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The World-Wide Hunt for Vanished Riches: Kidd

CAPTAIN KIDD IN FACT AND FICTION DOOMED to an infamy undeserved, his name reddened with crimes he never committed, and made wildly romantic by tales of treasure which he did not bury, Captain William Kidd is fairly entitled to the sympathy of posterity and the apologies of all the ballad-makers- and alleged historians who have obscured the facts in a cloud of fable. For two centuries his grisly phantom has stalked through the legends and literature of the black flag as the king of pirates and the most industrious depositor of ill-gotten gold and jewels that ever wielded pick and shovel. His reputation is simply prodigious, his name has frightened children wherever English is spoken, and the Kidd tradition, or myth, is still potent to send treasure-seekers exploring and excavating almost every beach, cove, and headland between Nova Scotia and the Gulf of Mexico. 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. As for the riches of 'Captain Kidd, the original documents 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 documents, 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 noble 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 him-self 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 God 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.