Of all the pirates whose dreaded top-sails appeared along the coast of America in the old days of the colonies none has left a more grewsome and romantic reputation behind him than Captain William Kidd, the New York ship-master, who was born in 1650. Legends abound of his boldness, his craftiness, and his savage and blood-thirsty disposition, and stories of the immense treasure that he accumulated, the dreadful murders that he committed in its acquisition, and when and with what ghastly accompaniments he buried it are still told over the firesides of ’longshore hamlets from Maine to the Carolinas. Fiction has not neglected to turn this pirate’s career to its own purpose, and one of Poe’s most imaginative and thrilling tales is based upon the discovery on Sullivan’s Island, in Charleston Harbor (South Carolina), of a parchment which, on being held to the fire, revealed a cryptogram of Kidd’s that led to the discovery of buried wealth amounting to millions of dollars. It seems almost a pity to tamper with the halo of romance and mystery which posterity has drawn about this worthy’s brow, but the fact is that Kidd was an unready, unwise, and vacillating character, and that there was little truth in the romances told about him. Beside such dreadfully famous buccaneers as Blackbeard, Roberts, and Avery he appears a pygmy in his own “profession,” and his career, when contrasted with theirs, seems colorless and contemptible. As to the vast riches that he was supposed to have acquired, it is doubtful if in his whole course of piracy he was able to accumulate more than a hundred thousand dollars. One thing is assured--the only money that he buried on the coast of America amounted to not more than seventy-five thousand dollars, which he hid on Gardiner’s Island, over against New London, and the last penny of this was recovered by Bellamont after Kidd’s execution.