. . .

In the foregoing description, Horsburgh mentions two bays, “Ingando and Moroon.” The etymological origins of the word moroon or maroon could undoubtedly fill a lengthy volume. Though it is probably a derivative spelling of the Swahili words Itzanda and Mroni or Maroni, “Moroon” would have to be Hors- burgh’s identification of what came to be known as Moroni Bay. The place name was evidently known to the founding settlers of Ngazidja and did not originate with Horsburgh. Horsburgh’s spelling may well have been based on phoneticized spellings or pronunciations from mariner diarists and visitors to the island whom he surveyed for his directory. While it may be that Horsburgh was using the term denoting desertion or isolation on an island shore—a term with which many of us are familiar and which was used by Johnson in his History of the Pyrates—this explanation is unlikely, as chroniclers who documented the settlement and French colonization of the island referred to the sultan’s village (or king’s town) first as “Mouroni,” or “Mourouni,” then as “M’roni.” In Comorian, the village name means “In the Heart of the Fire,” for its proximity to Mt. Karthala, a notoriously active volcano. In any case, however, “Moroon,” would not have been a source name for Smith’s “Moroni.

. . .

In April 1855, Édouard Charton published a series of illustrated vignettes on the Comoro Islands and its peoples in his Magasin Pittoresque. The first entry in the series includes an inset map, dated 1851, showing the “Îles Comores” and Moroni on the southwestern coast of Grande Comore (fig. 11 [see images]).

. . .

Conclusion

Joseph Smith’s knowledge of and participation in treasure seeking during the early years of the nineteenth century will continue to be questioned and disputed. From the time he was very young to the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, Smith was nurtured amid a whirlwind of treasure-seeking activity that had swept across the eastern seaboard into New England and New York. Smith was part of the pervasive quests for buried treasure that reached the hills and farms of western New York. It has long been known that he assisted his father in treasure quests while in the employ of Josiah Stowell and others in the 1820s. Many of these treasure digs were aided by the use of folk magic, peep stones, and ceremonial circles. The motivation behind these digs was, of course, the hope of finding Captain William Kidd’s buried treasure. What’s more, Smith reportedly had in his possession an autobiography or biography of Kidd that was “eagerly and often perused.” That Joseph Smith Jr. had pre-1830 knowledge of the East Indian Ocean pirate haunt—the Comoro Island group and its sultan town, Moroni—is difficult to conclusively determine. No extant pre-1830 chart or map shows Moroni as a place name on the larger island.

Smith’s youthful idolization of Captain William Kidd certainly would have been a motivation for him to seek out published biographies and legendary accounts of Kidd’s piracy in the Indian Ocean. If such was the case, Smith would have undoubtedly discovered that Kidd and the crew of his ship, Adventure Galley, policed the waters of the Mozambique Channel, the northern coast of Madagascar, and the Comoros archipelago, near Anjouan (Johanna). If Smith had in fact read Captain Charles Johnson’s History of the Pyrates (1728), he would have learned that notorious pirates such as Kidd and his counterparts Robert Culliford, Henry Avery, Thomas Tew, Olivier Levasseur, Nathaniel North, and Abraham Samuel stalked the merchant ships passing in the vicinity of Madagascar, the Comoro Islands, and St. Marie’s Island, their home base. More specifically, he would have known that Kidd careened his ship for repairs at Johanna in 1696. It is compelling to think that Smith read of the island group, or heard of them while listening to old treasure-seeking seamen retell the legends of Kidd and roguish pirates of the Indian Ocean. In light of Jacque-Nicolas Bellin’s widely available chart of Anjouan, the idea is arresting—if not a probability—that Joseph Smith saw the island place names on this chart, as it featured the place names “Comore” and “Meroni” together for the first time.