Kidd clue

[kiddseeker6818]

has anyone seen a copy of the note to Sarah with 44106818

 

[Cryptid1990]

has anyone seen a copy of the note to Sarah with 44106818

It never existed and was part of a wider hoax (concerning the Astor fortune) by Franklin Harvey Head.

Olmsted and Captain Kidd's Treasure - Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

This legend has Captain Kidds treasure buried under the Olmsted summer home in Maine.

www.nps.gov

But that Captain Kidd must have left the larger part of his treasure somewhere along the Atlantic coast — probably with the idea of keeping it dark until he should find out just where he stood on the charges which had been lodged against him — would seem to be, on the record, an inevitable conclusion: so inevitable that a commission of experts representing the British government, at the time of Captain Kidd's trial and hanging in 1701, spent months and several hundred pounds of good English money in a vain attempt to decipher their only clue to the treasure's whereabouts — a small piece of pasteboard which Kidd, after a whispered conference, had been seen handing to his wife.

This card bore these hastily scribbled figures:

44106818

Not much, to be sure, these cryptic figures, on which to base a search for buried gold. But over a period of two centuries this undeciphered and apparently undecipherable cipher had been enough to cause hundreds of otherwise sober-minded persons to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars digging and drilling on almost every likely spot from Nova Scotia to Key West.

Franklin H. Head first circulated this false story about Kidd passing Sarah a pasteboard with "44106818" written on it among members of the Chicago Literary Club on 13 January 1896 and mentioned it in a pamphlet a few years later (A Notable Lawsuit [1898]). There if of course no earlier literary source that mentions it since he made it up.

 

[kiddseeker6818]

thank you for the response to my 44106818 thread. i think it was lost in evidence with the 2French passes . and if it was written 44-106818 it should have meant something to sarah .

 

[Cryptid1990]

thank you for the response to my 44106818 thread. i think it was lost in evidence with the 2French passes . and if it was written 44-106818 it should have meant something to sarah .

Do you know of a literary source that mentions 44106818 (in relation to Kidd) prior to Franklin H. Head's A Notable Lawsuit [1898]?

 

[kiddseeker6818]

If Kidd used Dundee as his meridian then Block Island would be of interest. and he was known to be there.