As for the riches of Captain Kidd, the original documents in his case, preserved among the state papers of the Public Record Office in London, relate with much detail what booty he had and what he did with it. Alas, they reveal the futility of the searches after the stout sea-chest buried above high water mark. The only authentic Kidd treasure was dug up and inventoried more than two hundred years ago, nor has the slightest clue to any other been found since then.
These curious documents, faded and sometimes tattered, invite the reader to thresh out his own conclusions as to how great a scoundrel Kidd really was, and how far he was a scapegoat who had to be hanged to clear the fair names of those noble lords in high places who were partners and promoters of that most unlucky sea venture in which Kidd, sent out to catch pirates, was said to have turned amateur pirate himself rather than sail home empty-handed. Certain it is that these words of the immortal ballad are cruelly, grotesquely unjust:
I made a solemn vow, when I sail'd, when I sail'd,
I made a solemn vow when I sail'd.
I made a solemn vow, to God I would not bow,
Nor myself a prayer allow, as I sail'd.
I'd a Bible in my hand, when I sail'd, when I sail'd,
I'd a Bible in my hand when I sail'd.
I'd a Bible in my hand, by my father's great command,
And I sunk it in the sand when I sail'd.
In English fiction there are three treasure stories of surpassing merit for ingenious contrivance and convincing illusion. These are Stevenson's "Treasure Island"; Poe's "Gold Bug"; and Washington Irving's "Wolfert Webber." Differing widely in plot and literary treatment, each peculiar to the genius of its author, they are blood kin, sprung from a common ancestor, namely, the Kidd legend. Why this half-hearted pirate who was neither red-handed nor of heroic dimensions even in his badness, should have inspired more romantic fiction than any other character in American history is past all explaining.
Strangely enough, no more than a generation or two after Kidd's sorry remnants were swinging in chains for the birds to pick at, there began to cluster around his memory the folk-lore and superstitions colored by the supernatural which had been long current in many lands in respect of buried treasure. It was a kind of diabolism which still survives in many a corner of the Atlantic coast where tales of Kidd are told. Irving took these legends as he heard them from the long-winded ancients of his own acquaintance and wove them into delightfully entertaining fiction with a proper seasoning of the ghostly and the uncanny. His formidable hero is an old pirate with a sea chest, aforetime one of Kidd's rogues, who appears at the Dutch tavern near Corlear's Hook, and there awaits tidings of his shipmates and the hidden treasure. It is well known that Stevenson employed a strikingly similar character and setting to get "Treasure Island" under way in the opening chapter. As a literary coincidence, a comparison of these pieces of fiction is of curious interest. The similarity is to be explained on the ground that both authors made use of the same material whose ground-work was the Kidd legend in its various forms as it has been commonly circulated.
Stevenson confessed in his preface:
"It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the 'Tales of a Traveler' some years ago, with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlor, the whole inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters—all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the springtides of a somewhat pedestrian fancy; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye."
After the opening scenes the two stories veer off on diverging tacks, the plot of Stevenson moving briskly along to the treasure voyage with no inclusion of the supernatural features of the Kidd tradition. Irving, however, narrates at a leisurely pace all the gossip and legend that were rife concerning Kidd in the Manhattan of the worthy Knickerbockers. And he could stock a treasure chest as cleverly as Stevenson, for when Wolfert Webber dreamed that he had discovered an immense treasure in the center of his garden, "at every stroke of the spade he laid bare a golden ingot; diamond crosses sparkled out of the dust; bags of money turned up their bellies, corpulent with pieces of eight, or venerable doubloons; and chests, wedged close with moidores, ducats, and pistareens, yawned before his ravished eyes and vomited forth their glittering contents."