Lord Birkenhead expressed the opinion that Captain William Kidd had "a scrupulously fair" trial when he was indicted at the Old Bailey for murder and piracy. From diligent research, the author of this book, Harold T. Wilkins, is able to show that the exact reverse was the case - that the Captain Kidd was railroaded to the gallows. Documents vital to Kidd's defense were withheld, he was refused the aid of counsel, and he was made the scapegoat for certain Whig politicians who were interested in cashing in on his privateering ventures. Wilkins presents papers and documents hitherto unknown to the public. The Captain's own charts, retrieved from their ingenious hiding places, are published for the first time. Someday, these manuscripts may aid in the recovery of actual treasure by those who can decipher the symbols.

In "New Facts About Mysterious Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island Chests: The Strange Story of a Secret Cunningly Hidden For Almost 300 Years," the foremost treasure of the 20th century, Harold T. Wilkins, shares his personal discovery of Captain Kidd's last message, about a treasure he buried on Blank Island in the South China Sea.Chapters include:Captain Kidd: Ill-Used SeamanCaptain Kidd Dabbles in PoliticsKidd Meets a Pretty WomanKidd RailroadedThe Hollywood Version is UnhistoricalHaunted Cannon For Sale

Millions of years in the making, sustaining human voyagers and societies for millennia, a couple of centuries of that by Europeans - the Great Barrier Reef - in maybe five or six decades the largest living structure visible from space will have become the largest dead one. Vicarious Dreaming documents a series of personal voyages between Cooktown and the Torres Strait that are interwoven with accounts of exploration, exploitation and escape. The travels and tales coalesce around the works of Ion Idriess and the lives of solitary men at the edge of the world, drawn to the wild by folly and obsession, and to an island in the Howick Group that Idriess knew well and which was the site of his first book - Madman's Island. And as with the slow-motion ecological catastrophe that is the Reef's agonal decline there are players - and bystanders; stories of people and places, of life and death, of arrivals and departures, and of journeys that involve even the most remote, uninhabited spaces - the necklace of islands scattered along more than two thousand kilometres of Queensland's Coral Sea coast. At once a journey into the far north of Australia and into the furthest depths of the human mind. A tale of Cape York's past and a new chapter in the exploration of its present. A dream narrative - maybe; a case study - perhaps; literary art, yes, absolutely, in its purest and most ambitious form. - Nicholas Rothwell