All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Aug. 25, 2015 - Skeptoid
16:14
Skeptoid #481: Captain Kidd's Treasure

Think you're going to find Captain Kidd's buried treasure on the US east coast? Think again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Captain Kidd's Buried Treasure 00:06:47
Captain Kidd, the notorious 17th century pirate, is believed to have buried his magnificent treasure somewhere along the eastern coast of North America, and also in Florida, and also in the Bahamas, and even in Madagascar.
In fact, there's hardly any place where someone doesn't claim Kidd's treasure is buried there.
But where is it actually?
The truth is, it's probably nowhere.
That's today on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Captain Kidd's Treasure.
Today we're going to scramble up the rat lines with a spyglass, for on the horizon has been spotted a sail.
Tis the ship Adventure Galley of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd, doubtless on the warpath, bloodthirsty and lusting for gold.
We'll fall off a point and run out the stuncil booms, and should we live to see the morrow, we may get our own chance to hunt for his legendary buried treasure.
For no pirate tale has gripped the modern public's attention like that of Captain Kidd.
There are only a few problems with it.
It seems that Captain Kidd's actual history and today's legends of buried treasure may have almost nothing in common.
But let's see what history tells us and see if we can in fact find a bounty of buried gold.
In order to understand where any great treasure hidden by Captain Kidd may have come from, we should take a look at his professional career to see where and when he may have been in possession of large hordes that required hiding.
William Kidd was born in Scotland in 1654.
In his early 20s, he moved to New York City, which even in those early days was still the third largest city in the British Empire.
It's not very clear what he did there as it's recorded that he worked as an apprentice seaman on various pirate crews, but also that he became well known in high social circles, two things that don't go together very well.
About the age of 35, he took his first command as captain, commissioned by the governor of the English island of Neves as part of a small fleet to attack French ships, taking his pay from whatever spoils he might gain along the way.
He found reasonable success at this, and there are any number of times during his voyages up and down the New World's eastern coast that he might have had a fair-sized booty on board.
During all this, he still made his residence in New York and married a very wealthy woman.
Kidd scarcely needed a risky career as a privateer.
Nevertheless, all his connections with governors and society led to a royal appointment in 1695 straight from King William III.
He was to represent England in a special voyage aboard a purpose-built ship to capture pirates and attack the French.
This voyage was to be the one that would write him into history.
With a hand-picked crew and his new ship, the Adventure Galley, which had the advantage of being both a capable and well-armed warship and rowable with oars for extra maneuverability in battle or in poor wind, Kidd set forth.
He crossed the Atlantic to New York, crossed back and rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa, and spent a year and a half along eastern Africa and in the Indian Ocean.
This was where he got into trouble.
Kidd's principal victory on this voyage was over a ship named the Kedok Merchant, the problem being that its nationality was not clearly French, and thus taking it would have been piracy.
The ship was Armenian and its captain was English, but he'd purchased letters of protection from the French East India Company.
It was fully laden with valuable goods from India.
Kidd kept the ship, renaming it the Adventure Prize.
Soon after, Kidd attacked a pirate with whom he'd fought years ago in the Caribbean, Robert Cullifford.
But Kidd's men had no stomach for it, and 95 of them deserted to join Cullifford.
Only 13 remained with Kidd.
The 95 disgruntled sailors joined a growing chorus of voices who sent complaints of Kidd's piracy back to England.
The Adventure Galley turned out to have been both poorly built and poorly equipped, and with only 13 men, Kidd scuttled it somewhere off Madagascar, nobody's ever found the wreck, and headed home aboard the Adventure Prize.
While in the Caribbean on his way to New York, Kidd learned that he was officially wanted by the Crown for piracy.
Half the men who remained deserted, and he left the Adventure Galley on St. Thomas Island and sailed to New York aboard a sloop to answer the charges.
This is when you'd expect him to stash away any great loot he might have still had, and that's exactly what he did.
He obtained permission from the Gardner family, who owned the 3,000-acre Gardner Island, off of New York's Long Island, to let he and his men bury their valuables there in various locations while they were in New York, fearful of being robbed by some of his former crewmen who had already returned to New York.
But the treasure on Gardner's Island was never a secret and was all recovered as evidence while Captain Kidd was imprisoned for more than a year in Boston.
Then, taken back to London, he was tried and convicted of piracy and murder and hanged in 1701.
His body was gibbeted in an iron cage and suspended beside the Thames for three years.
Ever since, we're told, people have been searching for a buried treasure.
Stories abound, and they're as colorful as you could ever hope for.
Even the good name of Benjamin Franklin has been appropriated by modern sensationalists looking to hype the legend of Captain Kidd's treasure.
There's a quote from Franklin you'll find time and time again in articles about Kidd.
The Charm of Finding Money 00:02:12
You can hardly walk half a mile out of town on any side without observing several pits dug.
There seems to be some particular charm in the conceit of finding money.
True that Franklin wrote this, it's from a satirical series of letters called The Busy Body, he wrote for a newspaper in 1729, but false that it has anything to do with Captain Kidd.
His piece was poking fun at people who believe unspecified buried treasure was all around and spent endless time and money searching for it.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding.
Together, get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
Oak Island and Hidden Value 00:05:52
In fact, it appears that 150 years passed after William Kidd's appointment with the hangman before there were published rumblings of a buried treasure still outstanding.
These stories came not from historians or archaeologists, but from a far more inevitable source, people looking for money.
They were the proprietors of a shaft being dug on Nova Scotia's Oak Island.
Refer to the full Skeptoid episode on Oak Island for the complete story.
Popular local belief held that a mysterious pit, discovered 10 years earlier by a young boy, had existed on this island and doubtless contained pirate treasure.
Miners took it over, dug, found nothing, and completely destroyed the area so that nobody even knew where the original pit had been.
In 1849, the current owners went bust and resorted to salting the mine to entice investment.
They planted a few links of jewelry chain and a mysterious tablet with a barely disguised substitution code using Masonic symbols, claiming that a vast hoard was buried just a few more meters down.
To bolster their advertisement, they stated that Captain Kidd had been in the area, despite no historical record of this, and doubtless buried treasure here.
But the Oak Island fundraisers were not prejudiced only toward Captain Kidd.
Other piratical names dropped to potential Oak Island investors included Henry Morgan, Edward Teach, Blackbeard, and Sir Francis Drake.
And since that day, local traditions and tourism boards have sprinkled Captain Kidd's alleged buried treasure so liberally over the United States eastern coast that there's no longer any pretense of any historical foundation.
A fair specimen is Hangout New Jersey, a travelogue section on the state of New Jersey's official website.
They cite six different locations where Captain Kidd's treasure is, quote, said to be buried on New Jersey's coast, not one with the slightest historical support.
A lot of these sources say that Captain Kidd claimed to have buried 40,000 pounds of treasure, that only 10,000 pounds was recovered, and that it's believed he actually buried 400,000 pounds.
I was intrigued.
It turns out there's quite a lot of published text from the days of Kidd's trial, including numerous statements written by Kidd and others, as well as the transcripts of the court proceedings.
I searched through them looking for such claims.
10,000 is the value, given at the time in English pounds, of the goods buried on Gardner Island by Kidd's party, which was recovered and sent back to England along with Kidd as evidence in his trial.
40,000 was the value, in Indian rupees, of the ship Kadach Merchant.
400,000 was given in his trial as the estimated value in English pounds of all the treasure taken by Kidd during his voyage in the Adventure Galley, and which was divided among his crew before they all left his service.
Probably the £10,000 Kidd buried on Gardner Island was all that remained of his share.
I found no evidence that Kidd himself ever claimed to have buried £40,000, £400,000, or any treasure at all, other than the Gardner Island stash.
It all appears to be just more made-up and exaggerated nonsense to sensationalize the story for public consumption.
And the tradition continues.
The latest bit of Captain Kidd to hit the news came in May of 2015 when underwater explorer Barry Clifford announced he'd found the wreck of the Adventure Galley and a 50 kilogram bar of silver just off of Madagascar's island of St. Marie.
The discovery spread like wildfire across science publications like Smithsonian and Discovery News.
Was it true?
No, it was more sensationalism.
It turns out the History Channel funded Clifford's hunt based on Clifford's long-standing belief that he'd discovered the Adventure Galley, and the announcement was largely a promotion for their TV show.
It included an elaborately staged presentation of the Silver Ingot to Madagascar's president, all for History Channel's cameras.
Afterwards, UNESCO sent researchers to validate the find and discovered that it wasn't a shipwreck at all, merely a piece of an old wooden dock, and that the silver bar wasn't silver either.
It was lead, an unremarkable lump of ballast from some old unknown ship.
This is why historians and other scientists validate before they publish.
Appreciate history and its colorful characters for who and what they are.
There truly is no need to invent false histories or to attach stories to people and places, selling vacation spots or attracting tourism dollars notwithstanding.
It's entirely possible that Captain Kidd did leave some buried treasure somewhere that went unrecorded and unrecovered by his friends or his enemies, but not very likely.
Even as he was headed for the gallows, Kidd had ample opportunity to give information to his wife or anyone else he wished to enrich.
The lack of credible evidence for such a stash is not surprising, given that there don't seem to have even been any rumors about it until a century and a half after his death.
So, rest in peace, Captain, and know that if you did hide anything out there, it's probably going to rest just as well.
Skepticism Is Best Medicine 00:01:18
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookam Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as five US dollars per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection