Captain Kidd, Blackbeard and buried pirate treasure at the Bayshore? Truth vs. tales

It’s a story worthy of Hollywood. Blackbeard, the notorious pirate, brings his hungry crew ashore to round up some livestock. Local farmers, incensed, engage them in a pitched battle and chase off the marauders, who barely escape (but do make off with the goods).

Legend has it this incident took place in what is now Middletown and Holmdel the early 1700s. And it’s not the only piece of pirate lore at the Bayshore. Tales of Captain William Kidd sailing into Raritan Bay and leaving his mark from Cliffwood Beach to Shrewsbury abound, so much so that they’ve spawned a litany of Kidd talks, walks and treasure hunts.

“There’s no doubt in my mind Captain Kidd was here,” Matawan historian Kurtis Roinestad said.

Not everyone agrees.

“There’s never really been any proof that those pirates were here,” said Peter VanNortwick, vice president of the Middletown Township Historical Society.

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Like Halloween, a cultural touchstone whose very real roots are shrouded in myth, could there be a kernel of truth at the genesis of Monmouth County’s buccaneer folklore?

Blood money and stolen hogs

An often-cited source for these stories is “The Story of Middletown,” a 1927 book written by Ernest Mandeville, rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Middletown. Among its assertions:

• “Many of Captain Kidd’s pirate crew did spend considerable time in Middletown and its environs.”

• “The pirates were said to have brought quantities of silks, Spanish laces and other luxuries to their friends in Middletown village. The Middletown merchants in turn marketed them through the colonies.”

• “William Leeds, an early 1700s resident of Middletown [and a major early benefactor of Christ Church, now both in Middletown and Shrewsbury], was reputed to be one of Captain Kidd’s chief cohorts.”

• The wealth and land Leeds donated to Christ Church was, in the view of Leeds’ neighbors, “nothing more or less than conscience-money, an expiation for the piratical wild oats sewn by one of the famous Captain Kidd crew.”

• “In a meadow on Sandy Hook stands a lone pine tree. Kidd is supposed to have buried treasure under this tree.”

• “Edward Teach (Black Beard) landed a crew and sent them up as far as Holmdel to seize cattle and hogs to provision his vessels. After they had secured their booty and were marching back, the irate farmers gathered on their rear and harassed them so that their rear guard made a stand in Middletown and quite a battle, but succeeded in getting away with their plunder.”

Local historian John Barrows says Mandeville “invents the William Leeds connection out of whole cloth.”

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But if untrue, why would Mandeville malign someone who helped found his church? Barrows believes locals were suspicious of Leeds because he was baptized as an adult, and on a weekday (as opposed to a Sunday) — both highly unusual for the time — less than two years after Kidd was hanged. Was he distancing himself from the notorious pirate? Also, Leeds was powerful and wealthy, and he might have made enemies who passed down an unfavorable oral history.

“The facts that we can piece together these many years later don’t really indicate that Leeds and Kidd ever met or worked together,” said Rick Burton, a Syracuse University professor who researched the subject and gave a presentation on it for the Middletown Historical Society last year.

The forward to Mandeville's book, which mysteriously disappeared from later editions, raises a red flag.

“The writer of this story does not claim originality,” Mandeville wrote. “He does not claim over-diligent research, but he covered as much ground as was possible in the press of time for publication and the limitations of expense imposed upon him.”

Mandeville does credit several historians by name as the resources for his book, but he does not provide a bibliography.

“He is really apologizing for this piece of work, and when you look at it, it’s not hard to understand why,” Barrows said. “It’s near hearsay.”

'It hasn't been entirely dismissed'

If there’s no tangible proof that Kidd set foot on the Bayshore, there are plausible reasons he might have. He lived for a time in New York City, and he would have viewed Raritan Bay as a place to duck into during storms.

“Kidd starts as a privateer and marries a respected socialite from New York City,” Burton said. “There’s reason to believe he could have had a non-criminal reputation and been able to deal with the local townspeople.”

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Of course, that reputation changed after he was hanged in London in 1701.

“Now we swing around and do revisionist history,” Burton said, “and now he’s come here as a pirate.”

It’s factual that Kidd donated heavily to the building of Trinity Church in Manhattan. Perhaps he would have inspired the same action in Middletown?

“Of course it’s legend, but it hasn’t been entirely dismissed,” said the Rev. Michael Way, a priest at Christ Church in Middletown.

A pamphlet published by Christ Church to mark its 300th anniversary casts doubt on Leeds’ association with Kidd, but adds: “A cross which is visible on the wall plaster over the pulpit in the Old Church in Middletown, attributed to the handiwork of Captain Kidd’s sword, lends further romantic, yet unsupported, credence to this local legend.”

Jamie Green, parish historian of Christ Church in Shrewsbury, said Leeds’ donation of 400-plus acres was “crucial” to the growth of the congregation, but local researchers never have found proof of a link to Kidd. Still, visitors regularly ask about it.

Justin Dapolito, a Matawan resident who leads an annual Captain Kidd tour in the Cliffwood Beach section of Aberdeen, makes a good point: Rather than inventing the Kidd-Leeds connection outright, Mandeville might have been drawing on long-established oral history. In an era of intervillage raids and violence, Leeds’ contemporaries would have good reason to risk associating with pirates — or at least to claim they did.

“The story goes into pretty good depth,” Dapolito said. “The town might have used the story as protection. Would you go into a town that has pirate crews who built the church there?”

Roinestad, who chairs Matawan’s Historic Sites Commission, says there are mentions of Kidd in the borough’s archives.

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“Rose Hill Cemetery used to be Fox Hill, one of the highest peaks in the area,” he said. “Captain Kidd used Fox Hill as a reference point when he was in Raritan Bay. It was leveled in the 1800s.”

The Blackbeard story as told by Mandeville has less historical backing. Blackbeard was known have ventured into the Delaware Bay, but is mostly associated with piracy off the coast of the Carolinas and points south.

“A careful look at Blackbeard's known whereabouts provides very limited windows for his having possibly been in this region,” Barrows said.

The lure of buried treasure

Each fall, Roinestad and Dapolito conduct a popular tour of Cliffwood Beach, touching on the neighborhood’s history as a resort town and, farther back, a possible pirates’ cove. It includes a stop at Treasure Lake, so named because of a reputed visit from Kidd (as Roinestad explains, the lake used to be a cove before a hurricane enclosed it).

Dapolito, a professional diver who has salvaged silver coins from an 18th-century shipwreck in the Caribbean, has scoured Bayshore waters but found nothing earlier than the 1800s. The truth is, there is only one recorded instance of a pirate burying treasure, but since that was Kidd (whose loot was left on Gardiners Island, on the east end of Long Island), the allure of buried booty from his travels remains strong. More than 100 people turned out for Dapolito’s tour in 2021, and attendance grows each year.

“We all love a buried treasure story,” Burton said. “All you need is for a pirate ship to have stopped to resupply, and there is always going to be that belief that, ‘Someday I am going to come over a sand dune and the edge of a wooden chest is going to be sticking out.’”

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Don’t count on it to pay the mortgage. But if you want to dream a little about Captain Kidd dropping anchor at Cliffwood Beach, or one of his henchmen founding a Middletown church, or angry Holmdel farmers chasing Blackbeard and his scallywags off their land, we’ll give the last word to the Rev. Way.

“It’s a legend, which means the details are blurry, but there had to be some truth for the legend to be activated,” he said. “It’s maybe been embellished, but on some level, there may be truth in the connection.”

Jerry Carino is community columnist for the Asbury Park Press, focusing on the Jersey Shore’s interesting people, inspiring stories and pressing issues. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Bayshore NJ: Captain Kidd, Blackbeard and buried pirate treasure