The Bargaining Chip That Hanged a Pirate

On Gardiners Island, near Long Island, William Kidd is believed to have knelt in the sand sometime in 1699 and hidden away part of his plundered wealth. He was not thinking of adventure or mystery when he did it. He was thinking of survival.

Kidd had begun his career as something respectable, at least on paper: a privateer commissioned by England to hunt enemy ships and pirates on the crown's behalf. But somewhere along the way, his conduct crossed the line separating sanctioned raiding from outright piracy, and word of his activities reached authorities eager to make an example of him.

Sensing the net closing, Kidd sailed toward New York City, but not before stopping at Gardiners Island to bury a portion of his treasure. The idea, it seems, was practical rather than romantic: if he was caught, the hidden wealth might become a bargaining chip, something to trade for leniency or his life.

The gamble failed. Kidd was captured, tried, and hanged as a pirate, his buried fortune doing nothing to spare him. But the story of the treasure did not die with him — if anything, it grew larger with every retelling, becoming the seed of an entire mythology.

Kidd was far from the only pirate rumored to have stashed away riches. Governor Thomas Modyford of Jamaica wrote in 1665 of buccaneers hiding plundered Spanish goods in holes and creeks rather than returning them. A 1703 deposition mentioned money from pirate Thomas Tew's sloop supposedly buried in the ground at Rhode Island. Stories swirled around Henry Every's riches lying buried near Madagascar, and later writers claimed Blackbeard had hidden chests near Mulberry Island in Virginia, or a fortune on the island of Blanco in the West Indies. Even the pirate John Rackham was said, in the unreliable General History of the Pyrates, to have buried treasure before his capture — a claim absent from his actual trial record.