And Captain Kidd’s treasure

Laughing Lady The restoration of an American express commuter at a Whangateau boatyard allows us to smuggle in a story of a dastardly, swashbuckling pirate.

In recent weeks there has been a lot in the news about the supposed discovery of treasure on the shore of Ile Sainte Marie, off the north-east coast of Madagascar. It is linked to the Scottish sea captain William Kidd.

In the late 17th century, Sainte Marie Island was a lair for pirates who preyed on ships on the rich trade route in exotic spices, cloths, precious stones, gold and silver to and from India through the Red Sea.

One 50kg ingot of Spanish-marked Bolivian silver was dredged up from the wreck of an oak-timbered vessel in shallow water, and some believe much more silver remains in the wreck. It was also strongly suggested that the wreck was Captain Kidd’s Adventure Galley which he abandoned in Madagascar after seizing the Quedah Merchant and looting her of valuable cargo. Possibly, however, it is the wreck of the ship Rouparelle which Kidd had seized in November 1697 and renamed November.

Or, it may be another pirate vessel that used the shelter of this beautiful island as a base for buccaneering. Quite why Kidd would have left any quantity of silver aboard either of his two ships that sank or was burnt in Madagascar is hard to understand, but it is plausible when you sit back and consider what a bumbler this pirate captain really was.

It’s only natural that I take a great interest in anything to do with Captain Kidd and his grisly fate, since we share the same surname. A licensed privateer with a Crown warrant to enable him to attack any French ship, Kidd was provided with the near-new 124ft Adventure Galley, a conventional three-masted, 34-gun ship capable of 14 knots under sail and equipped with 46 sweeps which could be deployed in calms to give three knots.

Three English noblemen who wanted to remain anonymous arranged Kidd’s commission as a privateer; even King William III had expressed the intention of taking a share in the adventure.

France and England had been at war intermittently for most of the century when, in 1696, Captain Kidd was commanded to proceed to the Indian Ocean to suppress piracy and seize any French ships and their cargo. The high position of his backers seems to have convinced him that he could take any action provided there was a French ship involved. He was also under continual pressure from his crew who were entitled to a share of any prize captures. All these factors provided fertile opportunity for things to go wrong for him.

William Kidd had blundered through a series of fatefully bad decisions when Adventure Galley fell in with the Armenian-owned ship Quedah Merchant off Goa in January 1698. She flew the French flag and was sailing under a French ticket of leave but had an English master and a Portuguese navigator. Worse, her cargo was largely owned by an important Mogul prince whose anger at the loss of his goods became seriously embarrassing to the British Government and the British East India Company. Kidd was immediately proclaimed a pirate.

He abandoned the now-rotten Adventure Galley in Madagascar and sailed the Quedah Merchant, now renamed Adventure Prize, to the Caribbean where he learned that he had been posted as a pirate. He bought a small vessel, the San Antonio, transferred much of the loot to her and sailed for Boston. Many believe he stopped at various places on the eastern seaboard of New England to cache parts of his treasure. Since then stories of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure in the north-eastern American seaboard have abounded.

There is a kernel of truth in these tales. On June 25 1699, before

sailing San Antonio up to Boston to protest his innocence, Kidd gained permission from John Gardiner, owner of Gardiner’s Island at the northern tip of Long Island, to bury a major part of his treasure there. He planned that to be a bargaining point should things go wrong in Boston, as they inevitably did.

When Kidd was arrested, the Gardiner’s Island treasure was dug up and surrendered to the Earl of Bellomont, Governor of Massachusetts and New York. Paradoxically, Bellomont had been one of Kidd’s major backers in London, but now scrambled to disassociate himself from the Scotsman.

William Kidd was transported to London for his trial. It became a sensation, if only for the denial of justice with which he was treated. Kidd thought he would have immunity because of his high level patronage, but when he appeared before the House of Commons he refused to name those patrons who, by now, were on the wrong side politically.

That sealed his fate. He was convicted on multiple charges of piracy and one of murder at his trial at the Old Bailey. His dignity and candour in both processes were remarkable; he was still confident of an acquittal and seems to have laboured with a mindset of arrogance and naivety. He was hanged in chains. His body was tarred and left to rot in an iron cage on a gibbet at Tilbury Point on the Thames Estuary as a warning to sea captains who might turn their mind to piracy. In the 314 years since then his personality has morphed into a serious baddie – but without him, Robert Louis Stevenson may never have written Treasure Island.

The Gardiner’s Island treasure provides the second thread here. John Gardiner was the grandson of Lion Gardiner who had been made manorial proprietor of this little island by grant from Charles I in 1639. The island is still owned by Gardiner descendants who still hold the receipt John Gardiner gave Kidd specifying the contents of the buried treasure. However, John Gardiner did keep some of the treasure, at least one large diamond and some cloth of gold from the Quedah Merchant.

Fast forward to 1949 when Luders Marine Corporation at Stamford, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound built a sport fishing boat, Laughing Lady, for socialite Mrs Winthrop Bradley, a close friend of the Duchess of Windsor. Laughing Lady was 33ft 2ins x

9ft 2ins and part of the post-war revival in the United States of the fast planing hulls that had flourished as rumrunners and express commuters during Prohibition.

The Luders company, founded in 1908, had spent the war years building more than 40 submarine chasers for the US Navy. As pioneers in hot-moulded and marine plywood construction, they were well-skilled in planing hulls. Luders went out of business in 1968, unwilling to get involved in fibreglass construction, but not before they produced in 1958 the successful America’s Cup defender, the 12-metre Weatherly, which vanquished Australia’s Gretel in 1962 at Newport, Rhode Island.

Laughing Lady was strong, built of double-planked cedar and mahogany with oak framing, and hugely powerful with twin, 8-cylinder 150hp Packard engines giving a speed of nearly 30 knots. The connection with Gardiner’s Island is through stockbroker Robert David Lion Gardiner, the sixteenth Lord of Gardiner’s Island. He bought Laughing Lady almost-new and used her for many years to commute from his fiefdom at Gardiner’s Island across Gardiner’s Bay to Greenport, Long Island. From there it was a fast trip by the Long Island Rail Road to midtown Manhattan. Her Packards were eventually replaced with twin Volvo turbo-charged diesels.

After a feud with his niece, a co-owner of the island, Gardiner rarely went there and, sometime before he died in 2004, Lady was sold. She was transported to San Diego where she underwent significant hull restoration before the job stalled.

Kiwi yachtsman James Dreyer and his brother Michael bought Laughing Lady, semi-restored, in San Diego. Both have worked as crew on the Dutch-built classic Feadship Istros and on Fife yachts in various classic yacht regattas around the Mediterranean. They have developed a great love of thoroughbred old craft – Lady is a stellar example. James is working overseas on an 88m superyacht. He brought Laughing Lady to New Zealand for restoration at the Whangateau boatyard of George Emtage and Pam Cundy. The beauty of the arrangement is that he can work on her during his three months’ rotation periods in New Zealand and Pam continues the work schedule while he is away.

Progress has been good and the final touches should be completed by Christmas 2015 when Laughing Lady will join the select band of Us-built fast launches, mostly Chris-craft, which have filtered into New Zealand over the years despite import and currency restrictions for many years after World War 2.

The links between Captain Kidd, Gardiner’s Island, Laughing Lady and the boatyard at Whangateau may be tenuous, but it’s a good excuse to run a pirate story. Were it not for Captain William Kidd choosing to bury his treasure at Gardiner’s Island in June 1699, Laughing Lady may never have made it to New Zealand. B