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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Based on a painting by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945)
GOLD-mining has come down to a level almost as prosaic as that of cutting coal; pearl fishing is now on a hard business basis; the output of the world's diamond mines is calculated to a few carats months beforehand; but treasure- hunting is still as fascinating a pursuit as ever it was.
The days of buccaneers and pirates are long since past and gone, but gold and gems won from Spanish galleons, or plundered from the treasure vaults of Panama and Cartagena still lie hidden beneath the white beaches of lonely islets. Hoards wrung from their starving subjects by savage kings and tyrannical governors remain buried beneath the mouldering ruins of their strongholds, and vast stores of precious metals repose upon the silent sea-floor amid the rotting timbers of once stout ships.
Many of these treasures are certainly mythical, but the existence of others is no less certain. Enough has been found from time to time to keep the spark of hope alive in the breasts of the seekers, and there are to-day, and probably always will be, many men ready to spend their lives in patient and rarely rewarded search.
The world's two most celebrated treasure-islands are Cocos and Trinidad. Each has been visited by scores of expeditions, intent upon recovering the hoards believed to be hidden under their soil; but with one possible exception none of the seekers is known to have been the richer for his pains. Cocos is a lonely dot of land lying far out in the Pacific, about 500 miles south-west from Panama, and less than 6 deg. north of the Equator. There is good evidence that on at least two separate occasions treasure to a large amount has been hidden upon Cocos. The first was deposited in 1820, or 1821, by a British ship, which had turned pirate; this vessel was afterwards chased and captured by a British war-ship, her officers hanged, and the rest of her crew imprisoned or transported. Many years later, two of the survivors were taken back to the island to attempt to locate the hiding-place; but there was no plan in existence, and all that the men could say was that the treasure had been buried in a shaft sunk in the gravel at the bottom of the cliff. As landslips are frequent in Cocos, it is little wonder that it was found impossible to identify the hiding-place.
The story of the second treasure is most romantic. In the year 1835 Callao was expecting bombardment from the Chilean fleet. In order to save their valuables from the enemy the Peruvian authorities placed the contents of their treasury, together with the church-plate, aboard the British barquentine Mary Dier, which was lying in the harbor. But the sight of such wealth of gold and gems roused the passions of the crew. In the night they rose, murdered their officers, and slipping their cable sailed away. Fearing to put in at any port with such a cargo, they made for Cocos, and there landed eleven boat-loads of treasure, which was carefully buried. But just retribution was at hand. A Peruvian vessel had followed the Mary Dier; the pirate was captured, and all but three of her crew were shot. Two of these men died shortly afterwards; the third, Thompson by name, made many vain endeavors to get back to Cocos. Before he died he bequeathed his secret to a man named Keaton. Somewhere about 1855 Keaton and a certain Captain Bogue found means to visit Cocos, and actually did rediscover the Callao treasure; but being afraid of their shipmates, they only took as much coined gold as they could carry about them--some £6000 in all--and put off for their ship. The story goes that on the way they quarrelled, fought, the boat upset, and Bogue weighted with his gold, went to the bottom like a stone. Keaton, however, flung off his clothes, clung to the boat, and was rescued; but he lost every coin of his newly gathered wealth.
There must be some evil fate which haunts the treasure-seeker. Here was Keaton with full knowledge of the hiding-place of millions, yet utterly unable to collect the few hundreds necessary to revisit the island. At last, worn out with vain longings he, too, died, but left a legatee in the shape of Captain George Hackett.
It has been chiefly through Hackett's knowledge that the modern explorations of Cocos have come about. Some ten or eleven years ago, Frederick Hackett, George's brother, fitted out the schooner Aurora, and sailed from Vancouver for Cocos. But when the party reached the island they found there had been a great fall of cliff along that part of the shore where the treasure had been buried. The whole contour was changed, and all landmarks lost; so after a week's hard digging they gave up the job and went home.
Then came a startling development. In 1897, no less a personage than the late Admiral Palliser arrived at Cocos in H.M.S. Impérieuse, for the purpose of locating the long-lost gold. He had aboard a Canadian named Hartford, who possessed a chart of the island, with the hiding-place marked upon it. A hundred seamen were landed, and set to dig trenches in parallel lines six feet apart, across the spots indicated in the chart; they also opened a cave in the cliffs with dynamite. But not one solitary coin rewarded their efforts. The rains broke, the trenches filled, and the search was abandoned.
Admiral Palliser afterwards accompanied Lord Fitzwilliam upon his expedition to Cocos in the Véronique. It is said that the main reason why this expedition failed was that the island was found to be in possession of a syndicate, which held a concession from the Costa Rican Government, and would only permit digging in certain parts of the island.
These are not one tithe of the expeditions which have hunted Cocos high and low for the treasure of Callao. The whole island is seamed and scarred with pits and trenches, and agents of two different companies are still busy in a systematic attempt to recover the elusive hiding-place of the buried millions.
So much for Cocos. The story of Trinidad, which is not the West Indian island of that name, but a rocky islet off the coast of Brazil, is very similar. Several treasures are supposed to have been hidden under the frowning cliffs of Trinidad, the last so lately as 1864, by the captain of an American slaver turned pirate. Mr. E. F. Knight, the well-known war correspondent, has always been a staunch believer in the genuineness of Trinidad's buried wealth. In June, 1889, he wrote to a London paper proposing that an expedition should be equipped for the purpose of searching for the treasure, the value of which he calculated to be at least a million sterling. His proposal was quickly taken up, and on the last day of August nine gentlemen and four paid hands sailed together from Southampton in the yawl Alerte. She was only 56 tons yacht measurement, a tiny craft indeed in which to brave the stormy Atlantic. The adventurers, however, reached the island safely, and worked hard for three long months, but without the slightest success. Mr. Knight afterwards described the various adventures of the expedition in his book "The Cruise of the Alerte." Several expeditions have since visited Trinidad, but, so far as is known, none has returned any richer.
It has always been believed that the cays of the Caribbean Sea hold much treasure within their sandy maws, buried there by the buccaneers and pirates of the old time; and there is never a year but expeditions leave various American or West Indian ports in search of it. Early in the year 1903 there were no fewer than five different treasure-seeking parties at once of Kingston, Jamaica. Most of these treasures, however, must have been buried, if buried at all, from one to three centuries ago. Consequently there remain no reliable charts, and as the islets are low and sandy and change in shape with every storm, the chances of finding any of these ancient hoards are extremely remote indeed.
A yellow and wrinkled chart, which dates from the eighteenth century, has caused an expenditure of over £30,000 in a search for the buried hoards of Oak Island, a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia. The first search began somewhere about the year 1800, when three men who had inherited the chart from an old sailor, set to work to dig beneath an ancient and gigantic oak near the beach. At a depth of 80 ft, so the story goes, they came upon a large flat stone, roughly carved, upon which were these words, "Ten feet beneath this stone two million pounds are buried." Unfortunately, before they could dig that little distance the sea water broke in, and having no pumps, nor money to purchase them, the seekers were helpless. Fifty years later another attempt was made. A boring machine was used, and 8 ft. below the stone the auger brought up some fragments of a cask and three links of a silver chain. But again the sea baffled the searchers, and Oak Island enjoyed another half-century of peace. In 1896 a company was formed, modern machinery shipped to the island, and a coffer dam built to keep out the tide. One thing at any rate was proved; the stone lied; there was no treasure 10 ft. beneath but at a depth of 156 ft. there was unearthed a tiny scrap of parchment hearing two letters, V.E. Work is, or was very recently still proceeding upon Oak Island, but so far, we believe, without any satisfactory result.
In March, 1904, certain Peruvian and Bolivian papers announced that the great treasure of the Incas had been discovered at Chayaltaya, in Bolivia, by a party of English and American engineers. The amount was set at the modest total of £3,200,000; there is, however, very good reason for believing this story to be a myth. South American treasures have, in fact, a thoroughly bad name, and investors should fight very shy, indeed, of shares in any of the numerous companies formed to empty sacred lakes or search the recesses of the Andes for Atahualpa's hidden gold.
In the year 1863, when the Northern and Southern States of America were still at death-grips, two brothers, named James and John Reynolds, gathered a band of 200 ruffians and left Texas for Colorado. They carried the Confederate flag, and vowed that they would wrest Colorado from the Union. This was a mere excuse. The men were bandits pure and simple, and they robbed every ranch and settlement they came to, capping the climax by attacking a gold-escort on its way to Denver, and securing about £120,000 in dust and nuggets. But justice, in the shape of a troop of cavalry under Colonel Chivington, was at their heels, and they fled into the hills. The pursuit being hot, the gang scattered, and the brothers, with the few left with them, determined to bury their plunder. In a deep defile under the gloomy shadow of the great mountain mass known as the Dion's Head, they hid their gold in a cave, and fled; the spot was marked by driving a bowie knife into a pine near by and breaking off the haft. But they were too late. As they fled up the pass near the Great Elk Falls the troopers caught them, and a desperate fight began. One by one the robbers dropped, and their bodies fell or were flung over the cliff into the roaring torrent below; no prisoners were taken. One man only survived, John Reynolds himself. Sorely wounded, he yet succeeded in creeping back to a miner's cabin in the valley, and before he died he told the miner, whose name was Anton Glasman, the secret of the cave.
That night snow fell heavily, and it was months before Glasman could go in search of his fortune; when he did, he could not find the cave. There is no space here to tell the whole story of that search. Glasman was a young man then, but he was old, bent, and shrivelled when, 37 years later, he suddenly appeared in the village of Pine Grove, with his pockets stuffed with gold, both rough and coined. "I've found it at last," he wheezed; "now I must go to the lawyer at Denver." He too the train and reached the lawyer's house, but with what purpose no one will ever know. He had hardly sat himself down on a chair in the office, before he slipped forward, and fell to the floor stone-dead. His secret perished with him, and the whereabouts of the Reynolds treasure are still a mystery.
If treasure-seekers by land seldom succeed in attaining the objects of their search, those who probe submerged wrecks are not always so unlucky. In the year 1833 the brig Barbaric foundered in a storm off Seawall, Nova Scotia, and all her crew sank with her. She was only a small vessel, and as her value was not great, and salvage apparatus in those days almost non-existent, she was left where she sank.
Seventy years later, in the summer of 1903, a local fisherman, Thomas Burns by name, offered to purchase the wreck, and as it was supposed that the only thing of value about her was her copper she was sold for five dollars. But Burns had heard a story that the Barbaric had had treasure aboard her, gold dollars, accumulated during a three years' cruise among South American ports, and he induced a diver from Halifax to come to his help. Before the summer was over Burns had recovered £3600 from the old wreck, and in the following year he got several hundred pounds more--fairly good interest for an investment of one guinea.
The great Spanish galleon Florida, whose wreck lies beneath the waters of Tobermory Bay, is supposed to contain an enormous treasure. Several vain attempts have been made to recover it, three of them in recent years, and under the auspices of the Duke of Argyll. Many interesting articles have been recovered, including guns, cannon balls of stone and iron, human bones, and silver coins; but hitherto the treasure has eluded the seekers. In last October, however, the famous Yorkshire water diviner, Mr. John Stears, used his rod over the spot, and, according to his account, located two large chests of specie, besides 14 bronze guns. It may be added that for some time past a rumor has been going about to the effect that an American vessel has already been at work on the quiet, and had filched both from the Florida, and from that still more famous wreck the Lutine, everything worth having.
The Lutine, whose ship's bell may still be seen at Lloyd's, is perhaps the most celebrated of all treasure vessels. Certainly few ships ever carried such a cargo as the £1,600,000 in gold that was in the hold of this British frigate when she sank off the coast of Holland. Half a dozen attempts have been made to recover that huge fortune, and about £100,000 in all has been regained, made up of 85 bars of gold, 97 of silver, and some coin. But there are known to be still 245 bars of gold in the sunken hull, and a few years ago Lloyd's, who originally paid one million sterling in insurance on the lost vessel, made preparations for a new salvage venture. The wreck, however, lies within the three-mile limit, and as the Dutch Government for that reason apparently claims it, this particular treasure-hunt hangs fire.
The greatest of all sunken treasures is, without much doubt, that which since 1702 has lain beneath the placid waters of Vigo Bay. In that year a combined Dutch and English fleet sank fourteen out of a fleet of twenty-three Spanish galleons, and with them went to the bottom gold and silver coin to the value of seven and a half millions sterling. For the past three-quarters of a century one attempt after another has been made to recover the money, but so far none has been successful. The latest is that of the Italian Cavaliere Pino. With his marvellous new water-telescope he is said to have definitely located the position of several of the wrecks, whose contents he hopes to raise to the surface by means of another novel device, which he terms an elevator.