The Captain Kidd treasure legend of the Jersey Shore

The historical Kidd

William Kidd was born in Scotland around 1645 and had established himself in New York before traveling to England in 1695. Licensed to seize French and pirate ships, he sailed in 1696 in the Adventure Galley, turned to plundering ships of any nation after killing his gunner William Moore during a shipboard quarrel, and took the rich Quedah Merchant in the Indian Ocean. He was arrested at Boston in 1699, sent to England, tried, and hanged in London on May 23, 1701. His claim to have hidden a large treasure — and the real recovery of goods he had left on Gardiners Island, off Long Island — is the root from which the burial legends grew.

What the shore traditions claim

The Barnegat Bay versions are the ones that touch the pines. Weird NJ, quoting Robert Jahn’s Down Barnegat Bay (1980), reports a legend that Kidd courted a Barnegat farm girl named Amanda and buried a chest near Oyster Creek, and a separate old story that he came up from Barnegat Inlet and landed on an island near Toms River long known as Money Island. The same passage relays a claim that chests were hidden near a pond behind the dunes somewhere between Old Barnegat Beach and Sandy Hook. Farther south, William McMahon’s South Jersey Towns (1973) records a Brigantine tradition in which Kidd anchored near Brigantine Inlet in the late summer of 1698, buried a chest in the dunes, later returned to move it, and killed his mate in the process.

A distinct cluster of stories belongs to Raritan Bay rather than the pines: an island off what is now Cliffwood Beach, where seventeenth-century Spanish coins were reportedly found, became known as Money Island and has since eroded away. That island and the Money Island near the Toms River are two different places, and retellings that treat them as one produce a legend whose geography cannot be pinned down.

Legend, not record

These stories have the shape of classic buried-treasure lore: a famous name, a vivid human detail such as the Amanda romance, and a landmark that has conveniently washed away. They are not, however, merely modern inventions. Edwin Salter, writing his Monmouth and Ocean county history in 1890, recorded cob dollars found in the cellar wall of an old Shrewsbury mansion and noted they were “sa[ppo]sed by the superstitious to have been Kidds money,” and he set down a tradition told to him by old Ocean County residents of an Indigenous man called Indian Will who led Derrick Longstreet to a money-filled trunk buried in the sand at Manasquan. Salter’s own verdict was skeptical and chronological: coins may well have been found along the beach, but whether they came from pirates or a wreck “is another question,” and he pointed out that Kidd did not sail on his piratical cruises until 1696, too late for the dates in the tradition he had been given.

No contemporary document placing Kidd’s treasure anywhere on the New Jersey coast was located for this entry. The specific claims here rest on tradition — some of it a century and a half old, some of it recent — rather than on any record that a period source has produced.