Madagascar, Manhattan & the Jersey Shore: The Enduring Legacy of Captain Kidd's Hidden Treasure

 

Early morning, London, England, May 23, 1701.

It is windy, rainy and unseasonably cold.  

A crowd has gathered around the place called Execution Dock in the neighborhood of Wapping along the banks of the River Thames.  The cold wind whips an icy spray onto the faces of all those assembled, but the crowd standing before the single raised gallows remains pensive and still.

Execution Dock, located just beyond the low-tide mark of the River Thames, is reserved solely for those who have been found guilty of committing crimes against the British Admiralty on the high seas.

Those who commit mutiny, murder, smuggling even sodomy while at sea all meet a cruel and very public end hanging from a shortened rope on this single wooden gallows.

On this day the condemned is the famous Captain William Kidd--found guilty of murder and piracy against the British Crown.

He has languished in prison, first in the dank Stone Prison of Boston in the American Colonies and then in the infamous Newgate Prison of London, for nearly two years.  It is rumored that solitary confinement in almost complete darkness has driven him insane and that he now mutters to himself incoherently about buried treasure and speaks in cryptic riddles about riches looted from Spanish galleons.

He has been convicted of murder based largely upon the testimony of his own mutinous crew members and fellow smugglers who seeking pardons themselves, had turned their backs on their former Captain, and had even gone so far as to wait in New York City to personally turn him in to the authorities. Knowing that he had many influential personal and political connections in New York they had erroneously expected Kidd to turn up somewhere in Manhattan once he had heard that the British Admiralty had a warrant out for his arrest two years earlier in 1699.

Instead, seeking to shake the British Men-of-War that had been dispatched by the Royal Navy to bring him to justice, and wishing to hide his precious treasure somewhere safe, the ever wily Captain William Kidd had sailed hundreds of nautical miles and docked at countless ports around the world before finally falling victim to a trap that his fellow smugglers laid for him by having him pull into port at Boston for a chance at a supposed smuggling venture.  When Kidd arrived with his ship in Boston Harbor the authorities were waiting and promptly arrested the world’s most wanted pirate.

Captain William Kidd has become famous the world over and now thousands have gathered to watch him die.  In doing so the assembled crowd will, inadvertently, help to make Captain Kidd even more famous dead than alive.

After being paraded with hands tied behind his back across London Bridge, Kidd is brought before the gallows on Execution Dock.

Site of Execution Dock

The noose is placed around his neck, and as is customary, Kidd is asked if he would like to say any final words.

At first, the famous pirate says not a word and his face is covered by black sackcloth.  But it is reported that only mere seconds before the trap door is released Kidd tosses a small piece of parchment into the crowd.

“Here is my treasure!” he mockingly shouts just before the trapdoor is released and his body plummets.

An audible gasp goes up from the crowd.  A mad scramble of grasping hands reaches skyward in an attempt to grab the parchment that Kidd has so nonchalantly tossed into the crowd of onlookers.

Then the rope snaps!

Kidd’s body falls to the earth below the gallows and lands on the dirt with a thud like a falling stone.

The world’s most famous pirate, more loved for his daring exploits than hated for the murders he may have committed, is still alive!

With his hands and feet tied and his face still covered, Captain William Kidd, condemned to die and writhing on the ground, laughs in the face of his would-be executioners.

“Release him!  Let him go!”  The crowd starts to shout.  “Release him!”

But Kidd is dragged up and out of the mud and brought up the steps of the gallows once more.  And another noose on the end of another stronger rope is tied around his neck.

The crowd jeers and boos and continues to cry out for his release but this time the rope does not break.  Captain William Kidd dies a slow and painful death by strangulation on the gallows at Execution Dock on the banks of the River Thames.

After his limbs finally stop twitching his now lifeless body is cut down and gibbeted atop London Bridge where everyone who passes by can watch the remains of the world’s most famous pirate slowly rot away and decompose.  The corpse of Captain William Kidd is left hanging above the River Thames until nothing remains but a hollow eyed bleached white skeleton.

Legend has it that the piece of parchment that he tossed into the crowd that day contained a cipher that held the answer to the whereabouts of a treasure he hid just before his arrest in the summer of 1699.  If such a piece of parchment ever existed it has been lost to history and the supposed cipher that it contained has never been solved.

Captain Kidd’s hidden treasure has never been found--or has it?

Captain William Kidd

For over 300 years archaeologists, treasure hunters and mythmakers have claimed to know (or to have found!) the final resting place of Captain Kidd’s lost treasure, but over the centuries it has become harder and harder to tell where the true history surrounding Captain William Kidd’s hidden treasure begins and where the folklore ends.

Even as recently as May of 2015 a team of British underwater archaeologists discovered what they believed to be a 50 pound silver ingot off the coast of Madagascar, a spot frequented by Kidd in the 17th century, and believing they had found the possible location of Captain Kidd’s hidden treasure, they turned the artifact over to Hery Rajoanarimampianina the then President of Madagascar.  Hery R., who served as President of the island nation of Madagascar from 2014 to 2018 touted the artifact as genuine and believed it to be a major historical find for his nation and people.

However, in July of that year an examination by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) determined that the ingot discovered off the coast of Madagascar was 95% lead and contained hardly any silver at all despite what had been previously claimed and believed.  The United Nations experts surmised that the metal ingot may have been part of a 17th century shipwreck but that it had little historical and no financial value in and of itself.

Despite this most recent connection to Madagascar, many have traditionally held to the belief that Captain Kidd buried his treasure either somewhere along the New Jersey coastline, on Long Island or in New York City most probably on Staten Island.

Belief in the validity of Captain Kidd’s hidden treasure comes largely from the story of the coded parchment cipher and from a ballad called “Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas” which was written in London just after the famous pirate’s execution in 1701 and was hugely popular across the Atlantic in the American Colonies.

“Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas” contains the lines, “Two hundred bars of gold and rix dollars (silver coins) we seized uncontrolled.”

Ever since those lines were sung thousands have looked up and down the east coast of America in search of Captain William Kidd’s lost treasure.

It is known that just before his arrest in July of 1699, realizing that soon the full weight of the British Navy would be brought to bear against him, Kidd sailed around Long Island in New York and buried several chests of gold coins valued at $20,000 on Gardiner’s Island off the coast of Suffolk County.

Kidd testified before the court that he had deposited the stash on Long Island hoping that he would be able to use them as a bargaining tool in an attempt to reach a plea deal with the court upon his arrest.  These coins were later recovered by the British Admiralty on Gardiner’s Island in New York exactly where Kidd said that they would be.

Additionally, Kidd also testified to having sailed around Madagascar in April of 1698 so that, if he had knowingly hid even small amounts of riches at these two locations, it stands to reason then that his real treasure must still be somewhere out there so to speak.

No place on earth in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was more active when it came to pirate sailing ships than the waterways between Staten Island in New York and Sandy Hook in New Jersey.

Famed British pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, is known to have raided countless towns along Long Island and along the Jersey Shore and it is said that the famed Captain Morgan’s favorite place to dock and refit his ships was Sandy Hook.

And unlike both Blackbeard and Captain Morgan, Captain William Kidd had a personal connection to the Big Apple and to the Jersey Shore.  Kidd was a resident of New York City from 1695 to 1699 and his wife came from Monmouth County along the Jersey Shore.

Apparently, around the then advanced age of 45 in about 1690 Kidd fell madly in love with a widow from New Jersey and did in fact get married, a rarity for any pirate of any age.

It is known that prior to his arrest Kidd dropped anchor many times in Raritan Bay along the coast of Monmouth County to both visit his wife and to try and use her family, many of whom were prominent Whig politicians, to help him avoid arrest and prosecution for privateering on the high seas.

It is estimated that at the time of his execution Captain William Kidd may have hidden as much as 400 million dollars worth of treasure around the world, with many speculating that much of that was hidden, somewhere between his home in New York City and his wife’s family home in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Though no one has ever found the countless riches of which the ballad of “Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas” hinted at, surprisingly, some have found gold coins in New Jersey!

At a place just off Sandy Hook called Wales Creek (or Whales Creek), where Middlesex and Monmouth Counties meet today, was once located a small island where Spanish coins from the 17th had been found in the 19th century.  This small island, immediately after the discovery of the gold coins gained the fitting name of Money Island and it became the haunt of countless New Jersey treasure hunters.

However, over the years, due to constant erosion of Raritan Bay and from the excavations of generations of fortune seekers, Money Island itself has long since disappeared.  Today, the site of what was once known as Money Island is now closest to what is known as Cliffwood Beach in Raritan Bay, which has also been the site of the discovery of several gold coins dating from the 17th century.

Perhaps, Captain William Kidd’s treasure does remain somewhere out there along the Jersey Shore for some beachcomber to discover, or maybe it has quite literally, been lost to history by the eroding sands of time.  We may never know the truth behind Captain Kidd’s hidden treasure or mysterious cipher, but of one thing we can probably be certain.

Somewhere, either up above or down below in another world, wherever pirates go, the famous Captain William Kidd is laughing at all of us who go in search of his long lost treasure just like he laughed at the hangman on that infamous day in May of 1701 when the rope broke and for a brief moment at least, the wily Captain Kidd cheated even death.