By Manushag N. Powell, Purdue University
One of the most beloved pirate legends is the trove of buried treasure. However, most of the standard Golden Age Pirates did the maritime equivalent of robbing a couple of 7-11s, sold what they could, and then drifted away into a quiet retirement. The average length of a pirate career was no more than one to three years, and whatever money they acquired, they tended to spend quickly.
Captain Kidd’s Fictional Treasure
The medieval and Viking hordes that are still found from time to time are usually theorized to be either burial treasures or treasure buried to protect it from pirates rather than done by pirates.
Captain Kidd was rumored to have buried a cache of spoils on Gardiner’s Island in New York, but this seems unlikely. It’s true that fearing arrest, Kidd had tried to disperse and hide much of his booty, but he did so in the more conventional way of buying and selling and leaving it with various people, most of whom were found and persuaded to cough up the ill-gotten gains by his persecutor, the Earl of Bellomont.
One version of the anonymous 18th-century Ballad of Captain Kidd promises, “I’d ninety bars of gold, and dollars manifold, with riches uncontrolled… Come all ye young and old, you’re welcome to my gold, for by it I’ve lost my soul, and must die.”
However, no one got the 90 bars, or the 200 as in some other versions; either way, it was just a legend.
In the end, the only wealth that the golden rumor ever produced was literary.
Stories about the Buried Treasure
Washington Irving, the author of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, wrote a set of immensely popular pirate stories in 1824 called The Money Diggers that featured Dutch American farmers tearing up their cabbage fields in search of Captain Kidd’s non-existent booty.
Then, in the mid 19th century, Kidd became a feature of melodrama, like the highly popular Captain Kyd or The Wizard of the Sea, a romance from 1839, which led credulous audiences to believe that his sunken treasure ship lay somewhere in the Hudson River.
Robert Louis Stevenson also contributed to the myth of the buried treasure hoard. His best-selling 1882 boys adventure story Treasure Island, and to a lesser extent, the 1889 Master of Ballantrae, both revolve around buried treasure plots. Both helped to cement the idea of pirate gold in the imagination of children and their parents.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Real History of Pirates. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Stevenson and the Confluence of Fiction and History
The confluence of fiction and history in Stevenson is interesting. Ballantrae is set between 1745 and 1764, and it features a pirate who deliberately imitates the historical pirate Blackbeard. In Treasure Island, Stevenson doesn’t date the events precisely, but based on the events it references, it seems to take place in the late 1750s.
So, while the ultimate pirate novel was composed in the late 19th century, it stars pirates from the earlier Golden Age of piracy, which took place in the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean from about 1650 to the end of the 1720s.
Stevenson also name-checks several real pirates like Captain Blackbeard and Captain England, but he mixes in a lot of anachronisms from the sailors he’d grown up seeing. Most of his pirates, for example, sport tattoos and earrings.
Tattoos weren’t popular among sailors until the end of the 18th century, when South Seas’ explorations became more common, while earrings had been fashionable for men in the early 17th century. King Charles I reportedly wore his favorite pearl drop earrings to his own beheading. However, with the interregnum, earrings fell out of fashion, even for sailors, until the end of the 18th century as well.
Pirate Fiction
Treasure Island is a good example of how cultures take the pirate stories of previous eras and adjust them to fit their own desires. Stevenson himself admitted to borrowing or, we might say, pirating from Washington Irving’s Money Digger stories; one good pirate yarn begets another.
The interesting thing is that these newly modified pirate fictions can become a part of collective folklore for future generations. But all this is not to downplay the fact that the historical colonels behind the legends are often dramatic and terrifying without the subsequent mythologizing. And to be fair, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no hard and fast line between history and fiction, reportage and storytelling.
Common Questions about Pirates and the Myth of Buried Treasure
The medieval and Viking hordes that are still found from time to time are usually theorized to be either burial treasures or treasure buried to protect it from pirates rather than treasure buried by pirates.
The Money Diggers by Washington Irving had Dutch American farmers tearing up their cabbage fields in search of Captain Kidd’s non-existent booty. Captain Kyd or The Wizard of the Sea, a romance from 1839, led credulous audiences to believe that his sunken treasure ship lay somewhere in the Hudson River. Robert Louis Sevenson’s Treasure Island and Master of Ballantrae also revolved around buried treasure plots.
Treasure Island is a good example of how cultures take the pirate stories of previous eras and adjust them to fit their own desires. It is a confluence of fiction and history. In Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson doesn’t date the events precisely, but based on the events it references, it seems to take place in the late 1750s. So, though it was composed in the late 19th century, it stars pirates from the earlier Golden Age of piracy, which took place in the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean from about 1650 to the end of the 1720s.
