The fascinating, unbelievable story behind Barry Clifford’s discovery of the long-lost treasure ship— the Adventure Galley—of the world’s most fabled pirate, Captain Kidd.
With larceny in his heart, Captain William Kidd and a band of pirates sailed to the Indian Ocean on the Adventure Galley, a ship built specially for piracy. But months later, Kidd found himself with a ship on the verge of sinking, and his crew members threatening mutiny.
With the Adventure Galley filling rapidly with water, Kidd ordered her to the tiny island of Sainte Marie off the coast of Madagascar. Soon thereafter, Kidd’s beloved ship sank in the harbor, disappearing beneath the waves never to be seen again…Until 302 years later, when undersea explorer Barry Clifford arrived to uncover the ship’s secrets.
When history's most famous pirate, Captain Kidd, was hanged in 1701, he left behind a trail of treasure and treachery that stretched halfway around the world. For undersea explorer Barry Clifford, the biggest prize of all would be to find the Adventure Galley, Kidd's legendary pirate ship. In the world of pirate archaeology, it was the Holy Grail.
With the help of the Discovery Channel, Clifford fields an expedition that includes some of America's top experts in shipwreck recovery. Their goal is to find, identify, and possibly excavate the remains of history's most famous pirate ship. The search takes them to the exotic nation of Madagascar and a tiny island off its rocky coast known to historians as the model for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. There, amid pirate graveyards, broken porcelain intended for a European royal family, and native rituals that include blood sacrifice, Clifford and his crew find far more than they bargained for. The island's murky harbor is filled with sunken pirate ships, making it difficult to single out the Adventure Galley, and the shores are teeming with people who want the expedition stopped. The team races to find the ship before dark forces expel it from the island -- forces motivated by the same resentment and greed that caused Kidd's downfall.
Return to Treasure Island and the Search for Captain Kidd weaves together two exciting stories: the saga of Captain William Kidd, one of history's most baffling and mysterious figures, and Barry Clifford's obsessive quest to find perhaps the most notorious pirate ship of all time. The result is a tale of treasure and adventure that ends in death -- both Kidd's and, three hundred years later, that of a rival archaeologist who attempts to stop Clifford's expedition.
