Fortune and Glory

by David McIntee

  This inspired a lot of treasure hunters to associate Wilkins’s map with assorted real life islands. Gilbert Hedden associated it with Oak Island, for example. Wilkins confirmed that he had made up the map from a variety of inspirations, but this didn’t stop searchers believing that Skeleton Island was – and is – a real place.

  Paul Hawkins, for example, claims to have deciphered the book’s clues and located Skeleton Island in the Indian Ocean. In 1983, two treasure hunters named Cork Graham and Richard Knight decided that Skeleton Island was the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, and that they should go and dig it up. Two Americans digging up parts of Vietnam at the height of the Cold War; what could possibly go wrong? They were caught, accused of espionage, jailed and eventually released after paying a massive fine.

  From 1952 onward treasure hunters starting looking at the Japanese island of Takarajima – which translates as ‘Treasure Island’ – in Kagoshima’s Tokara Archipelago. Local stories told of English sailors under Captain Kidd demanding supplies of food and cattle from the islanders. When the islanders refused, a couple of dozen pirates raided, looted, pillaged and supposedly buried some loot in a cave. Again, people have spent decades looking for this treasure.

  So far, nobody has come up with any treasure from any of those places, but one thing associated with Kidd has been discovered. In 2007, archaeologists from Indiana University responded to the discovery by fishermen of a shipwreck 10ft underwater and 70ft from dry land off the beach of Catalina Island in the Dominican Republic. This was the Quedagh Merchant.

  Cocos Island, where the Treasure of Lima was taken in the 19th century, has also been associated with Captain Kidd and, of course, it has been identified as Skeleton Island. Prior to the past few decades, however, people only went looking for the Treasure of Lima there.

  One John Keating claimed to have been an associate of Captain William Thompson, and to have met him in 1844. Thompson revealed to Keating how he had teamed up with another pirate named Benito Bonito and buried their combined loot in a cave on Cocos Island before a British ship put an end to their piracy. Thompson then died, and Keating sailed to the island with a Captain Bogue. There, Keating claimed, they found 100lb of gold, but their crew mutinied and stranded them there. The pair then tried to escape in a small raft with what they could carry, but the raft capsized and Bogue drowned. A less friendly version of the story has Keating kill his partner, grab some gold and jewels from the hoard they found, and leave the corpse with the rest of the hoard. Either way, Keating then moved to Newfoundland and died there.

  On his deathbed, Keating supposedly passed on his secret to both his wife, and a ship’s quartermaster called Nicholas Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was never able to put together the funds to get to Cocos, but he did write down what he had been told, and his document still exists at the Nautical and Travellers’ Club in Sydney, Australia. His description reads, ‘At two cable’s lengths, south of the last watering-place, on three points. The cave is the one which is to be found under the second point. Christie, Ned and Anton have tried but none of the three has returned. Ned on his fourth dive found the entrance at 12 fathoms but did not emerge from his fifth dive. There are no octopuses but there are sharks. A path must be opened up to the cave from the west. I believe there has been a fall of rock at the entrance.’

  Keating’s widow, however, said that the treasure had been found in a bay with a small crescent-shaped beach, which wasn’t visible from the sea because it had a natural breakwater of black tree roots on both sides. Over the years, searchers have equated this with both Chatham Bay on the north-east side of the island, and the Bay Of Hope on the east side.

  There are a couple of sets of directions supposedly written by Thompson himself. One refers to Chatham Bay, adding: ‘Once there follow the coast line of the bay till you find a creek, where, at high water mark, you go up the bed of a stream which flows inland. Now you step out 70 paces, west by south, and against the skyline you will see a gap in the hills. From any other point, the gap is invisible. Turn north, and walk to a stream. You will now see a rock with a smooth face, rising sheer like a cliff. At the height of a man’s shoulder, above the ground, you will see a hole large enough for you to insert your thumb. Thrust in an iron bar, twist it round in the cavity, and behind you will find a door which opens on the treasure.’ Another says, ‘Disembark in the Bay of Hope between two islets, in water 5 fathoms deep. Walk 350 paces along the course of the stream then turn north-northeast for 850 yards, stake, setting sun stake draws the silhouette of an eagle with wings spread. At the extremity of sun and shadow, cave marked with a cross. There lies the treasure.’

  With so many variants, searchers have long since jumped to the conclusion that the loot must have simply been partitioned into multiple stashes – usually thought to be four – either one in each northern bay, or all within a hundred-yard circle around a waterfall, depending on who you want to believe.

  In 1845, an iron-bound chest was found in a cave overlooking Wafer Bay, containing Spanish coins of unknown vintage. Legend says that in the 1880s, soldiers found $80,000 in silver and $30,000 of English and French gold coins in a cave in Wafer Bay, which also contained 300 silver ingots, clothing, a binnacle compass and a burst brass cannon.

  The soldiers were supposedly also ordered to blast out a cedar tree in Wafer Bay, and the blast collapsed a cave revealing a chest with $10,000 of gold and letters written by Evan Jones, shipmate of Benito Bonito’s. None of these hauls have been tracked down, or made it to any museums, and it’s highly likely that they’re all just fictions.

  In 1895, it was reported in a Costa Rican government survey that, ‘There are signs of mineral wealth, and gold has been found. In 1793, there was a mysterious cryptic carving found on the island on one of the big boulders in Chatham Bay that various seamen observed upon landing there. It read: Look Y. as you goe for ye S. Coco, with four branched crosses. The carving had originally been badly executed and had letters much defaced.’ The survey also found a stone marked with a sombrero symbol, which locals took to calling ‘Bonito’s hat’.

  A German explorer and treasure hunter called August Gissler was so obsessed with finding the life-sized gold Madonna statue from the Lima treasure that he lived on the island as a sort of Robinson Crusoe crossed with Indiana Jones for 19 years, from 1889 to 1908. Like many a crazed prospector in old Westerns, Gissler dug a maze of tunnels, some of which still exist, based on two maps he had acquired, which both indicated the same location for the Lima treasure. He was also aware of the stories of Bonito’s treasure being located on the island, and finding that too would be a good bonus.

  Gissler’s expedition was funded by financial investors in the Cocos Plantation Company, a tobacco-growing body who also invested in (or bribed officials in) Costa Rica itself. In 1897, the government rewarded him with permission to set up a German farming colony on the island, of which they named him governor.

  Unfortunately the island doesn’t have the best soil or climate for tobacco growing, and is too far from the mainland to be economically viable to transport goods back and forth, so within a decade all the colonists had gone. August and his wife eventually gave up too, moving to New York with the treasure he had found over nearly two decades of searching: a total haul of six gold coins.

  In 1910, a pre-presidential Franklin D. Roosevelt went with a group of friends to explore Cocos Island. In the 1920s, racing driver and land and water speed record holder Sir Malcolm Campbell also visited. Ironically, one of the most famous screen pirates, Errol Flynn, tried his hand at searching for the treasure in real life in the late 1940s, some years after playing the titular Captain Blood, a pirate who duels a villainous Basil Rathbone on the beach where his crew is burying their treasure.

  Despite all of the above, there has been treasure confirmed on Cocos Island: In l931, a 2ft-tall gold Madonna was found and sold for $11,000, while eight years later, a gold bar was found in a stream near a waterfall and sold for £35,000. Sadly, there’s no r
ecord of which haul these came from – pirates and others have been reported as burying treasure on the island since the days of Sir Francis Drake.

  The Treasure of Lima hasn’t spawned anything like as many novels and movies as Captain Kidd, but in a way it has been the inspiration for the genre as a whole.

  It’s a tropical island upon which pirate treasure has been buried, and so is probably the ur-tale for every movie about buried pirate treasure from Captain Blood and The Crimson Pirate through to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The treasure being in a cave is probably best visually expressed by the location of the hoard of cursed Aztec gold in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

  Just to be really awkward, in 2014 an art installation project called Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition, drew 40 artists from across the world to create artworks which were then buried in a chest, somewhere on Cocos Island. This rather intrusive meta art project will doubtless confuse and frustrate future treasure hunters.

  The association between pirates and buried treasure was made, however, by one man, and he wasn’t a pirate. This was the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, and it was his book, Treasure Island, that created the whole idea of pirates burying treasure on Caribbean islands.

  Stevenson had been inspired to base his fictional pirate crew upon some of the real pirates who had operated on the American coast in previous decades (for example, Long John Silver’s first mate, Israel Hands, was in reality Blackbeard’s boatswain). Treasure Island was published in 1883, a good 170 years after the time of Blackbeard, and more than 180 years after Captain Kidd was hanged at Admiralty Dock. He had done his research, however, in the form of both his own travels, and reading the book A General History of the Pyrates by the pseudonymous ‘Captain Charles Johnson’.

  This book, first published in two volumes in 1724, gave a potted – and fictionalized – account of the adventures of various 17th century pirates, including Kidd, Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts and various others (some entirely fictional). Johnson’s book introduced peg-legs, eyepatches and so on, but it was Stevenson who really hit it big by popularizing the idea of islands with buried treasure as the definitive pirate trope.

  Having decided to write about an island, Stevenson was particularly inspired both by Kidd having buried treasure on Gardiner’s Island, and by the more recent – really the last classic act of piracy – Thompson’s theft of the treasure of Lima, and his flight to Cocos Island. This was within living memory in Stevenson’s day.

  More specifically, Kidd has appeared in various media, being played twice by Charles Laughton (once in the adventure biopic Captain Kidd, in which psychotic and manipulative pirate Kidd is sent to provide safe escort to England for the Quedagh Merchant, as unlikely as that seems, and once in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd!)

  Kidd has also been a character in several anime and manga series, is a major point in Nelson DeMille’s Plum Island, and is namechecked directly in both Treasure Island and Peter Pan. His buried treasure is the hoard uncovered in Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Gold Bug.

  It’s no surprise that he’s one of the nine other pirates opposing the player in the videogame Sid Meier’s Pirates, which itself lent the Pirates of the Caribbean movies their nine pirate lords (though one could argue that’s a Lord of the Rings reference too). Assassin’s Creed III has a set of missions in which the player must find four maps left by Kidd, which eventually lead to recovering his most valued treasure. He’s also referenced in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, when real-life pirate Mary Read claims to be his son, called James.

  THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

  Arrr … Think of buried treasure and you most likely also think of pirates in stripey shirts being led ashore in a longboat by a peglegged, hook-handed captain in a tricorn hat and a frock coat – all of them draped in cutlasses and flintlock pistols, and probably singing about rum – to dig a hole in the sun-drenched golden sands ready for a large wooden chest full of gold coins and gemstones.

  Pirates and buried treasure go together like bread and butter, fish and chips, rum and cola; as the song says, you can’t have one without the other, right?

  Wrong.

  Pirate crews were surprisingly democratic and even-handed, and since the crews tended to be in the business for, yes, treasure – or at least better pay than the miserable pittance offered by navies of the era – everybody expected to get paid their fair share. There was a scale of payment for everyone in a ship’s crew, and even standardized rates of compensation for injuries sustained in battle or during raids. These rates varied from crew to crew but were usually around six to eight hundred pieces of eight (or silver dollars, depending on the period) for losing a leg or arm, one hundred for losing a hand or an eye. On a less salutary note, slaves could make up part of the payment, one slave being the equivalent to a hundred pieces of eight.

  The crew would be paid a base salary for the voyage, and then shares in the prize money from successful raids. This would be paid out by the purser, and the crew would generally spend their wages ashore in dens of iniquity. As you can imagine, therefore, any captain who told his crew on payday, ‘I buried the loot three islands back,’ would very quickly find himself demoted from Captain to what is known in esoteric maritime terminology as ‘shark bait’.

  Pirates would more generally store their loot in a locked room attached to the purser’s office. This is not to say, however, that individual pirates never buried their share of the loot, like many other ordinary people did with their savings in those days, but this is a different matter than a whole crew stashing their entire takings in one hoard. An individual wouldn’t necessarily need a map either, as it’d basically be buried wherever he called home.

  There are a couple of exceptions, of course.

  The first ‘pirate’ – though whether you call him that really depends on your view of Elizabethan politics and imperialism – to bury his treasure ashore was Sir Francis Drake, who had raided a Spanish mule train at Nombre de Dios in Panama, and grabbed sackloads of gold and silver. He immediately legged it to where he remembered parking the ship – which wasn’t there. He buried the loot and left a detachment of men to guard it while he set off to find the ship. Don’t bother going looking for that site, because Drake returned, with his ship, a mere six hours later. He had gone to the right beach, but the ship had moved away to avoid a Spanish patrol. He and his crew then dug up their treasure and left.

  Captain William Kidd, as an experienced privateer from a decade earlier, was requested by Governor Lord Bellomont to hunt down assorted pirates and French ships. Refusal would have been seen as disloyal, and caused trouble, and Kidd was happy to go back to sea with such a job. He also had a few ideas about how to get himself a new ship out of the deal, and persuaded several lords to front 80 per cent or so of the expense in fitting out a pirate-hunting expedition. These included Bellomont, the Earl of Orford, the Baron of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, and possibly – through proxies – King William III himself. The king signed a Letter of Marque, legally empowering Kidd to attack French ships, with the proviso that 10 per cent of any booty be kept for the Crown.

  Kidd bought a new ship in London, the Adventure Galley, armed with 34 cannons, and with a crew of 150. The ‘Galley’ in the name was accurate, as she had oars for propulsion in calm seas, which were a key advantage as they enabled the ship to manoeuvre in battle regardless of the winds. Kidd personally selected the officers for competency and loyalty.

  Kidd got off on the wrong foot with the Royal Navy almost immediately, failing to salute a navy ship at Greenwich. The Navy ship fired a shot across his bows, Kidd’s crew mooned them, and the navy immediately press-ganged a third of them as punishment. Kidd then sailed for New York, capturing a French ship on the way, and recruited replacement sailors there, mostly known criminals.

  By September of 1696, Kidd set out for the Cape of Good Hope, and a bad start. They stopped off on the Comoro Islands, where a third of the crew
died of cholera. The Adventure Galley had turned out to be very leaky, and there was a marked absence of pirates anywhere in the vicinity of the supposedly pirate-stricken Madagascar. So Kidd headed to the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, at the southern end of the Red Sea, and a notorious haunt of pirates. Again, there were no pirates around.

  Kidd then may have attacked a Mughal convoy escorted by the British East India Company, but nobody’s quite sure. Sailors deserted while on shore leave, and those who stayed were openly mutinous. On 30 October 1697, a gunner called William Moore tried to insist that Kidd attack a nearby Dutch ship – which, being neither a pirate ship nor French, would have been an act of piracy (and would have annoyed the king, who was Dutch by birth). They got into an argument which ended with Kidd cracking Moore’s skull with an iron bucket.

  Adventure Galley then met a British convoy, whose commander intended to press 30 of Kidd’s crew into service. Undermanned already, Kidd decided to leave the convoy under cover of darkness, but this act was seen by the navy as disloyal.

  On 30 January 1698, Kidd captured the Quedagh Merchant, and her cargo of satins, muslins, gold, silver, spices and silk. The ship was Armenian, owned by the Mughals of India, and her captain was an Englishman named Wright, who had passes from the French East India Company. Kidd tried to make his crew return the ship to Wright, but they reminded him that they were commissioned to take French ships, and this one had French passes.

  Kidd, therefore, kept the passes and the ship, which was renamed Adventure Prize, and sailed for Madagascar, where he sold her cargo for £7,000. Under pressure from the Armenians, Mughals, East India Company and their own captains, the Admiralty decided that Kidd was a pirate and ordered the navy to hunt him down.