History of Westchester County, New York, from its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900
His favorite haunts after returning from his precious landed he where Sound, Island Long inlets and islands of and jewsilver, gold, his buried cargoes, and, according to tradition, els.^ It is said that when brought to trial he confided to the authorities the location of a treasure secreted on Gardiner's Island, and the authenthat it was duly found and appropriated by them. ofFrom the coast of the ticated accounts of Captain Kidd's frequentings Sound, it may safely be said that from time to time he must have steered his bark into some of the numerous places of retreat along This, however, is only a reasonable inferThe Westchester shore. ence. There is nothing to show that he ever had a rendezvous within In the course of time popular imagination, stimulated our waters. by the fiction of his buried wealth, even ascribed to him expeditions Bolton reproduces a up the Hudson River as far as the Highlands. the present century during attempt an very entertaining account of i Van TVlfs Hist, of the Greater New York,
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to raise a sunken bark off Caldwell's Landing in the Highlands, supposed to have been Captain Kidd's private ship. Some $20,000 was spent in the enterprise.1 The pre-eminence which Captain Kidd has always enjoyed in the popular imagination is much out of proportion to his achievements. His formal piratical career was at all events very brief. It was in October, 1G96, that he was dispatched to hunt down pirates, and at that time he must have had a fairly honest reputation. Less than five years later he met his doom on the gallows. His exceptional popularity as a pirate hero is doubtless due to the fanciful stories of his buried treasures, to which a certain substantial foundation was supposed to have been given by the unearthing of one of them -- in all probability the only one -- by the authorities.