BURIED TREASURE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 19, 2 November 1938, Page 8

BURIED TREASURE

HISTORY OF THE HOARDS. BIG PRIZE AT COCOS. So they have found a bar of the £1,250,00 worth of gold sunk in 1799, when the British frigate Lutino went down off the Dutch coast, where she lies now in 20 feet of sand under 40 feet of water, writes J. Wentworth Day in the “Daily Mail.” .1 am not surprised. They will probably get it all in time. Some £IOO,OOO of it was recovered years ago. There is hidden treasure all over the world. I have searched for some of it. Ten years ago I was up at Tobermory Bay, in Mull, when Colonel K. M.. Foss was seeking the sunken gold of the ' Armada payship the great Floreneia. A Mac Lean of Duart blew her up—himself included—in 158 S after south-easterly gales had driven her through thrashing' seas from the disaster of the Channel to the Isles of the West.

Then I went down to C'orfe Castle, in Dorset, to search for the Royalist treasure which Lady Bankes threw into the castle well in the 1640’s when the Roundheads took the place by treachery. She swore she would haunt it for the rest of time. The treasure is still there.

Once I was asked to go on a treasure hunt to Cocos, that lost island of the Pacific where the £12,000,000 treasure of the City of Lima in gold, silver and jewels lies hidden in the cave where it was put in 1821. Why is it that these tales of sunken gold and buried doubloons, of moidores and ducats, jewelled swords and golden statues of the Virgin, stir in any man the echo of youth? For if you or I could go on a treasure hunt to-mor-row we would.

The words have *a sound of salty horizons, a taste of blood and buccaneering. There is not a port in the world, from Plymouth to Penang, from Vladivostok to Vancouver, from Guam to Grimsby, which has not its crop of tarry-breeked, rum-hoarse, tale-telling liars ready to pitch you a yarn of hidden gold. They have walked every beach from Okhotsk to the harbours of the Flores. They have sailed the Sea of Timor and the long, slow swells of the Sargasso. They know the Spice Islands and the sandy beaches of Clipperton, and the Galapagos, where those grand pirates Edward Davis and Dampier careened their ships and hid their gold. I have met a hundred of them.

The rusty funnels and salty topsails of their craft have peeped above every horizon in the world. They have followed the seaways of the carracks and caravels, trodden in the whisper of blood and agony which the old' pirates l&ft on the echoes of the world.

They say there ai - e 1743 islands in the Spanish Main and treasure on 1743 of them. Forget the first two figures, and you might be right if you assume that there are at least fifty good pirate hoards hidden beneath the beaches of West Indian cays and sandbanks.

Cocos is the biggest treasure of all. .Most of it was put there in 1821 by Captain Thompson, skipper of the English brig Mary Dyer who rescued from Lima the riches of the city when Bolivar, “the Liberator/’ was marching through the hills. The grandees fled in terror with their treasure. It includes life-sized statues in pure gold of the Virgin and Child, between £7,000,000 and £155,000,000 worth of bullion and specie and “273 jewelled swords, crosses and patens.” Thompson, a man of action, murdered the grandees and buried the treasure. Forty-two expeditions have failed to find it.

But a great deal of hidden treasure has been found. The sloop Thetis was wrecked 100 years ago off the coast of Brazil with 810,000 silver dollars on board. Captain Davidson, of the sloop Lightning, and his crew salvaged 749,000 dollars at immense risk and hardship. The Treasury rewarded each man with £7.

The Laurentic went down in ( living memory with £5,000,000 on board. Almost all of it has been recovered. It is only a few years since £700,000 was raised from the sunken Oceanic. Most of the liner Egypt’s treasure, too, has been recovered.

In 1898 a wretched fellow living in a half-ruined house in Haiti suddenly found £3OOO under his floorboards. A speculator bought the house from him —and found another £40,000. It was part of the treasure buried by the fleeing French planters when the blacks rose against them in 1790. Haiti is full of such treasure to-day. It' was off this island that John Phipps, who began life as a ship’s carpenter and ended as Sir John Phipps, Governor of Massachusetts, recovered no less than 32 tons of silver from a sunken Spanish plate ship. My wife’s ancestor Admiral Rooke sent the biggest consignment in history to the bottom when, in 1702, he trapped the stupendous silver fleet of Spain in Vigot. Bay, routed their French escorts and sank nearly every one of them.

Twenty million pounds was aboard the fleet. Two millions of it came home to Queen Anne, who stamped “Vigo” on each coin and issued it. as currency.

■Spain recovered a great deal more. But there is still £4,000,000 washing about in the sands and swift currents of that Iberian bay.

The Tiber, in Rome, according to Professor Nispi-Landi, lately Italian Inspector of Ancient Monuments, contains tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of gold, silver, and ornaments cast into the river within the last 3000 years, either as votive offerings to God or as treasure cast away by fleeing citizens in time of war.

Professor Nispi-Landi declares that the sacred candelabrum of the God of Israel, which Moses was commanded to prepare on Mount Sinai, was saved bv Titus from the sack of Jerusalem, carried to Rome, where thousands worshipped it, and “eventually lowered by the Jews down into the Tiber from the bows of a ship . . There is no record of it having ever been recovered.” It was 3ft in height and of pure gold.