Crow
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There was more successful pirates like Tew and Avery rather than William Kidd. His exposure as pirate and his show trial and recorded fact that he buried his personal cache at Gardiners island make him a notorious super star pirate at the time. All up the eastern sea board and around the world Kidd's ironic fame spread. So much his story became folklore and every unknown pirate cache or smugglers cache became automatically connected to Kidd. As real story morphed into legends out of all proportions. By the 20th century his story between sexed up newspaper stories and treasure book authors and treasure blew out of all proportions. That is how legends form and evolve over time.
Even If you ask an ordinary person in the street to give a name of pirate? William Kidd would definitely be mentioned the most.
From his letters Kidd believed he could still recover remaining treasure from Captain Kidd’s most famous captured ship was the Quedagh Merchant, a 500-ton Armenian vessel loaded with silk, gold, and silver, seized on January 30, 1698, in the Indian Ocean. Renamed the Adventure Prize, it was later abandoned in 1699 at Catalina Island near the Dominican Republic. However we know it was looted and sunk and the trail leads back St Thomas and Curaçao where the good traded and disputed through the Caribbean via possibly Henry Bolton. February 4, 1701. Other crew testimonies point to some crew deserting taking their shares with them to St Thomas and Curacao. The questions remain is there still relics still present on their islands. Small caches of deserting ex crew members of Kidd.
Just having relic from story is treasure in itself.
Here is some retrieved from the Quedagh Merchant.
Here is relics preserved from Gardiners island. A fragment from the cloth Capt. William Kidd presented to Mrs. John Gardiner for her hospitality while visiting Gardiner’s Island in June, 1699. The cloth is composed of silk, cotton, and metallic gold and silver thread, measuring 4 3/8 x 2 1/2 in. It is said that he also gave her a clay pitcher filled with dried fruit. Kidd later returned to Gardiner’s Island, where he entrusted John Gardiner with a chest, among other things, containing fifty pounds of gold and fifty pounds of silver. It is said that John Gardiner buried the chest in Cherry Tree field on the island, where it was later retrieved.
And other fragment below.
Hidden away in Sylvester Manor, a seventeenth-century provisions plantation on Shelter Island, NY, lies a frayed scrap of green and yellow fabric only 4 3/8 x 2 ½ inches in size (fig. 1). Made of silk, cotton, and gilded silver thread, this cloth would have once shimmered in the light. The looping scrawls of a handwritten note give the fragment an abbreviated provenance: “a piece of the ‘Gold Blanket.’” The note asserts that the fabric was “…presented by the Pirate Kidd to Madame Gardiner of Gardiners [sic] Island,” and later “…presented by Mrs. Kimball to Mrs. Horsford, descendants of [illegible] Gardiner.” Carefully passed down and divided through generations of Gardiner relatives since the turn of the eighteenth century, this scrap presents a unique opportunity to study family connections and legacy in colonial North America. While contemporary family histories are recorded in genealogy books, or may be lost entirely, this piece of fabric is a material embodiment of Gardiner familial connections that has transformed over time with the family. By considering the fabric and legend through the lens of Marcel Mauss’s theory of gifting, this essay will unravel how the scrap functions to create and maintain connections and build family legacy. Family genealogies, like Cutis Gardiner’s 1890 book Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890, court records, broadsides, local legends, and the scrap itself will support the analysis of the ‘Gold Blanket’ and the connections it creates.
volume 10, issue 1
A Piece of the “Gold Blanket”: Gardiner’s Island, Captain William Kidd, and the Gifting of Family History
by Allison Donoghue
Figure 1. The scrap of “Gold Blanket” and accompanying note (ca. 1700). Silk. 4.4 x 2.5 in. (11 x 6.4 cm). Courtesy of the Sylvester Manor Collection. Photograph by the author.
Hidden away in Sylvester Manor, a seventeenth-century provisions plantation on Shelter Island, NY, lies a frayed scrap of green and yellow fabric only 4 3/8 x 2 ½ inches in size (fig. 1). Made of silk, cotton, and gilded silver thread, this cloth would have once shimmered in the light. The looping scrawls of a handwritten note give the fragment an abbreviated provenance: “a piece of the ‘Gold Blanket.’” The note asserts that the fabric was “…presented by the Pirate Kidd to Madame Gardiner of Gardiners [sic] Island,” and later “…presented by Mrs. Kimball to Mrs. Horsford, descendants of [illegible] Gardiner.” Carefully passed down and divided through generations of Gardiner relatives since the turn of the eighteenth century, this scrap presents a unique opportunity to study family connections and legacy in colonial North America. While contemporary family histories are recorded in genealogy books, or may be lost entirely, this piece of fabric is a material embodiment of Gardiner familial connections that has transformed over time with the family. By considering the fabric and legend through the lens of Marcel Mauss’s theory of gifting, this essay will unravel how the scrap functions to create and maintain connections and build family legacy. Family genealogies, like Cutis Gardiner’s 1890 book Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890, court records, broadsides, local legends, and the scrap itself will support the analysis of the ‘Gold Blanket’ and the connections it creates.
The scrap’s bold colors and distinctive floral motif suggest its journey began in India. The fabric has a woven pattern with two distinct repeating columns, one a glimmering gold and the other a deep green. A full flower with five pink outlined petals and a green stem is visible in the gold columns. The green column is decorated with two gold flowers, cut off by the division of the textile, suggesting a repeating pattern. The five-petalled flower is a common motif found on Indian textiles beginning in the early eighteenth century.1 Europe had been importing vast quantities of Indian textiles with the best being quality embroidered silks and dye painted cottons coming from Gujarat and Bengal.2 However, designs favored by Europeans tended to feature large scale and fantastical florals and foliage on a white background.3 The small, evenly spaced patterning on the scrap could indicate that it was not originally meant for the European market before it was intercepted by Kidd. Although the origin is ambiguous, the luxurious material qualities of the fabric highlight its significant worth. Some of the finest fabrics were woven or embroidered with gilded silver threads called zari, meaning “gold.”4 The making of zari was a highly skilled and hereditary profession, passed down through families. The skill necessary to create zari, combined with the monetary value of the materials used in making the thread, resulted in a prized and expensive commodity. The zari woven into the scrap lends to the accuracy of the note’s description of the textile as a “Gold Blanket.” It continues to shimmer today and is but one small example of the intricate and sumptuous patterns that were achieved using the thread.
But it is not only treasure that had survived below. Robert Lion Gardiner, 16th Lord of the Manor, with a ring and artefact from the “Kidd Collection”.
So in essence any artifacts that can be traced back to William Kidd due to their rarity and notoriety would be worth fortune if ever going to auction.
Crow
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