Belief in their buried recalls an era marked by pirates – Boston Globe
Far from being universally feared, O’Neill says pirates were at one time welcomed with open arms in cities such as Boston and Newport. “The Colonies were fairly poor, and pirates were the only people who had hard cash,’’ he says.
And legends have grown that notorious sea bandits such as Blackbeard and Captain William Kidd stashed some of that hard cash among the island-studded harbors and secluded coves of New England’s jagged coastline. While there is little historical evidence that chests overflowing with jewels, gold bars, and pieces of eight are underfoot, that hasn’t stopped centuries of New Englanders from tilling soil and sand in search of interred fortunes.
To see the remnants of one of New England’s most bizarre pirate treasure hunts, I head to the Lynn Woods Reservation and Dungeon Rock, a geological formation that bears a striking resemblance to a human skull worthy of a Jolly Roger. It made an apt hideout for pirate Thomas Veal — that is, until 1658, when he was supposedly entombed inside one of the rock’s caves along with his ill-gotten goods in an earthquake.
In the early 1850s Hiram Marble and his son Edwin began a quixotic quest for Veal’s lost plunder. The two spiritualists believed they could communicate with the dead, and the Marbles claimed Veal’s spirit would direct them to the treasure and prove the truth of spiritualism. The men spent nearly 30 years blasting and chiseling a 175-foot-long tunnel through solid rock at a rate of 1 foot per month.
Ranger Dan Small leads me through the rusted iron door at the tunnel entrance, and, flashlights at hand, we descend a staircase into the darkness. We carefully traverse the slippery rock floor of the surprisingly spacious tunnel. The passageway zigs and zags abruptly, apparently at Veal’s direction during séances with the Marbles. Finally we get to the end of the circuitous passage. “There’s a lifetime of nothing,’’ Small says, beating me to the punch. No treasure. No yo-ho-ho. Not even a bottle of rum.