Choptank River Trip - Pirate’s Treasure

In his 1916 book about manor houses on the Eastern Shore, Swepson Earle remarked that “Tradition says [Watts Creek, south of Denton] once provided refuge for Captain Kidd, whose ‘buried treasure’ has been sought on its banks.”

The story tellers sometimes mixed up their pirates.  A generation later in the 1940s, Hulbert Footner related in his book, Rivers of the Eastern Shore,  this pirate tale about Blackbeard:

We set out from Cambridge and, during the drive south, my companion [a waterman from Cambridge] entertained me with tall tales of the rivers.  We had been talking about the deep, unexpected holes that are to be found in all Eastern Shore rivers, due to some obscure action of the tides. My friend said, with a perfectly grave face:

"There is such a hole near the mouth of Watts Creek that is ninety feet deep. It is called Jake's Hole.  Its exact depth is known because it's been sounded often enough, and I'll tell you why. There was aplenty pirates round here in the old time.  The one that mostly cruised in these waters was Blackbeard; Edward Teach was his right name.  Well, Blackbeard picked Jake's Hole for one of his caches, and dropped an oaken chest bound round with copper bands in there. It's still there. God knows what's inside it!

"Many knew about this and aimed to recover the treasure, but Blackbeard had left a school of man-eating red herring to guard the place and none could come near. Well, there was an Englishman called Lord Longbow bought a fine place on the river and his cousin, Prince Fakir, came to spend the summer with him. Lord Longbow took him out in a boat to show him the river, and as they passed by Jake's Hole he was trying to teach Prince Fakir to sing 'Yankee Doodle.'   This tickled the man-eating red herring so that they laughed theirselves to death.

"Those that knew about it thought it would be a cinch, then, to recover Blackbeard's treasure, so they proceeded to Jake's Hole with their ropes and grappling irons and so forth. But it turned out that Blackbeard had left another spell on the chest.  It was easy enough to catch holt of it, but as soon as they histed it near the surface, the ropes bust into flame and burned through with an awful stink of sulphur, and the chest dropped to the bottom of the hole again.   Many have tried it, but it was always the same. They only lost their grappling irons for their trouble.  So the chest is there yet, if you want to have a try for it.

“That famous beard of his," the storyteller continued, “started growing right under his eyes and would have hung down over his chest, only he used to plait it in many little tails which he tied with different colored ribbons and caught behind his ears.  I suppose you've heard how Blackbeard came to his end?"

I said I had not.

"Well, that was off Sharp's Island out in the bay. Blackbeard was lying in wait under the island at the edge of Dick's Hole for a richly laden Fast Indiaman that was expected down from Baltimore.  He was so intent upon it, he failed to notice the tops'l schooner Julia Harlaw lying inside the hook. Young Joshua Covey was her master. Covey was able to creep up on Blackbeard in a yawl boat, and to board him before he was discovered. Covey cut off Blackbeard's head with one mighty sweep of his saber.

"But a pirate, you know, prided himself on never losing his head.  Blackbeard threw the copper plate that showed the location of all his caches into Dick's Hole and jumped in after it.  He swam around the vessel three times without his head before he disappeared from sight"

From the frequency with which one meets with his name on the Eastern Shore, one would think that Blackbeard must have sailed up here, but the facts of his brief piratical career are known, and he never sailed north of the Carolinas. The truth is, he laid a spell of horror on the whole Atlantic seaboard.

How did the legend of Blackbeard travel all the way from the Carolinas, to charm the waters of humble Watts Creek?

He probably did not. According to Donald Shomette in Pirates of the Chesapeake, neither of these infamous pirates - Blackbeard or Captain Kidd - ever sailed into the Bay. But their legends did.

The key to the Watts Creek pirate mystery seems to lie the true story of a real Chesapeak pirate.   Next, read about Roger Makeele and his band from Tangier Sound.