CHAPTER ELEVEN
Inference, Conjecture, Supposition & Theory
Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved
It was now Monday. Sean had taken the day off so that he could deal with the mess that was the handsome PT Cruiser he’d just bought for his wife and self. Alexis was busy and beat. She’d left the library only two hours before she returned to open it for the university’s students. Lucinda was training a group of freshmen to run the front counter. Alexis had snoozed off in her office while preparing for the Bromberg funding presentation that was successfully postponed until the end of the week when her office phone rang.
“Honey? You there?” asked and energized Sean from the other end.
“Hey. Did everything work out with the car?” she asked worriedly.
“Done. There’s a three-day cooling off period in California for these kinds of purchases. Completely forgot about that. Listen, we’ve got to meet,” he said.
“Why? Something wrong?” she asked.
“No. Well…yeah. Something’s wrong but not like that. I did a Lexus/Nexus search and found out that when Kidd came into New York harbor, he was on a ship called Antonio. I couldn’t find anything on what happened to the Adventure. But I’ve got a thought…” he said, more excited than ever.
“Honey, stop. I can’t do this. I’m laying half asleep at my terminal trying to get this proposal done…a proposal that you’re supposed to be working on, I might add. Can’t we just take a break for…”
“Wait wait wait wait. Just thing…one thing: Let’s assume that Kidd does have this amazing treasure, whatever it might be. He must realize that everybody is after him. In order for him to safely return back to his wife in New York, he has to securely hide all of his loot from fear of losing it all to his fat cats when he got back. He has to make sure that no one will know how to get to his treasure, including his crew. If they mutinied once, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t try it again. You follow?” he rattled.
“How? He would have less then a month to do it all in and did you even hear me?” she argued.
“What are you talking about? Less than a month what again?” asked Sean.
“I was trying to explain this to you earlier. Except for one month, we traced his journey, including the events that lead up to it, all the way back to 1699. And I thought he couldn’t find any loot. Wasn’t that the whole problem to begin with?” she reminded him.
Sean was pretending to ignore this point. “Which month?” he asked.
“I think…I can’t think. It was sometime during the summer of 1700. It’s on the timeline.”
“That’s right, that’s right” Sean remembered the discussion, “In August he was somewhere in the Hispaniola headed for what was assumed to be Madagascar. But he turned up somewhere along the east coast of America less then forty days later. That’s what Hawke was talking about. It was considered a major achievement. No one knew how he’d done it.”
Alexis was growing tired. She was feeling like her husband wasn’t at all in tune with her. She was running a major institution and trying to start a family with the rock she thought Sean to be almost entirely by herself now that Captain Kidd was in their lives. More than anything, she wanted to just hang up the phone and sleep.
The two had discovered notes in Sean’s inherited documents that reported sightings of Kidd off the coast of Madagascar during the summer of 1700 just before Alexis called it quits that morning. Kidd never actually stepped ashore Madagascar; he just anchored the Adventure off the coast in plain sight. Sean had started to put two and two together: What if Kidd wasn’t on the Adventure when it was sighted near Madagascar? Sean pursued this idea for the next several days. He had become obsessed with the mystery. He found no record of the Adventure’s end other than a report that it was “unseaworthy”.
Sean was fixated on two facts: When he arrived in New York, Kidd didn’t have the Adventure. Secondly, Kidd arrived with only a skeleton crew of about ten men. The remaining 90 were unaccounted for. So Sean deduced the following scenario:
Captain Kidd and his crew couldn’t successfully discharge enemy ships. The crew mutinied because they were being kept in the dark about something Kidd was alleging and the fact that they were broke and dying. Kidd accidentally killed Moore but managed to keep up the crew by promising them a new contract. They continue on their privateering. He realized that he would have to trade ships because eventually and ultimately the Adventure would sink. Then, he commandeered a new ship, transported a treasure onto it and, one by one, got rid of the troublemakers on board by offering them permanent leave at differing exotic shores. His scheme now was to hide the treasure. Where he got the treasure was still a puzzle to Sean.
Kidd, then, must have sailed off to a location off the eastern coast of the States. Meanwhile, the Adventure was being seen off the coast of Madagascar. So while the world would be thinking that Kidd was somewhere around the Cape of Good Hope, in fact, he would be out hiding this mysterious treasure that he claimed in a letter to the magistrate was worth about £90,000 in the early 18th century thousands of miles away.
Subsequently, Kidd made an appearance in the States and, not surprisingly, was hailed a navigational genius. His coup-d’grave was the coveted French docking passes that he’d acquired when he attacked the French fishing boat on his way out of London and buried along with treasure. This was his ticket out of the murder charges that would surely be brought against him once back in New York—thanks to Lord Bellomont; a French flag, a disguised clipper, a few French idioms and he and his family, his true prize, would escape up to Scotland, by way of France, where they could live out their days in peace—despite having to lose their veritable empire in New York.
Inference, conjecture, supposition, theory—Sean knew that these were all his ideas were. But he clung onto them despite the fact that they were variant themes of everything he was groomed not to ground himself to. A manic attraction was Sean’s modus operandi now: He’d even completed his first artistic drawing of a ship—something he’d always fancied he’d do. And what ship did he capture? The Adventure, of course (working off a bronze plate that he discovered to be the oldest depiction of the galleon).
With the aid of an exceedingly influential Lord Bellomont—one of the original silent backers that aided in Kidd’s privateering crack by providing most of the necessary equipment and the then Governor of the Colonies, Kidd hid the small portion of the remaining treasure along with the critical passes on Gardiner’s Island just off of Long Island Sound
This was documented fact. Bellomont not only snuck Captain Kidd onto Gardiner’s Isle, he even gave Kidd a receipt for the hidden booty. What William Kidd didn’t know, however, was that Bellomont was under immense pressure from the East India Company for Kidd was primarily stealing from them while privateering. In order for Bellomont not to lose his lucrative status with the East India Company, he had to sell the Captain out. In fact, Sean discovered a pamphlet, then distributed as a magazine of sorts, that laid out the story of Kidd’s murder trial. In it, he discovered the well-known fact of the day--that Bellomont had ratted out the then infamous Captain Kidd, pirate of the seas.
What’s worse was that after Kidd was handed over, Bellomont let the caretaker of Gardiner’s Island, John Gardiner, dig up the treasure that Kidd left there and make it his own. Kidd trusted Bellomont. What ever happened to those vital passes was still a mystery: Perhaps Gardiner sold them; perhaps he didn’t even recognize them as valuables.
William Kidd had been double-crossed. His crew was ambushed, although a few men escaped. The set was deported to England were they were imprisoned at Newgate while the bulk of the mysterious wealth they’d attained lay hidden somewhere off the eastern seaboard never to be rediscovered for both the ambush and imprisonment were coordinated, conspired towards, and quick. Kidd had no time to communicate the whereabouts of the treasure to anyone, especially the few escaping crewmen who were probably involved with the failed mutiny and weren’t educated enough to find by way of direction, for he was executed without delay.
Most of this information was available to a good researcher. But why was a man, impersonating a Scottish museum specialist working in Maine, so interested in these documents--so much so that he didn’t want them to be found ever again? By Thursday, Sean had determined that the true worth of his relative’s documents would have amounted to approximately $1900, if that: According to the New York Public Archives where they lay hidden for hundreds of years, most of them were unattributable and those that weren’t were insignificant—so Sean’s source imparted. This was the dilemma.
“Unless!” exclaimed Sean, who was now driving their old Toyota Supra back to his condominium and talking on his cellular with Alexis, “unless he did somehow get the information out.”
“How? You just said that he had no time,” replied a bemused Alexis. “From the point where he was arrested to his death—he didn’t see anyone outside of the courthouse but his inmates, right? Oh, hold on hon…it’s the other line…it’s Lucinda. Don’t forget we’re having dinner with them tonight. Seven. Okay?”. She clicked over. Sean, transfixed, slowed down. She was right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 & 22, 23, 24, 25, Epilogue
Inference, Conjecture, Supposition & Theory
Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved
It was now Monday. Sean had taken the day off so that he could deal with the mess that was the handsome PT Cruiser he’d just bought for his wife and self. Alexis was busy and beat. She’d left the library only two hours before she returned to open it for the university’s students. Lucinda was training a group of freshmen to run the front counter. Alexis had snoozed off in her office while preparing for the Bromberg funding presentation that was successfully postponed until the end of the week when her office phone rang.
“Honey? You there?” asked and energized Sean from the other end.
“Hey. Did everything work out with the car?” she asked worriedly.
“Done. There’s a three-day cooling off period in California for these kinds of purchases. Completely forgot about that. Listen, we’ve got to meet,” he said.
“Why? Something wrong?” she asked.
“No. Well…yeah. Something’s wrong but not like that. I did a Lexus/Nexus search and found out that when Kidd came into New York harbor, he was on a ship called Antonio. I couldn’t find anything on what happened to the Adventure. But I’ve got a thought…” he said, more excited than ever.
“Honey, stop. I can’t do this. I’m laying half asleep at my terminal trying to get this proposal done…a proposal that you’re supposed to be working on, I might add. Can’t we just take a break for…”
“Wait wait wait wait. Just thing…one thing: Let’s assume that Kidd does have this amazing treasure, whatever it might be. He must realize that everybody is after him. In order for him to safely return back to his wife in New York, he has to securely hide all of his loot from fear of losing it all to his fat cats when he got back. He has to make sure that no one will know how to get to his treasure, including his crew. If they mutinied once, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t try it again. You follow?” he rattled.
“How? He would have less then a month to do it all in and did you even hear me?” she argued.
“What are you talking about? Less than a month what again?” asked Sean.
“I was trying to explain this to you earlier. Except for one month, we traced his journey, including the events that lead up to it, all the way back to 1699. And I thought he couldn’t find any loot. Wasn’t that the whole problem to begin with?” she reminded him.
Sean was pretending to ignore this point. “Which month?” he asked.
“I think…I can’t think. It was sometime during the summer of 1700. It’s on the timeline.”
“That’s right, that’s right” Sean remembered the discussion, “In August he was somewhere in the Hispaniola headed for what was assumed to be Madagascar. But he turned up somewhere along the east coast of America less then forty days later. That’s what Hawke was talking about. It was considered a major achievement. No one knew how he’d done it.”
Alexis was growing tired. She was feeling like her husband wasn’t at all in tune with her. She was running a major institution and trying to start a family with the rock she thought Sean to be almost entirely by herself now that Captain Kidd was in their lives. More than anything, she wanted to just hang up the phone and sleep.
The two had discovered notes in Sean’s inherited documents that reported sightings of Kidd off the coast of Madagascar during the summer of 1700 just before Alexis called it quits that morning. Kidd never actually stepped ashore Madagascar; he just anchored the Adventure off the coast in plain sight. Sean had started to put two and two together: What if Kidd wasn’t on the Adventure when it was sighted near Madagascar? Sean pursued this idea for the next several days. He had become obsessed with the mystery. He found no record of the Adventure’s end other than a report that it was “unseaworthy”.
Sean was fixated on two facts: When he arrived in New York, Kidd didn’t have the Adventure. Secondly, Kidd arrived with only a skeleton crew of about ten men. The remaining 90 were unaccounted for. So Sean deduced the following scenario:
Captain Kidd and his crew couldn’t successfully discharge enemy ships. The crew mutinied because they were being kept in the dark about something Kidd was alleging and the fact that they were broke and dying. Kidd accidentally killed Moore but managed to keep up the crew by promising them a new contract. They continue on their privateering. He realized that he would have to trade ships because eventually and ultimately the Adventure would sink. Then, he commandeered a new ship, transported a treasure onto it and, one by one, got rid of the troublemakers on board by offering them permanent leave at differing exotic shores. His scheme now was to hide the treasure. Where he got the treasure was still a puzzle to Sean.
Kidd, then, must have sailed off to a location off the eastern coast of the States. Meanwhile, the Adventure was being seen off the coast of Madagascar. So while the world would be thinking that Kidd was somewhere around the Cape of Good Hope, in fact, he would be out hiding this mysterious treasure that he claimed in a letter to the magistrate was worth about £90,000 in the early 18th century thousands of miles away.
Subsequently, Kidd made an appearance in the States and, not surprisingly, was hailed a navigational genius. His coup-d’grave was the coveted French docking passes that he’d acquired when he attacked the French fishing boat on his way out of London and buried along with treasure. This was his ticket out of the murder charges that would surely be brought against him once back in New York—thanks to Lord Bellomont; a French flag, a disguised clipper, a few French idioms and he and his family, his true prize, would escape up to Scotland, by way of France, where they could live out their days in peace—despite having to lose their veritable empire in New York.
Inference, conjecture, supposition, theory—Sean knew that these were all his ideas were. But he clung onto them despite the fact that they were variant themes of everything he was groomed not to ground himself to. A manic attraction was Sean’s modus operandi now: He’d even completed his first artistic drawing of a ship—something he’d always fancied he’d do. And what ship did he capture? The Adventure, of course (working off a bronze plate that he discovered to be the oldest depiction of the galleon).
With the aid of an exceedingly influential Lord Bellomont—one of the original silent backers that aided in Kidd’s privateering crack by providing most of the necessary equipment and the then Governor of the Colonies, Kidd hid the small portion of the remaining treasure along with the critical passes on Gardiner’s Island just off of Long Island Sound
This was documented fact. Bellomont not only snuck Captain Kidd onto Gardiner’s Isle, he even gave Kidd a receipt for the hidden booty. What William Kidd didn’t know, however, was that Bellomont was under immense pressure from the East India Company for Kidd was primarily stealing from them while privateering. In order for Bellomont not to lose his lucrative status with the East India Company, he had to sell the Captain out. In fact, Sean discovered a pamphlet, then distributed as a magazine of sorts, that laid out the story of Kidd’s murder trial. In it, he discovered the well-known fact of the day--that Bellomont had ratted out the then infamous Captain Kidd, pirate of the seas.
What’s worse was that after Kidd was handed over, Bellomont let the caretaker of Gardiner’s Island, John Gardiner, dig up the treasure that Kidd left there and make it his own. Kidd trusted Bellomont. What ever happened to those vital passes was still a mystery: Perhaps Gardiner sold them; perhaps he didn’t even recognize them as valuables.
William Kidd had been double-crossed. His crew was ambushed, although a few men escaped. The set was deported to England were they were imprisoned at Newgate while the bulk of the mysterious wealth they’d attained lay hidden somewhere off the eastern seaboard never to be rediscovered for both the ambush and imprisonment were coordinated, conspired towards, and quick. Kidd had no time to communicate the whereabouts of the treasure to anyone, especially the few escaping crewmen who were probably involved with the failed mutiny and weren’t educated enough to find by way of direction, for he was executed without delay.
Most of this information was available to a good researcher. But why was a man, impersonating a Scottish museum specialist working in Maine, so interested in these documents--so much so that he didn’t want them to be found ever again? By Thursday, Sean had determined that the true worth of his relative’s documents would have amounted to approximately $1900, if that: According to the New York Public Archives where they lay hidden for hundreds of years, most of them were unattributable and those that weren’t were insignificant—so Sean’s source imparted. This was the dilemma.
“Unless!” exclaimed Sean, who was now driving their old Toyota Supra back to his condominium and talking on his cellular with Alexis, “unless he did somehow get the information out.”
“How? You just said that he had no time,” replied a bemused Alexis. “From the point where he was arrested to his death—he didn’t see anyone outside of the courthouse but his inmates, right? Oh, hold on hon…it’s the other line…it’s Lucinda. Don’t forget we’re having dinner with them tonight. Seven. Okay?”. She clicked over. Sean, transfixed, slowed down. She was right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 & 22, 23, 24, 25, Epilogue
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