I have read that book by Travers. I have posted the full text below.
Treasure was also supposedly buried by various pirates, including William Kidd, on Oak Island off Nova Scotia. Kidd himself did not bury anything on Oak Island since he is not known to have visited there. In fact, treasure of any kind buried on Oak Island by any group of pirates or visiting ships is very improbable. This is because after many heroic attempts to locate treasure there over at least two centuries by treasure hunters, such treasure has not been found. No pirate or ship's crew would ever bury and conceal their wealth in such a difficult location that it couldn't be easily recovered. But there is another location where treasure is much more likely to be found, and this is St Mary's Island, off the ocean coast of Madagascar. Here, many pirates like Henry Avery, fresh from looting Muslim ships in the Red Sea and elsewhere (see Chapter 6), would either use the island to transship their enormous treasures home to the Caribbean, or the Americas, or Europe, or they might sell parts of it to traders like John Plantain on St Mary's Island, or they might actually stay on St Mary's Island for some years. In all those years, very large amounts of treasure passed through the island, from the 1680s to the 1720s. So, some of that treasure seems likely to have stayed on the island. Perhaps there are caches of treasure left behind, possibly at Ranter Bay, where the trader Plantain lived, since Plantain himself claimed to be very rich in gold and diamonds.64
One very specific location of treasure, allegedly buried by the pirate Blackbeard (Edward Teach), is recorded by the sailor and part time artilleryman in India, Clement Downing. According to Downing, when he was in India in the early eighteenth century, he met with a Portuguese man named Anthony de Silvestro. This man claimed to have been with Blackbeard when the pirate was killed. Silvestro reported that at York River, Chesapeake Bay, near Mulberry Island, Blackbeard's pirates buried 'considerable Sums of Money in great Chests, well clamp'd with Iron Plates.' Downing researched the story a little, and found that there was indeed an island called Mulberry Island, and stated:
If any person who uses those Parts, should think it worth while to dig a little way at the upper End of a small sandy Cove, where it is convenient to land, he would soon find whether the Information I had was well grounded. Fronting the Landing-Place are five Trees, amongst which, he [Silvestro] said, the Money was hid.
Downing added a rather plaintive request that if any one should benefit from his account, he hoped that they would remember him for his information. Downing obviously hoped for a finder's fee, but as of the present, no one has yet found any of Blackbeard's treasure at Mulberry Island, or anywhere else. Another explanation for the lack of success in finding this treasure is that Downing or Silvestro confused the Blackbeard story with the story of the burial of treasure from Captain Stratton's ship, previously mentioned, since that burial of treasure took place in exactly the same location, at the head of the York River in Chesapeake Bay, as recounted above. Moreover, Downing himself happened to give evidence to the High Court of the Admiralty only a year or two after the Stratton case was heard by the same High Court, so Downing probably confused the two stories in his memory. 65
One last place where pirate treasure can actually be found is in the wrecks of pirate ships. The most famous of these so far is the Whydah, the ship captained by the pirate Samuel Bellamy.
This ship was lost in a gale near Cape Cod in April 1717, with 144 onboard, of which only two survived. The Whydah was carrying four and a half tons of treasure, mainly gold and silver, but the ship was wrecked in only a quarter of an hour, and the remains of the wreck then spread out along the coast for some four miles. Scavengers quickly arrived on the scene, but the Whydah itself vanished under the sea until the wreck was rediscovered in 1984 by underwater searchers led by Barry Clifford. A large amount of treasure has been recovered from the Whydah wreck so far, including over 8,000 coins, 17 gold bars, 14 gold nuggets, and assorted amounts of gold dust and gold nuggets. This is certainly a very large treasure trove, yet the Whydah clearly held more when she sank. Another wreck that has been recovered is that of Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge, which grounded at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. Many objects, including cannon, a ship's bell, and a urethral medical instrument for treating venereal disease, have been recovered, but so far no treasure. 66 Finally, it is of interest that the pirates themselves looked for ship wrecks in order to recover whatever treasure they could. One such wreck was found at Salt Key, near the Turks Islands, in 1686, where a ship with a great deal of bullion had gone down on a half moon reef. Divers went down soon after and recovered a large amount of bullion. The wreck was reported as lying at Latitude 20 degrees, 15 minutes north, not far from Porto Plato. 67
