William Kidd also known as Captain William Kidd or simply Captain Kidd, was a Scottish privateer. Conflicting accounts exist regarding his early life, but he was likely born in Dundee and later settled in New York City. By 1690, Kidd had become a highly successful privateer, commissioned to protect English interests in North America and the West Indies.
The Visigoths were a Germanic people united under the rule of a king and living within the Roman Empire during late antiquity. The Visigoths first appeared in the Balkans, as a Roman-allied barbarian military group united under the command of Alaric I. Their exact origins are believed to have been diverse but they probably included many descendants of the Thervingi who had moved into the Roman Empire beginning in 376 and had played a major role in defeating the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in 378. Relations between the Romans and Alaric's Visigoths varied, with the two groups making treaties when convenient, and warring with one another when not. Under Alaric, the Visigoths invaded Italy and sacked Rome in August 410.
Treasure is a concentration of wealth — often originating from ancient history — that is considered lost and/or forgotten until rediscovered. Some jurisdictions legally define what constitutes treasure, such as in the British Treasure Act 1996.
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, telling a story of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action.
Captain J. Flint is a fictional golden age pirate captain who features in a number of novels, television series, and films. The original character was created by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). Flint first appears in the classic adventure yarn Treasure Island, which was first serialised in a children's magazine in 1881, and later published as a novel in 1883.
"Dead Man's Chest" is a fictional sea song, originally from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island (1883). It was expanded in a poem, titled "Derelict" by Young E. Allison, published in the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1891. It has since been used in many later works of art in various forms.
Dead Chest Island is an island located half a mile north east of Deadman's Bay on Peter Island, British Virgin Islands. It is uninhabited, has no fresh water or trees and only sparse vegetation. It was formerly used as a firing range by the Royal Virgin Islands Police, but the opening of the nearby hotel on Peter Island coincided with the decision to build a proper firing range on the island of Tortola. The island is now an uninhabited National Park, with several popular scuba diving and snorkeling sites.
José Gaspar, also known by his nickname Gasparilla, is a fictional Spanish pirate who terrorized the Gulf of Mexico from his base in southwest Florida during Florida's second Spanish period. Though details about his early life, motivations, and piratical exploits differ in various tellings, they agree that the 'Last of the Buccaneers" was a remarkably active pirate who amassed a huge fortune by taking many prizes and ransoming many hostages during his long career and that he died by leaping from his ship rather than face capture by the U.S. Navy, leaving behind his still-hidden treasure.
"The Devil and Tom Walker" is a short story by Washington Irving that first appeared in his 1824 collection Tales of a Traveller, in "The Money-Diggers" part of volume II. The story is very similar to the German legend of Faust.
A treasure map is a map that marks the location of buried treasure, a lost mine, a valuable secret or a hidden locale. More common in fiction than in reality, "pirate treasure maps" are often depicted in works of fiction as hand drawn and containing arcane clues for the characters to follow. Regardless of the term's literary use, anything that meets the broad definition of a "map" that describes the location of a "treasure" could appropriately be called a "treasure map."
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, or simply A General History of the Pyrates is a 1724 book published in Britain containing biographies of contemporary pirates, which was influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates. Its author uses the name Captain Charles Johnson, generally considered a pen name for one of London's writer-publishers. The prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates, the book gives an almost mythical status to the more colourful characters, and it is likely that the author used considerable artistic license in his accounts of pirate conversations. The book also contains the name of Jolly Roger, the pirate flag, and shows the skull and crossbones design.
In English-speaking popular culture, the modern pirate stereotype owes its attributes mostly to the imagined tradition of the 18th-century Caribbean pirate sailing off the Spanish Main and to such celebrated 20th-century depictions as Captain Hook and his crew in the theatrical and film versions of J. M. Barrie's children's book Peter Pan, Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 film adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Treasure Island, and various adaptations of the Middle Eastern pirate, Sinbad the Sailor. In these and countless other books, films, and legends, pirates are portrayed as "swashbucklers" and "plunderers". They are shown on ships, often wearing eyepatches or peg legs, having a parrot perched on their shoulder, speaking in a West Country accent, and saying phrases like "Arr, matey" and "Avast, me hearty". Pirates have retained their image through pirate-themed tourist attractions, film, toys, books and plays.
Piracy in the British Virgin Islands was prevalent during the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy", mainly during the years of 1690-1730. Privateering was also widely practised in the jurisdiction throughout frequent colonial wars, not least by emancipated slaves who, with in preference to back-breaking labour in the fields for pitiful wages, took enormous risks to capture fortunes on the seas with the sanction of the Crown. In 1808, Patrick Colquhoun, a prize agent for the Territory spoke of "the most daring outrages which are frequently committed by people of colour."
The Decebalus treasure is an account detailed by Cassius Dio about events said to have happened in the Roman world during the 2nd century AD.
Quedagh Merchant, also known as the Cara Merchant and the Adventure Prize, was an Indian merchant vessel famously captured by Scottish privateer William Kidd on 30 January 1698.
Frederick Graham, who writes under the name Cork Graham, is an American author of adventure memoir and political thriller fiction novels. He is a former combat photographer, who was imprisoned in Vietnam for illegally entering the country while supposedly looking for treasure buried by Captain Kidd.
Benjamin "Ben" Gunn is a fictional character in the 1883 novel Treasure Island by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.
Pirates of Treasure Island is a 2006 American comedy-drama film produced by The Asylum, loosely adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel Treasure Island.
The Fenn Treasure was a cache of gold and jewels that Forrest Fenn, an art dealer and author from Santa Fe, New Mexico, hid in the Rocky Mountains of the United States. It was found approximately a decade later in 2020 in Wyoming by an anonymous treasure hunter later revealed to be former journalist and medical student Jack Stuef. In attempting to honor what he perceives to be Fenn's wishes after his death in September 2020, he has refused to reveal the location of the treasure. An auction of items from the treasure chest in December 2022 resulted in $1.3 million in sales.
"Kidd the Pirate" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, based on legends of Captain William Kidd. The story was published in Tales of a Traveller, an 1824 collection of Irving's writings, where it immediately precedes that work's most famous story "The Devil and Tom Walker", which also involves Kidd's treasure.
