Huggins published an article in Dialogue exploring the connection between Captain Kidd and Joseph Smith. Captain Kidd, buried treasure, Comoro and Moroni-Joseph Smith, treasure hunting, gold plates, Cumorah and Moroni? Is all this coincidence or is there a connection between the activities of a Scottish buccaneer in the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth century and the development of a prophet in upper New York in the early nineteenth century? Did Joseph Smith have access to accounts of Captain Kidd’s exploits, which became more and more elaborate in the years following his hanging in London in 1701? Did accounts of Kidd’s rendezvous at Comoro and Moroni color the folklore about Kidd’s buried treasure to which young Joseph may have been exposed?

In fact, New York was a major source of supplies for pirates in business in the Indian Ocean. My friend had written and mentioned that the famous buccaneer “Captain” William Kidd, who is reputed to have hidden gold and treasure at Gardener’s Island, New York, and in a variety of New England locations, actually visited the Comoro Islands during his voyage to East Africa… Ultimately I found that Kidd actually spent a considerable amount of time in the vicinity of the Comoros between March and August 1697, and that the islands were an important stopping-off point on the long voyage from New York to India. After ruling out several avenues, Buchanan stumbled upon one that seemed plausible: In “Perilous Ponderings,” Fred Buchanan talked about how a chance encounter with the word “Moroni” in an atlas developed an off-and-on interest about a possible connection between the town, located in the Comoro Islands, and Joseph Smith. Near as I can tell, the first published source proposing the theory was Fred Buchanan in the June 1989 Sunstone magazine. Robert) Kidd? If not, you are in for a treat. Ever heard the one about Joseph Smith getting the names Moroni and Cumorah from the scandalous piratical tales of Captain William (a.k.a. With pirates at the box office, it seems appropriate to talk about how pirate legends may (or may not) have influenced the creation of the Book of Mormon. In order to use that village for source material, Joseph Smith would’ve had to view the name Meroni/Merone on one of the few detailed maps of Johanna island, which is unlikely. The name Moroni never appears in pirate lore, and is absent from all pre-1830 maps and literature, except for a mysterious village named Meroni/Merone on mid-1700s maps of the island Johanna.

The name Comoro (or derivatives) rarely occurs in pirate lore, though the individual names of three islands in the Comoros (Johanna, Mohilla, Mayotta) often do. Turns out, Captain Kidd never set foot on Grande Comore island, the location of the current city Moroni, and he wasn’t even a pirate till months after he left the Comoro Islands. TL:DR – Some church critics claim Joseph Smith got the names “Moroni” and “Cumorah” from tales of Captain William Kidd’s exploits on the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean.

Captain kidd long island