![]() ![]() To Kidd’s surprise, he was arrested and imprisoned in Boston to await transport to London to stand trial for murder and piracy. Parts of the Boston court depositions survive. A 1921 illustration by Howard Pyle of Kidd overseeing the burial of treasure from the Quedagh Merchant, taken off the Malabar Coast of southwestern India From Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main. It is said he fired off a four-gun salute as he departed. but if he called for the treasure and it was gone, he would take Gardiner’s head or his son’s.”Īs retold in The East Hampton Star in 1914, “Kidd added, ‘I wish your wife would prepare me a small roasted pig.’ This the lady, with great fear and trembling, hastened to have done, and so well cooked was the meal that Captain Kidd sent Lady Gardiner a blanket of cloth-of-gold, parts of which have always remained in the family.”īut Kidd, having been accused of piracy by the Crown, soon left Gardiner’s Island for the Port of Boston to clear his name. John” - that is, Gardiner - where he had stashed the treasure and told him, “If he never come for it, you may have it. According to the archival papers of the seventh proprietor of the Island, Kidd showed “Mr. In the story that came down in the Gardiner family, Kidd broke into the manor house at night, destroying featherbeds with his cutlass, hiding his treasure in the swampy area of Cherry Harbor, and exiting with a threat. Captain Kidd set his course to New York and the Isle of Wight. That ship, heavily laden with gold, rubies, and emeralds, was an Indian merchant vessel that Kidd plundered and took as his own, renaming it the Adventure Prize and setting sail for the West Indies.Īs Kidd later recounted in a confession, when he arrived at Santa Catalina in in the Dominican Republic he heard that he had been accused of piracy, so he burned and scuttled the Quedagh Merchant and bought the San Antonia, filling its stores with riches to be used for his own ransom and hurrying north to clear his name. ![]() The treasure was taken from the ship Quedagh Merchant 18 months earlier off the Malabar Coast of India. Kidd came to Gardiner not just to provision his sloop, but to leave behind three enslaved children and his treasure, for safekeeping. Depending on whose side you take in a centuries-old argument, Kidd may have been a pirate - or he may have been a privateer sailing, as he had during a long and illustrious career, under letters of marque from the British Crown and legally stealing from the enemies of England. Captain William Kidd anchored his latest acquisition, the six-gun sloop San Antonio, in Gardiner’s Bay and summoned John Gardiner to bargain for cider, sheep, and other supplies. On June 27 of 1699, an unexpected visitor came to Gardiner’s Island, which at the time was known as the Isle of Wight. Yet, this remarkable remnant of sumptuous silk is the very stuff of pirate legend. It is only a small fragment of cloth, woven of silk, cotton, and metallic gold and silver thread. It measures just under four-and-a-half inches long and less than half that high. There is an artifact that is now housed in the Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library - framed, and hung on the wall behind protective glass - that dates back 323 years.
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