Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 9 | Page 3

the highlands, is not
haunted by Kidd's men, as used to be said, but by the spirit of a
discontented squaw. This spirit the Indians themselves drove away with
stones.
At Oyster Point, Maryland, lived Paddy Dabney, who recognized Kidd
from an old portrait on meeting him one evening in 1836. He was going

home late from the tavern when a light in a pine thicket caused him to
turn from the road. In a clearing among the trees, pervaded by a pale
shine which seemed to emanate from its occupants, a strange company
was playing at bowls. A fierce-looking reprobate who was
superintending the game glanced up, and, seeing Paddy's pale face,
gave such a leap in his direction that the Irishman fled with a howl of
terror and never stopped till he reached his door, when, on turning
about, he found that the phantom of the pirate chief had vanished. The
others, he conceived, were devils, for many a sea rover had sold
himself to Satan. Captain Teach, or Blackbeard, proved as much to his
crew by shutting himself in the hold of his ship, where he was burning
sulphur to destroy rats, and withstanding suffocation for several hours;
while one day a dark man appeared on board who was not one of the
crew at the sailing, and who had gone as mysteriously as he came on
the day before the ship was wrecked. It was known that Kidd had
buried his Bible in order to ingratiate the evil one.
A flat rock on the north shore of Liberty Island, in New York harbor,
was also thought to mark the place of this pervasive wealth of the
pirates. As late as 1830, Sergeant Gibbs, one of the garrison at the
island, tried to unearth it, with the aid of a fortune-teller and a recruit,
but they had no sooner reached a box about four feet in length than a
being with wings, horns, tail, and a breath, the latter palpable in blue
flames, burst from the coffer. Gibbs fell unconscious into the water and
narrowly escaped drowning, while his companions ran away, and the
treasure may still be there for aught we know.
Back in the days before the Revolution, a negro called Mud Sam, who
lived in a cabin at the Battery, New York City, was benighted at about
the place where One Hundredth Street now touches East River while
waiting there for the tide to take him up the Sound. He beguiled the
time by a nap, and, on waking, he started to leave his sleeping place
under the trees to regain his boat, when the gleam of a lantern and the
sound of voices coming up the bank caused him to shrink back into the
shadow. At first he thought that he might be dreaming, for Hell Gate
was a place of such repute that one might readily have bad dreams there,
and the legends of the spot passed quickly through his mind: the
skeletons that lived in the wreck on Hen and Chickens and looked out
at passing ships with blue lights in the eye-sockets of their skulls; the

brown fellow, known as "the pirate's spuke," that used to cruise up and
down the wrathful torrent, and was snuffed out of sight for some hours
by old Peter Stuyvesant with a silver bullet; a black-looking scoundrel
with a split lip, who used to brattle about the tavern at Corlaer's Hook,
and who tumbled into East River while trying to lug an iron chest
aboard of a suspicious craft that had stolen in to shore in a fog. This
latter bogy was often seen riding up Hell Gate a-straddle of that very
chest, snapping his fingers at the stars and roaring Bacchanalian odes,
just as skipper Onderdonk's boatswain, who had been buried at sea
without prayers, chased the ship for days, sitting on the waves, with his
shroud for a sail, and shoving hills of water after the vessel with the
plash of his hands.
These grewsome memories sent a quake through Mud Sam's heart, but
when the bushes cracked under the strangers' tread, he knew that they
were of flesh and bone, and, following them for a quarter-mile into the
wood, he saw them dig a hole, plant a strong-box there, and cover it. A
threatening remark from one of the company forced an exclamation
from the negro that drew a pistol-shot upon him, and he took to his
heels. Such a fright did he receive that he could not for several years be
persuaded to return, but when that persuasion came in the form of a
promise of wealth from Wolfert Webber, a cabbage-grower of the town,
and promises of protection from Dr. Knipperhausen, who was skilled in
incantations, he was not proof against