ISLE OF MYSTERY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 81, 5 April 1930, Page 29

ISLE OF MYSTERY

OCEAN LANDMARK GONE

"Dead Man's Island," a famous land- j mark on the Pacific Coast, has gone.

Bit by bit this hulking mass of rod; and earth, which for centuries stood SOOfi above sea level, has been removed, and in its stead a clear channel for great liners drawing 35ft of water now runs.

This has been one of the greatest engineering triumphs ever accomplished, lor over 2,000,000 cubic yards of solid rock uad to be split up and taken away. The island had a weird history. The torn:} of an Englishman rested on its summit for more than a century. I/ana, the author of "Two Years Before the Mast," speaks of .the island, when he visited it in 1835, as being "a desolate-looking island that broke the surface of a great _ bay, looking steep and .conical, and without the sign of vegetable life upon it ... on the top of it were buried the remains of an Englishman, the commander of a merchant brig, who died while lying in this port .... . one who had died far from home, and was buried alone and friendless." •'•. "Dead Man's Island" was once the rendezvous of pirates who waged war on defenceless ships and hid in the caves along its. rocky shores. Of later years the island became the headquarters of rumrunners, smugglers, and the- meeting-place of men who traded in arms and ammunition to the rebels along .the. coast' ports of lower Mexico. It offered ample scope for any law-breaking arrangement that ad-, venturers, or sea highwaymen, embarked upon. . .■• ■ ■■■,•'■

Doubtless there were fights and.murders among the persons who frequented the Dead Man, for six skeletons were'found during the removal of the island. The dynamiters and diggers were • disappointed not to find the-treasure where'was believed to have been hidden, among the rocky caves ■ during ■. the eighteenth century. It is now said that the secret hiding : place was discovered by oue of the many persons who sought'for it. 1 Dead Man earned its name many- times over. .One man searching for treasure was caught beneath, the rock by a giant clam at low water when searching for a secret opening with both' hands at the base of a rock just below the water-line. Suddenly the massive shell closed its lips upon his fingers, and the dead man was subsequently found with the mai^s. of the big "shell on his hands. Rum runners and other sea adventurers will now have to.".'seek another hidingplace for their, rendezvous. . The island of mystery is no more.