In the late 1920s and early 30s, a collector of pirate artefacts from Eastbourne, England, named Hubert Palmer, came into possession of four treasure maps. One of these maps came inside an old sea-chest with the year 1699 and “Capn Kidd” (Captain Kidd) carved on its lid; another in an oak bureau with an inscription: “Captain William Kidd. Aventure Galley 1699”, the others in antique chests inscribed with the letter “K” and “William and Sarah Kidd” (Wilkins, 1935, pp. 315-339; Howlett, 1958).
The maps depict a crescent-shaped island in the “China Sea” with a lagoon. Some of the maps have an ‘X marks the spot’. One map (now known as the ‘Skeleton Map’) has latitude and longitude written on it, and there are directional instructions on its border. Another map has instructions for pacing in feet. Since the maps were sold with furniture pieces that have inscriptions with William Kidd’s name or initials and one of the maps has Kidd’s initials “W. K.” on it – the maps became known as the ‘Kidd-Palmer’ maps (charts).
The first literary mention of one of the maps was by Charles Driscoll (1930) in The Pittsburgh Press newspaper, followed by journalist Harold T. Wilkins in a magazine article (1933) and a book titled Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island (1935). Driscoll and Wilkins both corresponded with Palmer, and Palmer let Wilkins look at the maps. He did not, however, grant Wilkins permission to copy them. This explains why Wilkins’ drawings of the maps in his book (1935) are dissimilar to the Kidd-Palmer maps, because he significantly changed and omitted certain details. Wilkins remarked that Palmer was “adamant in his refusal” to let him copy the maps and so he relied on his own imagination.
At some point photographs of the maps were taken, but reproductions were not published until the 1970s (Furneaux, 1972) – but by then, the ink on the original maps was fading. Palmer showed one of the maps to Sir Reginald Hall, but he declined Hall’s offer to purchase.
Both Wilkins and Palmer were convinced that the treasure maps were owned by Captain Kidd and dated to the 17th century. Palmer supposedly planned an expedition to discover the island depicted on the maps, but postponed it because of the outbreak of World War II. By the time the war ended, Palmer was in ill health, and he died in 1949. Palmer bequest his house, private museum of pirate artefacts, and the maps, to his carer Elizabeth Dick.
In the 1950s, expeditions were planned to try to identify the island on the Kidd-Palmer maps. They all ended in failure, and one involved the schooner Lamorna being wrecked near the Isle of Wight. Dick decided to sell the maps and furniture pieces they came with. One of the maps was auctioned and made international news. It remains unclear who bought the maps. Elizabeth’s nephew claimed she sold the maps in 1964, but it has elsewhere been reported that they were privately sold in 1957 or 1958.
In the 1990s, there was a renewal of interest in the Kidd-Palmer maps when George Edmunds published the book Kidd: The Search for his Treasure. Edmunds argued the maps are authentic. However, scholars have long concluded the maps are a hoax. In 1976, the maritime historian Alan Stimson, who at the time was curator of navigation at the National Maritime Museum, commentated:
I have no confidence in any these charts being genuine, as they are all modelled on the chart by R. L. Stevenson for his book Treasure Island and are part of the romantic pirate tradition.
(O’Connor, 1978, p. 124)
Stimson was certainly on to something, since the ‘X marks the spot’ that appears on some of the Kidd-Palmer maps is a fictional pirate trope. Historical pirates are not known to have made maps of buried treasure (there are no authenticated pirate treasure maps); in Pirates: A History (2007, p. 33) Tim Travers, an expert in the history of piracy, further points out that “very few pirates buried any treasure” (contrary to popular belief, Captain Kidd did not bury any treasure on Gardiner’s Island). For pirates in the 17th century and 18th centuries, So-called ‘treasure’ rarely meant gold, but textiles, wine or spices that they plundered – and would not have buried.
There are other lines of evidence the Kidd-Palmer maps were not drawn or owned by Captain Kidd. In 1951, one of the maps was forensically examined by Wilson R. Harrison from the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory, who concluded the map is a “comparatively recent production on what might very well be an old sheet of parchment”. A separate report by the Metropolitan Police Laboratory found modern pencil marks under ink of the words “China Sea”, and a compass rose on the map (both these reports can be accessed in a file at the National Archives). The latter is not surprising, when it is realised the compass rose on the Kidd-Palmer maps is highly unconventional and would not have appeared on an actual nautical chart. Rather, it has much more in common with compass roses on fictional maps.
As further evidence the maps are a hoax and not authentic pirate treasure maps, all four maps have a dubious provenance before the maps were acquired by Palmer. Accounts differ as to who sold the four maps to Palmer, and exactly what years he bought them (sometime between 1925 and 1934), but the researcher Geoff Bath published Palmer’s private correspondence with Wilkins. These letters make clear Wilkins’ (1935) account, opposed to Howlett’s (1958) and Furneaux’s (1972), is by far the most reliable. This makes sense, since Wilkins met Palmer in person and corresponded with him when he was alive. According to Wilkins’ and Palmer’s letters, all four of the maps were purchased by Palmer from an antique dealer named Arthur Hill-Cutler. Palmer discovered one of the maps hidden inside the oak bureau when he was inside Cutler’s shop, in the presence of Cutler (whose shop in Eastbourne was named ‘Ye Oak Room’).
Prior to Cutler, there are no verifiable records of ownership of the maps or the furniture pieces they came with, which suggests that Cutler planted the maps in furniture in his shop. Cutler was certainly a shady character. He was involved in selling many forged Lord Nelson objects with a fake “Pamela Hardy” provenance (many can be found in collections at the National Maritime Museum; they were removed from public view because experts doubt they are genuine). Hardy almost certainly never existed; at least, no records have been found to verify her existence, and Palmer never met her.
One of the treasure maps and chests was claimed by Cutler to have been owned by Hardy before he sold it to Palmer, but as Alan Stimson noted, Hardy was “probably a fictitious character invented by a dealer” (O’Connor, 1978, p. 124). The Sphere newspaper in 1947, published an exposé on Hardy that mentioned “spurious Nelson relics”.
I have known about the Kidd-Palmer maps since around 2009, but did not seriously start to do research on them until last year. There is convergent evidence the Kidd-Palmer maps are a hoax, but what puzzled me was whether the fictional island in Treasure Island was the template or model (as Stimson put it) someone used; in other words, did the hoaxer base the island depicted on the Kidd-Palmer maps on the island in Stevenson’s Treasure Island? This has long been the view of Peter Barber, formerly head of the Map Library at the British Library, who once stated the Kidd-Palmer maps are an “amalgam of elements from clichéd treasure maps, owing more to the Treasure Island map”. At the very least the hoaxer who drew the four maps could have borrowed ‘X marks the spot’ from Stevenson; other similarities between these maps do suggest the hoaxer was loosely inspired by Stevenson’s novel (Harris, 2002, p. 183).
Nevertheless, the island on the Kidd-Palmer maps is significantly different in shape to the fictional island in Treasure Island, and its location in the China Sea is not a close match. There are also other profound topographical differences. This left me thinking that the hoaxer could have used a different fictional map as a template or model, and based the Kidd-Palmer map island on this hypothetical fictional island.
I began searching for imaginary islands in 19th century to 1920s pirate fiction and maritime adventure novels. I extensively searched books digitised on Project Gutenberg as well as visited my local library, searched second-hand book shops and purchased some physical copies of rare books (not digitised) on Ebay. No luck.
One rare book I purchased was The Mystery Chest (1929) by Rear-Admiral ERGR Evans. This book’s plot involves a “mystery chest found on the shore of an English coast town”. Could it have been Eastbourne? This was the coastal town where Palmer lived, and he bought the chests and maps from Cutler. The book arrived in my post, but to my disappointment it had nothing to do with Eastbourne, and had no map. Sadly, of all the islands I came across in pirate fiction (in many dozens of books), none closely resembled the island in the Kidd-Palmer maps.
Not giving up, I narrowed my search to the fictional subgenre ‘Robinsonade’, involving shipwrecked people who are marooned or isolated on an island. This led me to find interesting maps, for example, Perseverance Island (1884), Palm Tree Island (1910) and Lost Island (1918) in a similar style to the Kidd-Palmer maps. While not a very close match, I was on the right track. I narrowed my search again, to Robinsonade fictional books with a specific setting in the China Sea. This led me to an intriguing book titled The Wings of the Morning (1903) by Louis Tracy. The plot involves a ship getting wrecked and two survivors landing on a remote island in the China Sea.
As I read more pages, I realised that more and more details of the island in the book (named ‘Rainbow Island’) closely resemble the Kidd-Palmer maps, especially the map with latitude and longitude (‘Skeleton Map’). Was this a coincidence? I continued to turn pages until finding a crudely drawn map at the bottom of page 79. In the story, someone carved a map of the island on a tin canister. Not only was the shape of the island a crescent-shape but it had the exact same latitude as on the ‘Skeleton Map’ (9.16 N) and a similar longitude (113.80 E, versus 31.30 E).
I later learnt the UK edition of the book under a different title (Rainbow Island) was published with a detailed map of ‘Rainbow Island’. The original edition published in 1903 is scarce, but I ordered reprints of this book; one dates to 1917. Tracy’s map of ‘Rainbow Island’ is so similar to the ‘Skeleton Map’ there can be no doubt the Kidd-Palmer maps were copied from ‘Rainbow Island’. The hoaxer changed or omitted only minor details. Notably both the ‘Rainbow Island’ and ‘Skeleton Map’ have annotated places named North Cape and Smuggler’s Cove in the same position (north-east coast).
The hoaxer also copied the unconventional compass rose (a unique cartographic anomaly), on the ‘Rainbow Island’ map. It is apparent the directional instructions on the ‘Skeleton Map’ relate to the ‘Rainbow Island’ map (for example, yards appear on both).
On the right: The ‘Skeleton Map’ (one of the Kidd-Palmer maps).
It is evident the ‘Skeleton Island’ map was based on or rather copied from the ‘Rainbow Island’ map; not vice-versa. The island and topography is very similar on both maps and many features are near identical. The ‘Rainbow Island’ map contains annotated places that directly tie into the plot of the book and although the drawer of the ‘Skeleton Island’ map removed some of the most plot-specific places or replaced them with more generic names, they retained ‘Smugger’s Cove’ in the exact same position on the map). Palmer purchased the ‘Skeleton Island’ map in early 1933 (Wilkins, 1935, p. 332), thirty years after Tracy’s ‘Rainbow Island’ map was first published. Note that Tracy died in 1928.
An explanation as to why no one until now identified the remarkable similarities between ‘Rainbow Island’ and Kidd-Palmer maps is that the map of ‘Rainbow Island’ was not printed in the US edition, The Wings of the Morning. The map was only printed in the obscurer UK edition and reprints, Rainbow Island. The UK edition was less popular and sold far fewer copies than the US edition, and copies to this day are more difficult to find. In fact, the UK edition has not been digitised in its entirety online. I was the first person to scan and upload the map from Rainbow Island to the internet.
Although these maps have now been solved, there remain unanswered questions. Who was the hoaxer who tried to pass off these maps as Captain Kidd’s? As earlier noted, one map has Kidd’s initials, and the maps came inside furniture pieces (three chests and a bureau) with Kidd’s name and initials inscribed or carved on them. The evidence certainly points the finger at Arthur Hill-Cutler, who sold all four maps and the furniture pieces to Palmer and was involved in forging Lord Nelson objects and sold many other spurious items. Edmunds (1996, p. 228) mentions Cutler sold an item purporting to have belonged to Prince Rupert of Rhine, but it was revealed to have been “clearly a fake”.
An alternative plausible suspect is M. P. Shiels, who collaborated with Louis Tracy by sharing a pseudonym to write detective novels. Shiels had money troubles throughout most his life, was a convicted criminal, and invented a publicity stunt in 1929. He falsely claimed he was the king of Redonda, a small rocky island in the Caribbean.
The Kidd-Palmer map mystery continues.
References
- Driscoll, Charles. “Pirates Ahoy!”, The Pittsburgh Press (6 July 1930).
- Edmunds, George. Kidd: The Search for his Treasure (Durham: Pentland Press, 1996).
- Evans, ERGR. The Mystery Chest (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1929).
- Furneaux, Robert. The Money Pit Mystery (London: Tom Stacy, 1972)
- Harris, Graham. Treasure and Intrigue: The Legacy of Captain Kidd (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 2002).
- Howlett, Anthony D. “The Mystery of Captain Kidd’s Treasure”, Wide World Magazine (October 1958): 320-322, 345-359.
- O’Connor, D’ Arcy. The Money Pit (New York: Coward, McCann & Geohegan, 1978).
- Tracy, Louis. The Wings of the Morning (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Pub., 1903).
- Tracy, Louis. Rainbow Island (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1903).
- Travers, Tim. Pirates: A History (Stroud, UK: Tempus Publishing, 2007).
- Wilkins, Harold T. “Captain Kidd’s Treasure”, The Passing Show (6 May 1933): 5-6.
- Wilkins, Harold T. Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island (London: Cassell & Co, 1935).
