When Lieutenant Robert Maynard’s men searched Blackbeard’s sloop after killing him off Ocracoke Island on November 22, 1718, they found no chest of gold. What they found was sugar, cocoa, indigo dye, cotton, and a modest quantity of gold dust — a haul that historian Kevin Duffus has calculated sold at auction for around £2,500. Three centuries of treasure hunters have kept digging anyway.
A Pirate Who Wasn’t That Rich
Set against other pirates of his era, Blackbeard’s recovered plunder looks unremarkable. Captain William Kidd’s seized goods were valued at roughly £14,000; Samuel Bellamy’s wrecked Whydah is estimated to have carried plunder worth close to £1 million in period value. Blackbeard, despite being the most feared name of the Golden Age, appears by the surviving numbers to have been a comparatively poor pirate. That gap between reputation and recovered wealth is exactly the space the buried-treasure legend grew to fill.
“Only I and the Devil Know”
The legend has a specific origin point: a widely reprinted 1724 account, most familiar from A General History of the Pyrates, claims that Blackbeard told his crew that only he and the Devil knew where his money was hidden, and that whoever survived him would get it all. Duffus has argued the quote is almost certainly invented, since Blackbeard had no advance warning that Maynard’s ships were coming and no obvious moment to make such a pronouncement. Invented or not, the line did exactly what a good legend needs to do — it gave people a reason to believe there was something worth finding.
How “X Marks the Spot” Actually Got Buried Treasure
Actual pirates rarely buried treasure at all. The practice shows up in the historical record mainly as short-term hiding of goods rather than the deliberate, mapped caches of fiction — a 1665 account from Jamaica’s governor describes buccaneers stashing plunder in coastal holes and creeks, and William Kidd is the one Golden Age pirate with a documented buried cache, on Long Island’s Gardiners Island, which colonial authorities dug up soon after his arrest. The idea that this was standard pirate practice, complete with treasure maps, comes largely from fiction: Washington Irving’s 1824 short story “Wolfert Webber,” Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 “The Gold-Bug,” and above all Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, serialized in 1881 and published as a book in 1883. Historian David Cordingly has called the treasure map an “entirely fictional device,” and Stevenson’s novel is widely credited with fixing buried treasure — and the pirate imagery built around it — permanently in the public imagination.
The Searches Continue
None of that has stopped people looking specifically for Blackbeard’s money. Sites along North Carolina’s coast, including Plum Point near Bath where he kept a home, have drawn treasure hunters for generations, and unverified stories of finds — a claimed discovery on Blanco Island reported in a 1765 magazine among them — have never been substantiated. Duffus’s own conclusion, after years of research into Blackbeard’s life, is blunt: the real money made from Blackbeard’s legend sits in publishing and film industry accounts, not in any hole in the Carolina sand.
What the Evidence Actually Supports
No authenticated Blackbeard treasure has ever been recovered, and nothing in the surviving contemporary record shows he buried one. What the record does support is a pirate whose actual plunder was modest, a suspiciously convenient quote recorded after his death, and a nineteenth-century literary tradition that turned an ordinary bit of pirate folklore into the defining image of piracy itself.
Sources consulted: Kevin Duffus’s research as reported by Coastal Review; and Wikipedia’s entries on buried treasure and the historiography of the buried-treasure trope.
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