Uncovering North Fork’s ‘buried’ pirate past with historian Folk

Long Island pirate stories come up again and again, with communities all along the north and south forks staking a claim to these storied pillagers. Many of these local legends can be attributed to a movement in the early 20th century, when area hamlets were often looking to one-up one another with competing claims of historical prominence.

“In the beginning of the 20th century, it was really popular to try and outdo each other with history and make your place better than everybody else’s — better, but worse, ‘We have bigger, more horrible stories,’” said Southold Town historian Amy Folk. “And then a lot of this stuff just got loose.”

When it comes to pirates, however, there is a grain of truth within the tall tales — for example the East End’s connection to William Kidd, a famous privateer from the 1600s who later turned pirate.

“William Kidd is said to have roamed the waters around Long Island at one point. He starts out as a privateer,” which refers to the captain of a private boat commissioned by the military to patrol coastal waters, “attacking the other countries that he was supposed to attack,” Ms. Folk said. “But some histories say that the political winds changed, and he was labeled as a pirate. He wanted to clear his name, so he came back to this area. While trying to clear his name he was arrested for being a pirate, sent to trial and then executed.”

While navigating around Long Island, Capt. Kidd often camped on Gardiners Island, where he buried some of his plunder. He told the Gardiner family he would kill them if they alerted the authorities or tried to take the treasure for themselves, but he was subsequently captured and sent to stand trial. The colonial government ordered the Gardiners to dig up and surrender the treasure. The accounting of the chest’s contents is the only evidence that substantiates Kidd’s presence in the area — and the only documented instance of pirates actually burying treasure, which in this case included gold dust, silver bars, uncut gems, crystals and jewelry.

Another pirate connection is an old encampment on Fishers Island, which at the time was under the jurisdiction of the Connecticut colony. “[In 1682,] pirates captured Isaac Arnold’s ketch with the cargo around Plum Island,” Ms. Folk said, noting that records in Connecticut document the presence of pirates on Fishers Island. Around the same time, she added,“there’s another complaint that one Mrs. Raymond’s ketch from Virginia disappeared off Block Island, and they’re afraid that the pirates have gotten it. Mrs. Raymond’s ketch was never seen again.”

There also historic reports about three ships arriving in East Hampton in the late 1600s with some 30 to 40 pirates aboard. Five of them disembarked and were promptly arrested, while the rest sailed on toward the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Later on that same summer, four more pirates were detained and questioned. A record of their interrogation indicates they were planning to sell one of the ships and cargo they had seized to buy a smaller ship — which they’d then use to sail out and join a pirate fleet.

It can be difficult today to imagine the kind of world these pirates were living in, when foreign policy was often be decided on the open seas, at the point of a sword or by the arc of a cannon ball. European powers were eager to snatch up pieces of the New World in a bid to establish global dominance. “This is a time period where there are no airplanes. All this stuff is being fought out on the ocean,” Ms. Folk said of the decades leading up to the American Revolution.

“Everybody’s doing a huge land grab and trying to build their empires. So they’re going to try and grab land in Africa, they’re going to grab land in Asia. They’re going to grab any island they can find. This is a part of that huge imperialistic grab,” she said.

As for any modern day would-be treasure hunters out there, Ms. Folk has some stern advice. “There’s no treasure out there,” she said. “Please don’t go digging.”