In late November 1765, the brig Earl of Sandwich was making for London with a fortune in Spanish silver dollars, gold dust and 'pieces of eight' aboard when four of her crew — George Gidley, Richard St Quintin, Andreas Zekerman and Peter McKinlie — mutinied, killing the captain and several others on board and throwing them overboard. The mutineers turned the ship for the Irish coast and ran her close to the Hook Peninsula, where they waded ashore with around 250 sacks of coin and buried most of the hoard in the dunes, fearing they would be searched if they passed too close to the guns of Duncannon Fort.
The story
Word of strangers spending unusual quantities of foreign silver soon reached the authorities in New Ross, and in mid-December a magistrate's party, backed by soldiers from Duncannon Fort, recovered the buried treasure and shipped it under guard to the Custom House. The four mutineers were captured, tried, and executed on 3 March 1766 for the murder of their captain and the theft of the ship's cargo. The stretch of beach where the silver dollars were dug from the sand has been known ever since as Dollar Bay, and the story is still told along the Hook Peninsula as one of Ireland's great pirate-treasure legends — one some say helped inspire Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Treasure Island'.