The sea-robber involved was master of the galley Adventure, a Scotsman who was thoroughly hanged in London’s Execution Dock two centuries and a half ago—alas, on a day in May—and whose name ever since has stood for piracy in general. Ellery had tangled with historical characters before, but never with one so exciting as this; and it must be confessed that he embarked on the case of Captain Kidd’s treasure with a relish more suitable to a small boy in his first hot pursuit of Mr. Legrand’s golden scarabaeus than to a weary workman in words and the case-hardened son of a modern New York policeman.
And then there was Eric Ericsson.
Ericsson was that most tragic of men, an explorer in an age when nothing of original note remained on earth to be explored. He had had to content himself with being, not the first in anything, but the farthest, or the highest, or the deepest. Where five channels in the Northwest Passage were known, Ericsson opened a sixth. He found a peak in Sikang Province of western China, in the Amne Machin Range, which was almost a thousand feet higher than Everest, but he lost his instruments and his companions and Mount Everest remained on the books the highest mountain on the planet. Ericsson went farther and wider in the great Juf depression of the Sahara than the Citroën expedition, but this did not salve the nettling fact that other men had blazed the trail. And so it had gone all his life. Now in middle age, broken in health, Ericsson rested on his bitter fame—honorary fellowships and medals from all the proper learned societies, membership and officership in clubs like the Explorers’, Cosmos, Athenaeum—and brooded over his memories in his New York apartment or, occasionally, at the fireside of the old stone house on the island he owned off Montauk Point, Long Island.
Ellery had heard the story of William Kidd and Ericsson’s Island as a result of his first meeting with Ericsson at the Explorers’ Club. Not from Ericsson—their introduction had been by the way and their conversation brief; if any discoveries had been made it was by Ericsson, who explored Ellery with far swifter economy than that explorer in other spheres would have believed possible of anyone but himself. Then the large, burned, bowed man had shuffled off, leaving Ellery to quiz his host of the evening, a cartographer of eminence. When this amiable personage mentioned Ericsson’s Island and the buccaneer of the Adventure in adjoining breaths, Ellery’s bow plunged into the wind.
“You mean you’ve never heard that yarn?” asked the cartographer with the incredulity of the knowledgeable man. “I thought everyone had!” And he gripped his glass and set sail.
An Ericsson had taken possession of the little island in the fourth quarter of the seventeenth century, and he had managed to hold on to it through all the proprietary conflicts of that brawling era. Along the way the Northman acquired a royal patent which somehow weathered the long voyage of colonial and American history.
“Now did Kidd know Ericsson’s Island?” asked the cartographer, settling himself as if for argument. “The circumstantial evidence is good. We know that in 1691, for instance, he was awarded £150 by the council of New York for his services during the disturbances in the colony ‘after the rebellion of 1688.’ And then, of course, there was the treasure found on Gardiner’s Island off the tip of Long Island after Kidd’s arrest in 1699 on a charge of murder and piracy. On a clear day you can see Ericsson’s Island from Gardiner’s Island with a glass. How could he have missed it?”
“It’s your story,” said Ellery judicially. “Go on.”
William Kidd served respectably against the French in the West Indies, the cartographer continued, and in 1695 he was in London. Recommended as fit to command a vessel for the king, Captain Kidd received the royal commission to arrest all freebooters and boucaniers, and he sailed the galley Adventure from Plymouth in 1696 into a life, not of arresting pirates, but of outpirating them.
“The rest is history,” said the cartographer, “although some of it is dubious history. We do know that in 1698 or thereabout he was in these parts in a small sloop. Well, the story has persisted for two hundred and fifty years that during this period—when Kidd deserted the Adventure in Madagascar and took to the sloop, eventually working his way to these waters—he paid a visit to Ericsson’s Island.”
“To Gardiner’s Island,” corrected Ellery.
“And Ericsson’s,” said his host stubbornly. “Why not? About £14,000 was recovered from Kidd’s vessel and from Gardiner’s Island afterward; there must have been a great deal more than that. Why, John Avery — ‘Long Ben’ — once grabbed off 100,000 pieces of eight in a single haul; and a Mogul’s daughter to boot!
“What happened to the rest of Kidd’s booty? Is it likely he’d have cached it all in one place? He knew he was in for serious trouble—he tried to bribe Governor Bellomont, you’ll recall. And with Ericsson’s Island so handy...”
“What’s the story?” murmured Ellery.
“Oh, that he put into the cove there with a small boat one night, by a ruse got into the Ericsson house—the original’s still standing, by the way, beautifully preserved—gave Ericsson and his family fifteen minutes to get off the island, and used the place as his headquarters for a few days. When Kidd cleared out, to be seized and shipped to England shortly after, the Ericssons went back to their island—”
“And perforated it fore and aft and amidships for the treasure Kidd presumably buried there,” said Ellery, trying to sound amused.
“Well, certainly,” said the cartographer peevishly. “Wouldn’t you have?”
“But they never found it.”
“Neither they nor their heirs or assigns. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Queen.”
“Doesn’t mean it is, either.”
Nevertheless, Ellery went home that night feeling as if he had spent the evening in a hurricane off the Spanish Main, clinging to the wild rigging.
It was not quite two weeks later, in a mid-August spell of Dry Tortugan weather, that Eric Ericsson telephoned. The explorer sounded remote, as if deep—at least six fathoms deep—affairs were on his mind.
“Could you see me confidentially, Mr. Queen? I know you’re a busy man, but if it’s possible—”
“Are you calling from town, Mr. Ericsson?”
“Yes.”
“You come right on over!”
Nikki could not understand Ellery’s excitement. “Buried treasure,” she sniffed. “A grown man.”
“Women,” pontificated Mr. Queen, “have no imagination.”
“I suppose that’s true,” said his secretary coolly, “if you mean the kind that heats up at a bucket of nasty gore and a couple of rum-soaked yo-ho-hos. Who ever heard of a lady pirate?”
“Two of the bloodiest pirates in the business were Anne Bonny and Mary Read.”
“Then they were no ladies!”
Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang and Nikki, still sniffishly, admitted the owner of the island whose clamshells had once been crunched by the tread of Captain Kidd and his cutthroat crew.