Читать книгу The Curse of Oak Island - Randall Sullivan - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWO

From the perspective of what we know about the world today, it might seem absurd that the belief it was Captain Kidd’s treasure buried on Oak Island should persist for more than a hundred years. Even when the second edition of his History of the County of Lunenburg was published in 1896, Judge DesBrisay referred to the Money Pit as the burial place of “the Kidd Treasure.” From the point of view of the people living in Mahone Bay in the late eighteenth century, however, this notion was perfectly reasonable.

The coastlines of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had been pirate havens all during the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. In Nova Scotia, there was hardly a bay, cove, or inlet that did not have some legend of pirate treasure associated with it. And no part of Nova Scotia was more steeped in such lore than Mahone Bay. According to R. V. Harris, “the name ‘Mahone’ itself is derived from the French word mahonne which in turn is derived from the Turkish word mahone, which means a low-lying craft, propelled by long oars, called sweeps, and much used by pirates in the earlier days of the Mediterranean.” There’s some question about whether the bay’s name actually is an allusion to pirate boats, though most believe so. “Mahone Bay” first appeared on a chart of the Nova Scotia seacoast drawn by a Captain Thomas Durell in 1736, but Durell left no indication of where he got the name. It is clear, though, that pirates had been making use of the bay for more than a hundred years by then, and the reasons why it was so attractive to them are obvious. Twenty miles long by twelve miles wide, surrounded by thickly forested hills and protected from view by the Tancook Islands, Mahone Bay provides an ideal location to scan what are today the main shipping lanes running along the southern coast of Nova Scotia. And Oak Island might be the most protected body of land in the entire bay, with outer islands blocking sight of it until one sails very close to the mainland. A ship anchored on the south shore of Oak Island is about as well hidden from the open sea as it is possible to be and remain afloat, in a spot where it would take five minutes to row a boat to a mainland, which back in the seventeenth century was heavily populated with white-tailed deer, black bear, and moose, along with plenty of pheasant and grouse. The bay was then and remains today the summer home of hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese, not to mention the haddock, mackerel, and scallops that also fill its waters. During the warm season, it’s difficult to imagine a better place for a ship’s crew to fatten up, lay in provisions, and make repairs.

Henry Howard Brownell, in his 1861 work The English in America, observed not only that pirates had been “quite numerous all along the Atlantic coast of America” during the previous two centuries, but also that the freebooters made LaHave, at the entrance to Mahone Bay, “their depot.” In 1700, the French governor of Arcadia actually invited the pirates of Nova Scotia to make LaHave their base of operations, in order to keep the fort there out of British hands. The buccaneers happily obliged, mainly because the fort “was favorably situated for committing depredations on the trade with Massachusetts,” as Thomas Chandler Haliburton put it in volume 1 of his An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, published in 1829.

This sort of cozy relationship between pirates, government officials, and financial interests was common in the years between 1600 and 1750. Those who worked under the sponsorship of the British Crown were called privateers, and there were any number who alternated between collecting bounties for the ships they captured and simply seizing the loot and sailing off on the high seas. I found it remarkable that the greatest of all the privateers who turned pirate—the most successful and powerful buccaneer in history, in my estimation—is so little known. Perhaps this is because the career of Peter Easton (1570–1620) came so early in the history of English piracy. He was the scion of a family that was admired and respected for its service to the Crown, not only for having fought in the Crusades under Richard the Lionheart, but also for having distinguished themselves in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Peter Easton himself was still a loyal servant of Queen Elizabeth in 1602, when she commissioned him as a privateer and gave him command of a convoy that was to protect the British fishing fleet in Newfoundland. His commission from the Queen gave Easton the legal right to press local fishermen into his service and to attack enemy ships and wharves with impunity; he was actually encouraged to capture any Spanish ship that he could. Aboard his flagship Happy Adventure, with what had once been the Crusader flag, the St. George’s Cross, at its masthead, Easton enjoyed immediate success. His career as a privateer was short-lived, however, because when Elizabeth died in March 1603 her successor, James I, promptly sued for peace with Spain. Easton’s continued attacks on Spanish ships turned him into the first notorious British pirate, a role he played with remarkable dash and vigor. For the next decade, he and his fleet captured Spanish ships from the West Indies to the Mediterranean, taking enormous wealth in gold, while at the same time extorting protection money from English ships throughout the Atlantic Ocean. In 1610, his convoy successfully blockaded Bristol Channel, which gave Easton control of all shipping that came and went from British ports in the west of England. Throughout this time, Easton maintained his headquarters in Newfoundland, where his home base was an island in Placentia Bay called Oderin. Horseshoe-shaped and composed mainly of high hills, Oderin’s sheltered harbor not only had room for all of Easton’s ships, but it also concealed them from virtually every approach. (Placentia Bay was also the protected body of water where Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met aboard a ship to draft the Atlantic Charter as they prepared to join forces in World War II.) In Newfoundland, Easton continued to fill his ranks with men from English fishing vessels. Many were pressed into service, but it was widely reported that most of the fifteen hundred fishermen who joined Easton’s crews did so voluntarily.

The British captain Sir Richard Whitbourne, in his work Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland, recalled that in late 1611 he had met “the famous pirate, Peter Easton, who then commanded ten stout ships.” Whitbourne’s encounter with Easton was more than a meeting. In fact, the pirate captured and plundered all of the thirty ships under Whitbourne’s command at St. John’s (today the largest city in Newfoundland) and took Whitbourne himself prisoner. The captain was not released until he pledged to obtain a pardon for Easton upon his return to England.

Even after turning Whitbourne loose, though, Easton remained unrelenting. In June 1612, by Whitbourne’s account, Easton sailed into Harbour Grace, where he stole five ships, a hundred cannons, and “goods to the value of £10,400”—millions of dollars in today’s money. The pirate also “induced” an additional five hundred English fishermen to join his crews and robbed assorted French, Flemish, and Portuguese ships of their cargos and provisions. On the mainland, his crews robbed settlers, burned their forests, and murdered those who resisted.

Easton’s behavior was not entirely malign, Whitbourne would point out when he submitted his request that the pirate be pardoned. Easton, then in near-total control of Canada’s Atlantic coast, had permitted the first man appointed by the Crown as proprietary governor of Newfoundland, John Guy, to form the island’s founding British colony at Cuper’s Cove. He would not allow Guy to form a second colony, however.

By the time Easton’s pardon was granted by King James I, he was working the Barbary Coast, where he took a number of Spanish ships. From there he sailed to the Caribbean, where it was reported he had breached the purportedly unassailable fort at San Felipe del Morrow in Puerto Rico (which had previously withstood a siege by Sir Francis Drake). Whether that is true or not, Easton certainly captured the treasure-laden Spanish ship San Sebastian, which he hauled back to Newfoundland. On discovering that his pardon had been granted, Easton retired to Villefranche on the French Riviera with two million pounds of gold, wealth that permitted him to acquire the title marquis of Savoy and live out the remainder of his days in splendor.

It’s difficult to think of another outlaw in history who made crime pay better than Peter Easton. Among his admirers is Marty Lagina, one of the two brothers who have driven the treasure hunt on Oak Island since 2007. It was Marty who first suggested to me that Easton might be the man behind the works on Oak Island: “This was a very smart guy, and he wouldn’t have just sailed off with all his wealth and risked losing it on the sea or on land. He would have kept something in reserve, hidden. Why not on Oak Island?”

While Easton may have had motive and opportunity, there’s absolutely no evidence that connects him with Oak Island. Placentia Bay is more than a thousand miles from Mahone Bay. The idea that Easton was responsible for what took place on the island certainly can’t be dismissed, but that’s about the extent of the theory’s viability.

Of course, the evidence is even thinner for the numerous other famous pirates who have been linked to Oak Island. Those who propose Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (1680–1718) as the man behind the Money Pit like to cite his famous boast that “I’ve buried my money where none but Satan and myself can find it, and the one that lives longest takes all,” but that’s about all they have. There’s nothing to indicate that Teach was ever anywhere near Nova Scotia. Henry Morgan (1635–1688) is another candidate who has been suggested. Those who back Morgan note that after sacking the city of Panama in August 1670, the famous pirate captain and his crew sailed away with spoils of gold, silver, and gemstones worth well over $100 million in today’s values. Just six months later, Morgan, suspecting a mutiny among his men, slipped away during the night. Aside from the fact that the treasure of Panama has never been found or accounted for, however, there’s nothing that connects Morgan to Nova Scotia, let alone to Oak Island.

A slightly more plausible case might be made for Sir William Phipps (1650–1694). Phipps was a privateer who managed to remain in the good graces of the Crown, in large part because of a spectacular early success. In 1687 and 1688 Phipps led a pair of expeditions that recovered the Concepcion, an almiranta or “flagship galleon,” of the Spanish fleet that had foundered on a reef along Hispaniola’s Ambrosia Bank more than forty years earlier and was still loaded with a fantastic thirty-four-ton treasure of silver coins, silver bullion, gold doubloons, gemstones, and Chinese porcelain that was worth well over a $1 billion in today’s money. When Phipps hauled his prize back to London, he became a wealthy man and a national hero. He was knighted and made a Sheriff of New England, where he eventually rose to the position of Massachusetts governor. While most of the other famous pirates and privateers of his time sailed the waters of the Caribbean, Phipps was quite familiar with the North Atlantic, and in fact he was almost as celebrated for his sacking of the Acadian city of Port Royal on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy as he was for the capture of the Concepcion. Phipps was proposed as the originator of the Money Pit in a book titled Oak Island and Its Lost Treasure, put out by Formac, a Halifax house that has created a significant-sized cottage industry devoted to publishing works that champion doggedly researched but often weakly supported theories of Oak Island. The suggestion that Phipps kept a huge part of the treasure recovered from the Concepcion and buried it on Oak Island is something that can’t be simply shrugged off, but that’s about as much as can be said for it.

THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THE MAHONE BAY of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had just one pirate in mind when they spoke of the Oak Island treasure, however, and that was William Kidd (1645–1701). This singular focus on Captain Kidd was, I believe, largely a function of time and place. His rise to prominence came three-quarters of a century later than Peter Easton’s and took place only after he had settled in New York City. The unquestionably political circumstances of Kidd’s trial and execution by the British Crown, though, were what made him a pirate legend.

Kidd was “of obscure origin” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, though the man himself testified before the High Court of Admiralty in London that he had been born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1645. His father may have been a ship’s captain who was lost at sea, but some historians have made the case that the famous pirate was sired by a Church of Scotland minister. Historians also have made claims that in his youth Kidd served as an apprentice on a pirate ship, that he commanded a privateer in the wars of William III and fought the French, and that he performed “brave service” for the Crown in the American colonies. It can be stated with a bit more confidence (but no real certainty) that by 1680 Kidd, then thirty-five, had prospered well enough from his life at sea that he was able to resign from the British navy and purchase his own ship. What we can be sure about is that in 1689, Kidd attempted to settle in New York and to establish himself there as a person of means. This early effort at making a life on land was cut short the same year, though, when Kidd was dispatched by British authorities to the Caribbean. There is yet more disagreement about whether he went there as the captain of a privateer or as a member of the French and English crew of a pirate ship that mutinied, renamed the ship Blessed William, and made Kidd their new captain. Either way, the Blessed William became part of the small British fleet that defended the island of Nevis from the French; Kidd and his crew were instructed that they could collect their pay from any French ships or towns they captured and looted.

By 1691, Kidd had made it back to New York, where he married a wealthy young widow named Sarah Oort and began to join society, becoming acquainted with at least three governors and contributing to the construction of Trinity Church in Manhattan. At the behest of the British Crown, he was still employed off and on as a privateer, serving during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York and in the Caribbean. In December 1695, New York’s new governor, Richard Coote, the 1st Earl of Bellomont, tasked the “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” with taking command of a British privateer that was to attack both pirates and ships of the enemy French. Kidd could not refuse without destroying his reputation and so sailed to London to prepare for the voyage that would cost him his life and make him a legend. In England, he was given a new ship named the Adventure Galley, along with command of thirty-four cannons and a handpicked crew of 150. He carried a letter of marque signed by William III that licensed him as a privateer obliged to surrender 10 percent of his booty to the Crown. The Adventure Galley’s voyage got off to a bad start, though, when Kidd and his crew failed to salute a British navy yacht as they sailed down the Thames. When the yacht fired a shot across the bow to demand what was considered a proper show of respect, the Adventure Galley’s crew replied by presenting to the navy their backsides. Such unprecedented impudence resulted in the navy pressing virtually the entire crew of Kidd’s ship into its service. The Adventure Galley made it shorthanded back to New York, where Kidd was compelled to pick up a new crew, this one made up mostly of former pirates and hardened criminals.

By the autumn of 1696, the Adventure Galley was sailing off the coast of Madagascar, where a third of the crew died of cholera. The new ship began to spring leaks and Kidd failed to find any of the pirate ships he had told both his backers and his men would be there. With an increasingly discontented crew aboard the Adventure Galley, Kidd sailed to the entrance to the Red Sea, another popular pirate refuge, but again found no prizes to capture. Under pressure to deliver rewards to his backers (among them Governor Bellomont) and increasingly menaced by an unruly crew that regularly threatened mutiny, Kidd still refused to cross the line into piracy. That refusal would lead to a confrontation with a ship’s gunner named William Moore, who on October 30, 1697, was sharpening a chisel on the deck of the Adventure Galley when a Dutch ship appeared on the horizon. Moore demanded that they attack the Dutchman, but Kidd said he would not do it, knowing that to do so would infuriate Dutch-born King William. Kidd called Moore a lousy dog. Moore replied, “If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so,” and he accused the captain of bringing him and the rest of the crew “to ruin.” An enraged Kidd picked up an ironbound bucket and threw it at Moore, fracturing the skull of the gunner, who died the next day.

At his eventual trial, two members of Kidd’s crew would accuse him of savage abuses that included hoisting rebellious men and drubbing them with the dull edge of a cutlass. Others, not called to testify, said later that Kidd had punished his men only after they ransacked the trading ship Mary while he and the Mary’s captain were speaking in his quarters, and that this punishment consisted mainly of forcing the crew to return what they had taken. Only those who refused were beaten.

It was not until January 1698 that the Adventure Galley finally took a great prize. This was the four-hundred-ton Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship under hire to Armenian merchants, loaded with gold, silver, and a rich assortment of East Indian merchandise that included silks, satins, and muslins. The captain of the captured ship was an Englishman carrying passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French crown. When Kidd learned that the captain was English, he attempted to persuade his men to return the ship and its cargo, but the crew refused and Kidd, who at that point maintained only tenuous control over his men, backed down and agreed to keep the prize. That decision made him a criminal in the eyes of the British navy, which ordered its commanders to “pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices” for having committed “notorious piracies.” Kidd kept the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the captain’s French passes, hoping the latter would justify his capture of the ship. It was a calculated risk, as Kidd knew that British admiralty courts in North America frequently turned a blind eye to the trespasses of English-licensed privateers, especially if those trespasses were committed against the French.

Renaming the seized ship Adventure Prize, Kidd set sail again for Madagascar, where he encountered an old nemesis, the pirate Robert Culliford, who years before had stolen a ship and crew from Kidd. This time, Culliford stole only the crew—or most of it, anyway. With just thirteen men remaining, Kidd ordered the worm-eaten Adventure Galley to be burned at sea, then sailed the Adventure Prize across the Atlantic. Upon arrival in the Caribbean, Kidd discovered he was a wanted man and that at least four English men-of-war were hunting him. He abandoned the Adventure Prize in a concealed location and sailed a sloop toward New York. Avoiding apprehension by a series of clever maneuvers, Kidd came to his downfall by trusting Governor Bellomont, who lured him to capture in Boston. Kidd seems to have convinced himself that Bellomont and the various other Whig politicians (advocates of constitutional monarchy) who had backed him would come to his defense in the end, but the governor and the others were far more concerned about protecting themselves from the accusations of their rivals. Bellomont kept Kidd confined in Boston’s Stone Prison (often having him held in solitary confinement in the prison’s dungeon) and also ordered that Kidd’s wife, Sarah, be imprisoned in New York. After more than a year of that misery, Kidd was returned to England to be questioned before Parliament. The accused pirate quickly discovered that the newly elected Tory ministry was determined to use the now-infamous Captain Kidd as a tool to discredit his Whig sponsors. Kidd, though, was apparently still 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.