In June 1699, on a beach on Gardiners Island off the eastern tip of Long Island, a pirate captain buried a fortune while the island’s owner stood and watched. That single, well-documented burial is the exception that swallowed the rule: pirates almost never buried treasure, but William Kidd genuinely did, and the story of what happened to it afterward is stranger than the legend.
A privateer who became a pirate
Kidd had sailed from London in 1696 under a royal commission to hunt pirates and enemy French shipping, not to become one. The voyage went badly from the start, and by the time he captured the Quedagh Merchant, an Armenian-owned vessel loaded with gold, silver, silks and satins, in 1698, English authorities had already begun treating him as a pirate rather than a privateer. Sailing back toward New York with a small fortune and a large legal problem, Kidd needed somewhere to put both while he tried to negotiate his way out of trouble.
What actually got buried
He stopped at Gardiners Island and met with John Gardiner, the island’s owner, who watched Kidd’s men bring boxes of treasure ashore and bury them in a spot known as Cherry Tree Field. Kidd reportedly told Gardiner that if anything went missing, he would come back and kill every Gardiner on the island. Gardiner kept quiet about the burial, by his own later account, until word reached him that Kidd had been arrested and executed — at which point he contacted the colonial governor, the Earl of Bellomont, and told him where to dig.
Digging it back up
Bellomont had lured Kidd to Boston in July 1699 with promises of a fair hearing and had him arrested instead. Soldiers were sent to Gardiners Island to recover what Kidd had buried, and the inventory survives: a chest and box of gold, two boxes of silver, bars of silver, gold dust, Spanish dollars, rubies, diamonds, candlesticks and silver porringers. Two copies of the list were made, one kept in Boston and one left with Gardiner as a receipt. The recovered treasure was shipped to England, where it was formally logged as evidence for Kidd’s trial and ultimately became Crown property rather than being returned to anyone.
The evidence outlived the excuse
It didn’t help him. Kidd was shipped to London, tried on charges of piracy and murder — a gunner aboard his ship had died after Kidd struck him with a bucket during a dispute — and convicted on all counts. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping on May 23, 1701; the rope broke on the first attempt, and he was hanged again minutes later. His body was afterward gibbeted over the Thames as a warning to other sailors weighing the same choice he had made.
Why this case, and not the others
The Gardiners Island treasure is one of the only instances in the entire golden age of piracy where a pirate is documented burying loot and that loot is documented being recovered soon after by the authorities who prosecuted him. That is precisely why it doesn’t support the popular picture of pirates routinely stashing treasure across the Caribbean for someone else to find later: Kidd buried his because he was caught in a specific bind, needed a bargaining chip, and lost the gamble almost immediately. Interest in the case never fully faded. In 1953, a Gardiner family descendant compared the original 1699 recovery list against the corresponding entries in the English royal records and found they didn’t match, suggesting some of what reached London never made it into the Crown’s final accounting — a discrepancy that remains unresolved.
Sources consulted: “Captain Kidd and Gardiner: The Legendary Treasure Revealed,” Dan’s Papers; “History: Buried Pirate Treasure on Gardiner’s Island,” LongIsland.com; Wikipedia, “William Kidd.”
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