a corner of the Atlantic coast where tales of Kidd are told.
Irving took these legends as he heard them from the long-winded
ancients of his own acquaintance and wove them into delightfully
entertaining fiction with a proper seasoning of the ghostly and the
uncanny. His formidable hero is an old pirate with a sea chest,
aforetime one of Kidd's rogues, who appears at the Dutch tavern near
Corlear's Hook, and there awaits tidings of his shipmates and the
hidden treasure. It is well known that Stevenson employed a strikingly
similar character and setting to get "Treasure Island" under way in the
opening chapter. As a literary coincidence, a comparison of these
pieces of fiction is of curious interest. The similarity is to be
explained on the ground that both authors made use of the same material
whose ground-work was the Kidd legend in its various forms as it has
been commonly circulated.

Stevenson confessed in his preface:

"It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and
justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I
chanced to pick up the 'Tales of a Traveler' some years ago, with a
view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and
struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlor, the whole
inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first
chapters--all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving.
But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what
seemed the springtides of a somewhat pedestrian fancy; nor yet day by
day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It
seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right
eye."

After the opening scenes the two stories veer off on diverging tacks,
the plot of Stevenson moving briskly along to the treasure voyage with
no inclusion of the supernatural features of the Kidd tradition.
Irving, however, narrates at a leisurely pace all the gossip and legend
that were rife concerning Kidd in the Manhattan of the worthy
Knickerbockers. And he could stock a treasure chest as cleverly as
Stevenson, for when Wolfert Webber dreamed that he had discovered an
immense treasure in the center of his garden, "at every stroke of the
spade he laid bare a golden ingot; diamond crosses sparkled out of the
dust; bags of money turned up their bellies, corpulent with pieces of
eight, or venerable doubloons; and chests, wedged close with mo