Queen Anne's Revenge sits in about twenty feet of water.
I have been diving for more than twenty years, and that number is the part of this story I cannot get past. Twenty feet is nothing. It is the depth you check your gauge at on the way down and forget about. Blackbeard's flagship went aground at Beaufort Inlet in 1718 and stayed there, a short swim under the surface, for two hundred and seventy-eight years before anyone found her in 1996.
Divers have been bringing that ship up ever since. Cannon. Anchors. Ballast stones. Navigational instruments. A remarkable quantity of medical equipment, which fits a man who once blockaded Charleston harbour and demanded a chest of medicine as the ransom.
What did not come up was treasure.
The most famous pirate hoard in American memory has a documented flagship lying in shallow water off North Carolina, and there was nothing in it. Which raises a question I did not expect to spend a year on. If the gold was never there, where did all of us get the idea that it was?
The answer turns out to be a real hole in the ground on Long Island, and two novelists.
In 1699 William Kidd was trying to talk his way out of a piracy charge. He was not a good pirate and he had never been an especially convincing one, and his plan for staying alive involved handing over enough of what he had taken to look cooperative. On the way to that negotiation he buried a cache on Gardiners Island, off the eastern end of Long Island, and left it with the family who owned the place.
The colonial governor had it dug up almost immediately. It was inventoried, crated, shipped to England, and entered as evidence at Kidd's trial. He hanged in 1701, and the rope broke on the first attempt, and they hanged him again.
That is the documented tradition of buried pirate treasure in its entirety. One man, one hole, dug up inside a year, and it helped kill him.
Which is nowhere near enough to build a mythology on. So two writers built it instead.
In 1843 Edgar Allan Poe published a story called The Gold-Bug, in which a man finds a scrap of parchment covered in symbols, works out that it is a substitution cipher, breaks it, and follows it to Captain Kidd's buried fortune. Poe had been running a public challenge in a Philadelphia magazine daring readers to send him ciphers he could not solve, and the story is essentially him showing his work. It was enormously popular. It put the cipher, the parchment, and Kidd's gold into the same sentence and left them there.
Forty years later Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, and drew the map first and the book second. The X, the black spot, the one-legged sea cook, the marooned man gone strange from solitude. Almost every fixed idea we have about pirates was set down in 1883 by a Scotsman who had never been near a pirate, working from a map he sketched to amuse a boy on a rainy holiday.
The hoard everybody is still looking for was invented by a magazine writer and a novelist, roughly a century and a half after the last man who could have buried anything was dead.
And the real ships are exactly where they always were. One of them in twenty feet of water, with nothing aboard but cannon and medicine.
Break the Code
Last month's cipher was a Vigenère, the system the Confederacy actually trusted its orders to. This one is Poe's. A straight substitution, one letter standing in for another, the same shape of puzzle he set his readers in 1843.
The line underneath is something Blackbeard is supposed to have said when he was asked where his money was. The story comes down to us through a single book published six years after he died, so treat it as lore rather than testimony, which is roughly how he would have wanted it.
TSI HLKEIQT HBVIP QSLUHD TGFI GHH
Stuck?
The key is a place name in the story above. Build your alphabet from it, the way Poe's narrator built his from the letter frequencies, and the rest falls over quickly. Word breaks are exactly where they look like they are.
The prize. One entry drawn at random from all correct answers. The winner gets a character named after them in Echoes of Fortune: The Obsidian Covenant, the next Jack Sullivan novel. A real character with lines, not a name on a list. I may adapt it a little to fit the story, and I will check with you before anything goes to print.
Replies close September 18, 2026. The winner is named in the September 25 dispatch.
From the Wreck One Legend, One Fact
The Legend
The story goes that Blackbeard once blew out the candle at his own table, fired two pistols under it, and crippled his sailing master's knee. Asked why, he is supposed to have said that if he did not shoot one of them now and then, they would forget who he was.
The Fact
The sailing master had a name. Israel Hands was a real man on a real crew, and the account of the shooting comes down to us through that same single book, published six years after Blackbeard died. Hands survived. He was pardoned. By that same account he ended his life begging in the streets of London.
A hundred and sixty years later Stevenson went looking for a name for a coxswain in a book about buried treasure, and took his.
Most people who know the name have no idea it belonged to someone.
PS
Knights of the Golden Circle is out now, and free to read on Kindle Unlimited. Kirkus gave it their "GET IT" Pick.
Lost Voices: The Death of Blackbeard releases October 13. It is a standalone historical novella, quieter than the Echoes of Fortune books, and it is narrated by Israel Hands. Advance copies go out September 15 to readers on the ARC team. If you want to read it before it goes on sale, you can join below.
Start the Series
New here, or coming in partway through? The Search for Braddock's Lost Gold is where the whole thing begins, and Shadows Over Cozumel is the shorter way in and it is free.
One Question
Stevenson invented the map, Poe invented the cipher, and between them they built the pirate that lives in your head. So here is what I keep turning over. Which piece of history do you think you know that you picked up entirely from a novel or a film?
Hit reply and tell me. I read all of them.
Send this to someone
If you know somebody who would enjoy the hole in the ground on Long Island, this page is public and needs no signup.
Someone forward this to you?
Shadows Over Cozumel is a complete novella and it is free. A Confederate blockade runner that vanished in 1865, found on the seafloor off Mexico by people who should have left it alone. The dispatches come with it, every few weeks, and you can leave whenever you like.
From Another Author
One book this month, from an author whose work sits closer to mine than the genre label suggests.
The Black Circle by Parker Vale
A forensic psychologist takes the stand in a murder case where the man on trial does not fit the crime. The killings are careful and decades apart. They stop for a hundred years and then start again.
I read it. The best chapter is a conversation. The antagonist never threatens her, he explains himself in the calm procedural language of a man who has done nothing wrong, and it is considerably more unsettling than a chase would have been. There is also a long sequence about how a professional reputation gets dismantled, journal article, press release, the same three phrases repeating across every outlet, the consulting work quietly drying up, that is the most recognizable thing in the book.
It does not end well for her. I respected that.
Free, and it reads in one sitting.
Until next time, keep hunting.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Refuses to Stay Buried… It Echoes into the Present.