled off Catalina Island, Dominican Republic, in 2007, proof his documented movements still yield wrecks.
• The famous Kidd treasure maps, the Palmer and Hardy charts, surfaced only in the 20th century and are considered forgeries; they are dead ends, not leads.

The trail, in order

• 1696-1699: Kidd's privateering voyage turns to piracy in the Indian Ocean.
• 1699: he buries treasure on Gardiners Island on his way to Boston.
• 1699-1700: the cache is recovered and sent to England as evidence.
• 1701: Kidd is hanged in London and gibbeted over the Thames.

Sources and the record

• William Kidd (Wikipedia)
• Gardiners Island (Wikipedia)