"Rocks of gold and silver!" said I, incredulously.
"They are only the fire-stones of the Red Indians, and emit sparks when struck together," said Hartly.[*]
[*] They were the solid iron pyrites which deceived the early navigators who visited these barren shores. In the "List of H.M. Royal Navy for 1701," we find among the "fifth-rates, the _Adventure_, 120 men, 44 guns."
"His treasure," continued the mate, "if he had any, was never found; though _he_ was, for Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, and Governor of New England, caught him one day in 1701, when swaggering about the streets of Boston, and sent him home to King William, who lost no time in hanging him. But he died as hard as he had lived, for the rope broke with his weight in Execution Dock, so he was reeved up again with a new one.
"He was hung in chains on the banks of the Thames, but his body disappeared in the night, and the sailors in London declared that he could neither be hanged nor chained, as he had a _charmed_ life, having sold his poor soul to the devil. Be that as it may, on the _same night_, in 1701, my Lord Bellamont was found dead in his bed at Boston, and many affirmed that this event had some connexion with Kidd's mysterious disappearance from the gallows, as he was said to have been seen by some of his old shipmates near the dead Governor's house.
"Fishermen when jigging or trawling off Baccalao in the clear moonlight nights, often saw a solitary man sitting on the rocks at the mouth of yonder cavern, but his figure always seemed to melt away into the moonshine when any one approached; so a story went abroad that the island was haunted by the ghost of a drowned man. However, a stout fellow, named Tom Spiller, who was rather bolder than the rest, and who lived alone at Breakheart Point, where he had a little hut and stage for drying the fish he caught, went off to the island one night, when there was little cloud and a bright moon. The sea was calm, for there was but a puff of wind off the land from time to time.
"Tom Spiller was a brave and devil-may-care kind of fellow, whom I knew well, for he was an old man when I went to sea with him first as a boy, so I have often heard him tell the story without variation or leeway, or shaking out a new reef by way of a change.