The Oak Island Mystery (12 page)

Pirates and Privateers

A
lthough
Robert Louis Stevenson's world famous
Treasure Island
did not appear until 1881, its realistic portrayal of pirate atmosphere is timeless. Flint, Black Dog, Blind Pew, and Long John Silver were not destined to reach the bookshops until nearly a century after Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis reached Oak Island and made their pioneering discovery — but lurid tales of Henry Morgan, William Kidd, Woodes Rogers, Edward Teach, and other infamous pirates were widely known and frequently retold in eighteenth century Nova Scotia.

A long tradition has associated the Oak Island Money Pit with William Kidd, but how likely is it to have any basis in historical fact? Popular accounts suggest that Kidd was born in 1645, the son of the Reverend John Kidd, the Calvinist Minister of Greenrock in Scotland, but there is little or no reliable evidence for these assertions. Paul Lorrain, Prison Chaplain at Newgate when Kidd was hanged in 1701, says that the pirate was then in his mid-fifties, which gives some validity to the approximate birth year.

Almost nothing is known of Kidd's early life, but from 1689 to 1691 there are records of his successful work as a privateer captain against the French in the West Indies. Kidd married the twice-widowed Sarah Bradley Oort on May 16, 1691. She was only fifteen when she married her first husband, William Cox, who had been a wealthy New York alderman. He died when she was eighteen. Her second husband, John Oort, had been a prosperous shipmaster and merchant. He had been dead for just over a week when she and Kidd took out their marriage licence! William and Sarah owned what must now rate as some of the most valuable property in the world: 86–90 Pearl Street, 52–56 Water Street, 56 Wall Street, and other premises.
[1]

Sarah's connection by marriage with the Oort family is a strange coincidence, and may turn out to have more significance than appears on the surface. Ort, Orth, and Oort (Latin
ursus
, French
ours
) are variations of a word meaning “the bear.” The semi-legendary Arthur of Britain, Celtic king and/or Romano-British warlord of the West, was closely associated with the bear in folklore and mythology. The Rennes-le-Château mystery has a strong link to the Habsburgs, particularly to Johann, a descendant of the Tuscany branch, who denounced his title, took the surname of Orth, became a sea captain and allegedly went down with his ship, the
Saint Margaret
, in 1890, somewhere off Cape Horn.

This
Saint Margaret
tragedy was, of course, a full two centuries after Kidd's involvement with John Oort's widow, but that New York Oort family may well have had Habsburg connections, and John's mercantile marine activities would certainly have involved trade with Europe and Asia. Might some important Oort information that Kidd heard from his new wife have provided the spur that sent him on what was ostensibly a privateering voyage to the Indian Ocean?

In the days before the Suez Canal was cut, Indian and Asian goods, silk, spices, jewels, and tea, had to be sailed laboriously around the Cape of Good Hope. This brought the precious cargoes perilously close to Madagascar and the small islands nearby — notorious pirate strongholds. The East India Company — wealthy and influential at the court of William and Mary during the last decade of the seventeenth century — put massive pressure on the British Government to provide warships to deal with the pirates who were destroying their trade.

New York and the American North Atlantic ports (forbidden officially to undertake manufacturing or to trade other than via British ports and British ships under the terms of the Navigation Acts) were not all averse to taking part in the illicit Madagascar trade. A privateering commission could be bought very cheaply in New York at that time, and everyone benefited from the goods the privateers brought back.

One version of Kidd's enlistment, as commander of the privateer that the East India Company had demanded, was that he was more or less coerced into the job through fear of being thought disloyal or unenthusiastic. It was rumoured that Kidd's greatest ambition was to captain a Royal Navy man-o'-war, and that failure to accept the East India privateering commission would permanently bar him from achieving his own quarter-deck to strut on!

Whatever his true motives — and it seems more probable that Kidd had some special private and personal task in the Indian Ocean (or beyond) rather than that he was merely allowing the British Government to pressure him — he set out as captain of the
Adventure Galley
. She was a 287-tonner carrying only thirty-four guns — hardly a match for the formidable pirate vessels she was meant to pursue. He signed seventy rather dubious crewmen to start with, and almost immediately ran into his first problem. While his vessel was anchored impudently beside HMS
Duchess of Queensborough
, as though claiming the prestige and privilege of another Royal Navy vessel, Kidd was visited by a press gang who “recruited” the best twenty of his crew. He complained bitterly to Admiral Lord Russell that he now had scarcely enough hands left to sail the
Adventure Galley
without attempting to take on the extra burden of fighting well-manned, well-armed, and well-equipped corsairs. Eventually, he got twenty men back — but they were very inferior to the men that he had lost to the
Duchess
.

Having captured an almost worthless French fishing boat and used most of what it fetched to buy provisions in New York, Kidd took his time about sailing for the Indian Ocean, a delay which irritated his powerful British backers. Eventually, with an even less reliable crew than he had started with, Kidd sailed for Madagascar. Was that delay really caused by Kidd's need to consult further with Sarah and her brother who sailed with him about some vital information they had obtained from the late John Oort?

He sullied his reputation again by insulting British Naval Commodore Warren, whose squadron he encountered off the Cape of Good Hope. Then fifty of Kidd's crew died of disease in Mehila in the Comoros. In July of 1697 he laid in wait for the Mocha merchant fleet, but ran into the fearless, efficient, and well-armed Captain Edward Barlow, master of the
Sceptre
, who was guarding the convoy with more guns than Kidd had. In the face of Barlow's spirited action, Kidd and the
Adventure Galley
retreated ignominiously. His subsequent kidnapping of an English captain and his Portuguese mate from a Moorish vessel did little to enhance Kidd's rapidly deteriorating reputation. He quarrelled with Moore, one of his gunners, and then gave him a fatal blow with an iron-bound wooden bucket. One of the charges which cost Kidd his life in 1701 was Moore's murder.

Some time later he captured the only worthwhile prize he ever took, the 500-ton
Quedah Merchant
. It was Kidd's fatal misfortune that she had an English captain named Wright and was the lawful property of Armenian merchants against whom Kidd had no warrant.

Kidd and his captive “fleet” reached Madagascar on April 1, 1698, and sailed into the notorious pirate harbour on St. Mary's Island. Here he encountered his old enemy Robert Culliford, now a successful pirate captain. Kidd ordered his untrustworthy men to attack Culliford's frigate, the
Mocha
, but they disobeyed him derisively, deserted to join Culliford, and ransacked Kidd's ships. He was lucky to escape with his life, and a proportion of his non-too-plentiful spoils.

There is now a period of some uncertainty in Kidd's life during which he might just have had time to reach Oak Island and bury his treasure — if he had still had anything worthwhile left to hide, which is highly doubtful. Abandoning the conspicuous and slow-moving
Quedah Merchant
under guard in the Higuey River in Hispaniola, Kidd acquired the anonymous-looking sloop
Antonio
and reached Long Island in her. Sarah and their two daughters joined him, but, from there onwards, Kidd's life was all downhill: betrayal, desertion, imprisonment in horrendous conditions, sickness, condemnation, death by hanging, and finally rotting on a gibbet for years at Tilbury Point.

Three years later, while the pathetic remnants of his tarred body still hung there, Sarah remarried and lived comfortably for another forty-odd years in New Jersey.

The chance that Kidd had anything of value to bury at Oak Island, or that he had ever possessed the men, the money, or the engineering skill to construct even one-fiftieth part of the incredible workings there, must produce odds of hundreds to one against — and yet a tiny lingering doubt remains.

There is the odd business of Sarah's second husband, John Oort. Could he have been one of the “bear clan” associated with the ancient and powerful House of Habsburg? As such, did he know anything about the secret Arcadian Treasure, part of which may have been concealed at Rennes-le-Château? Did Oort perhaps leave papers or a map in a strong-box which the beautiful but illiterate Sarah asked Kidd, her third husband, to read and explain to her? Was there something in those papers which tempted Kidd to find an excuse — even a dangerous and unwelcome privateering excuse — to get to the Indian Ocean (or beyond it to the South China Sea) to try to retrieve something of immense value connected with that mysterious Arcadian Treasure? The chances are very slight indeed, yet they do not recede to zero: it is only possible to say that Kidd's involvement in Oak Island is very unlikely.

In this strange Money Pit investigation, however, nothing is entirely impossible, and there is still the disturbingly coincidental “evidence” of the Wilkins Map to be considered.

What purported to be a map of the location of Kidd's treasure cache turned up in a book by Harold T. Wilkins published in London in 1935:
Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island
. This composite, which Wilkins admitted hat he had largely drawn from memory fertilized by imagination, was based on several so-called Kidd charts which had been “discovered” by Hubert Palmer, an English antiques dealer who specialized in pirate relics. Palmer had allowed Wilkins to see the “original” maps at a distance, but not to copy any of the bearings or other directions which they contained. Nevertheless, when Wilkins's book appeared, there were cryptic directions on the composite sketch map he had drawn!

Gilbert Hedden's lawyer, R.V. Harris, came across Wilkins's book and was intrigued by the superficial similarity of the Wilkins version of Skeleton Island to Oak Island. He drew these similarities to Hedden's attention. Book in hand, Hedden tried to interpret and follow the directions. They led him to a drilled boulder north of the Money Pit.

When he excitedly told Blair about it, Fred remembered seeing a similar drilled boulder forty years previously. The two of them relocated it and began pacing out distances: as a result they called in Charles Roper, the provincial land surveyor with his assistant, George Bates. Roper's and Bates's work led to the stone triangle, and a site line from the triangle's pointer indicated the Money Pit! It all seemed far too accurate to be a coincidence. Hedden flew to England to interview Wilkins.

Drilled boulder observed and photographed by the Fanthorpe team in 1988.

Here he was grimly disappointed. Wilkins insisted that his map, which was in any case partly imaginative and partly a composite, referred to an island in the China Sea and had nothing whatever to do with Nova Scotia or the North Atlantic. Hedden pressed him about the directions shown below it, but Wilkins said he might have seen them on one or more of the thousands of maps and charts he had studied in the course of writing his various books about piracy and buried treasure. When Hedden finally succeeded in convincing Wilkins that markers (the drilled boulders) had actually been found very close to the places indicated on the semi-imaginary map, Wilkins was amazed. According to Hedden's later account, Wilkins then began trying to convince himself that he was a reincarnation of Captain Kidd and had somehow produced the map and its accompanying instructions from some deep subconscious memory!