convinced that Bellomont and his other backers would come to his aid and refused to name names. Realizing Kidd was of no use to them, the Tories sent him to stand trial at the High Court of Admiralty in London on charges that included the murder of William Moore. While awaiting his trial, Kidd was lodged in the hellhole of Newgate Prison, where he busied himself by writing letters to King William pledging loyalty to the Crown and pleading for clemency.
The accused still imagined that his backers would help him at trial, but in fact Bellomont and the others withheld both the money and the evidence (including the French passes taken from the Quedagh Merchant) that might have helped him avoid being condemned to death. On the testimony of two former crewmen who had been granted pardons if they helped the prosecution, Kidd was convicted of murder and five counts of piracy. While awaiting execution, he wrote a letter to the speaker of the House of Commons in which he claimed that on the way back to New York from the Caribbean he had “lodged goods and Treasure to the value of one hundred thousand pounds.” This sum (equivalent to approximately $20 million in today’s money) he would happily surrender to the Crown if he were permitted to lead a ship to the spot where it had been buried, Kidd added. The request was refused and on May 23, 1701, he was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping. Afterward, Kidd’s body was displayed over the River Thames at Tilbury Point inside a gibbet (a metal cage affixed to a gallows) where it was left to rot for three full years as a warning to those who might contemplate following the dead man into piracy.
A broadside song about Captain Kidd called “Farewell to the Sea, or, the Famous Pirate’s Lament” became enormously popular in the weeks and months after his execution and spread the false notion that he had confessed to his crimes. The broadside also popularized the story that Kidd had buried treasure on his way back to New York from the Caribbean. “Two hundred bars of gold, and rixdollars [silver coins] manifold, we seized uncontrolled,” was the song’s most oft-repeated line. The legend of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure would make its way into the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. It would also lead to treasure hunts that stretched from Grand Manan Island on the Bay of Fundy (between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) to the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc.
What cemented the idea that Captain Kidd’s treasure was on Oak Island, however, was the story of a confession made by an old sailor with his dying breaths. By the nineteenth century, the tale had become apocryphal to the point of cliché, but it seems to have originated in the story of Captain Kidd’s treasure that spread up the Atlantic coast of North America around the middle of the eighteenth century. On his deathbed, the story went, this sailor confessed to having been a member of Captain Kidd’s crew and claimed that he and the others had buried a treasure worth two million pounds on “an island.” In fact, a treasure buried by William Kidd on his return from the Caribbean already had been found on an island.
Gardiners Island (which still belongs to the Gardiner family and is today the only US real estate still intact as an original royal grant from the British Crown) is a six-by-three-mile piece of land standing just offshore from the town of East Hampton on New York’s Long Island. In 1701, shortly after learning that William Kidd had been arrested for piracy and was to face trial in England, John Gardiner contacted Governor Bellomont to tell him that Captain Kidd had anchored off his island in June 1699, when he had come ashore to say he wished to bury a chest filled with treasure and two boxes, one filled with gold and the other filled with silver. In the treasure chest were diamonds, rubies, Spanish coins, and candlesticks. The treasure was intended for Lord Bellomont, Kidd told the Gardiners, who agreed that the privateer might cache the two boxes and the chest on their property. In thanks, Kidd gave Mrs. Gardiner a length of gold cloth and a bag of sugar.
It was more than a year later when John Gardiner read that Captain Kidd was on trial for piracy in England. Gardiner contacted Bellomont and told him of the buried treasure. British soldiers were immediately dispatched to retrieve it. Once it was delivered to him, Bellomont shipped the loot to England to be used against Kidd at trial. During the proceedings at the Old Bailey, the value of what Kidd had cached on Gardiners Island was placed at around $1 million in today’s money—far less than the value of the booty Kidd was believed to have accumulated during his three years as a rover on the high seas. (The coins and effects Kidd had with him when he was captured were sold for £6,471—nearly $15 million in current value—in 1701, and used by the Order of St. Anne to establish Greenwich Hospital in London.)
So there was a not entirely unreasonable basis in the minds of eighteenth-century North Americans for the widespread belief that there remained a hidden Captain Kidd treasure on an island somewhere off the Atlantic coast. And that lent enough credence to the tale of the old sailor’s deathbed confession to let it take hold in the popular imagination. Jothan McCully in his 1862 article for the Liverpool Transcript observed that the early settlers of Mahone Bay had brought this story with them from New England and that Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Anthony Vaughan were all quite familiar with it. So it was no wonder that the three young men told prospective partners that they believed they had found the spot where Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried.
There is one other outstanding description of the connection between Captain Kidd, Oak Island, and the discovery of the Money Pit. In 1939, a ship’s captain named Anthony Vaughan, the grandson of the Anthony Vaughan who had been the friend of Daniel McGinnis and John Smith, gave an interview in which he added elements to the story that were previously unknown. Captain Vaughan, who was ninety-nine years old at the time of this interview—meaning his memories went back before the middle of the nineteenth century—said that the story of the Money Pit’s discovery he had heard started with a trip to England around 1790 made by a sailor who was a member of either the Smith or McGinnis family. While in England, this sailor had befriended an old fellow who claimed he had been a member of Captain Kidd’s crew and, out of gratitude for help he had been given, confirmed the story that Kidd had buried a huge trove of booty on an island in “New Anglia” that was “covered with oaks.” Months later, the younger sailor stopped over in Nova Scotia and related this story to family members there, whose excitement had led to a search of Oak Island and the discovery of the Money Pit.
The story may not be true, but it certainly doesn’t lack appeal. And that alone has been enough to keep it in circulation.
CHAPTER THREE
It was the spring of 1804 when a distant relative of Anthony Vaughan’s named Simeon Lynds became the first of many who have financed the search for treasure on Oak Island. Two versions of how this happened were published in the nineteenth century. According to the more colorful of the two accounts, John Smith’s wife, Sarah, was pregnant and refused to give birth to her child on Oak Island because of superstitions associated with the place. Instead she traveled to Truro, the largest nearby town, about seventy miles distant, to have the child delivered by a “Dr. Lynds.” Her husband, John, came along, of course, and immediately sized up the physician as the partner he had been hoping to find. After hearing Smith’s story, this version goes, Lynds visited Oak Island and was so excited by what he saw that he returned immediately to Truro and formed a company to finish the job that Smith and his two young friends had started. Among the problems with this account is that it seems in places to imply that the child delivered by “Dr. Lynds” was the Smiths’ first. Church records in Chester, though, show that the couple’s first child was christened on April 15, 1798, years before Lynd joined the probe of the Money Pit.
What R. V. Harris called the “more plausible version” of the story was that Simeon Lynds was a merchant, not a doctor, and he was in Chester to do business in early 1804 when he spent an evening with Anthony Vaughan’s father and heard the story of what Vaughan’s son and two other young men had found on Oak Island. The next day, Lynds went with the younger Vaughan to take a look at the Money Pit and was so impressed by what he saw that he hurried home to Truro to find other investors.
Whichever version is accurate (and almost certainly it’s the second), what can be known for sure is that Simeon Lynds quickly assembled an impressive collection of partners in this
