The Book of Buried Treasure. Ralph D. Paine
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 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 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.
In English fiction there are three treasure stories of surpassing 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 cluster around his memory the folk-lore and superstitions 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 ashore 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 entitled, "An Account of Some of the Traditions and Experiments Respecting Captain Kidd's Piratical Vessel." In this it was soberly asserted 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 assisted 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, Mass., 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 massive 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 Hell-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 superstition 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