RECENT SEARCHES FOR TREASURE TROVE.

Press, Volume LV, Issue 9947, 28 January 1898, Page 6

RECENT SEARCHES FOR TREASURE TROVE.

Wkstmikstkk Budget, Nov-cmbtcr 26. That very suspicious story of the discovery of treasure worth $30,000,000 by an English rnanof-war on Cocoa Island reminds mc (writes an occasional correspondent) that during the past year or two there has grown up something that very closely resembles a mania in the direction of hunting for lost treasure. The people who have developed the craze the most keenly are the Americans, but we ourselves are not guiltless. Mr Knight's trip to Trinidad Islet in search of the bullion and jewellery supposed to have been deposited there for safety from the sack of Lima in Peru is now a matter of history. More recently we have had on hand the search for the treasure of tbe Lutine, which went down in 1799 off the coast of Holland with £1,200,000 in gold and silver bullion; and shortly an English naval captain will lead on expedition to the Arabian and Red Seas with the intention of picking up, if he may, the untold gold lost along that immemorial trade route from the days of the Phoenicians to our own. The captain confidently expects with patience and assiduity to pick np, first in the shallow waters ot the Arabian Sea and afterwards in the Red Sea, wealth ! worth at the very least £800,000,000. He has the writer's very best wishes for complete success. A Long Island man is building just now a 1 curious submarine veeeel, with which he proposes to scour the floor of the ocean iv search of treasure. The vessel will be eighty feet loaf. From a preliminary aooonnt of her we gather that the surface buoyancy will be overcome by means of heavy weights attached to long wire cables connected with drams at either end of "the vessel. By the operation of these drums the vessel will be drawn to the bottom of the sea. Running fore and aft are axles with broad-tired wheels, which are connected with an electric motor. "In this way," we are told, " the ship will be transformed into a vehicle " —a sort of electric motor for the benefit of the numerous mermaid*, one may suppose. It would be useless to go into further details regarding the construction of this .peculiar ship vehicle. Suffice it that the inventor believes in it, and has convinced himself, further, that by its means he will become richer than the Vanderbilts in twelve months. He hoe a carefully prepared list ot treasure ships lost since the days of Drake, and the . latitude and longitude of the spots where they are supposed to rest beneath the waves. He will first make a beeline for L'Orient, which was sunk by Nelson st the battle of the Nile. She had a large amount of jewellery and plate and £600,000 in specie aboard. Then he will look for the wreck of tho De Braak, lost off the Delaware in 1793, with a great amount of Spanish specie and bullion. On the list ia also the Golden Gate, sunk off Hatteros in the early fifties, and simply filled with gold from California. Only a tew weeks ago we heard of the organisation of two American expeditions— one to recover the chests of Spanish doubloons said to have been buried on San Miguel Island, off Santa Barbara, on the Californian coast, by the crew of a Spanish vessel wrecked in that neighbourhood many years ago ; and the other to search for S irate treasure hidden on the Island of rand Terr*, in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, by one of the gentry who in the long ago made the West Indies their hunting ground, and who retired to the quiet cave* which abound between the Mosquito Coast and South ■ Florida, when they desired a rest or pursuers became importune. This last expedition was associated with the pirate Jean Lafitte, who is supposed to have secreted somewhere about the coast enough- wealth to buy up London. This man's name is a synonym for piracy among the 500,000 people who inhabit those parts. Just ask them, and they will call their grandfathtrs to tell you enough grisly take about him to

fill a book. There is not one of the thousand low,, flat islands along the Gulf coast from Pensacola clear around to the Point of Yncatan, not a bayou, creek, bay, lagoon or crooked waterway in all that country, but has its dark tales of Lafitte and his hidden treasures. He is their greatest hero. His father was a Frenchman who emigrated to the West Indies, where he had possessions. But a negro revolution drove the family to New Orleans, where the son took to smuggling. Then occurred the revolt against Spain. A republic was proclaimed in Mexico, and it« adherents were engaged in a bitter savage struggle with the Spanish Viceroy. The Revolutionary. Government was represented in New Orleans by a commissioner, Don Jose Manuel Herrera. From Herrera Lafitte obtained the appointment of Governor of Texas, under the Revolutionary Government of Mexico, procured a number of vessels, and harried the Spaniards nominally as the servant of the new Republic, but actually on his own account. It is beyond question that he did not confine his attentions to Spanish ships, but attacked all merchantmen that came in his way. In his time he committed enormous havoc, and must have appropriated enormous treasure. What did he do with this treasure *> That is just what American speculators would like to know. As we have hinted, almost every likely I and uulikely spot along; the Gulf Coast has been tapped for this recalcitrant treasure. The last carried through—that is, apart from the one to Grand Terre—was in August last year, when there appeared off Matagorda Island a mysterious schooner manned by halt a dozen mysterious men, who landed on I the island, spend a few days there but then I left in their schooner as mysteriously as they came, leaving behind them in the sand a square hole six feet wide and six feet deep, as though they had dug up something and carried it away. From this every native knew there had been another search for Jean Lafitte's buried treasure. The small island of Cheniere Comirada, a few miles south of Biloxi (Miss.), was perhaps the favourite resort of Lafitte. He had a house there, and the frame of the " Lafitte Cottage " is still to be seen, built almost upon the water's edge. A path leads through the garden to the bench, upon which a gate opened amid a cluster of water oaks. It seems very strange that some fortune hunter does not dig under the old weather beaten building for treasure. Perhaps the story that ghosts of men dangling from ropes and of men in the act of walking blindfolded into the sea from a vessel are seen nightly at this dreary, spot, prevents the search. Digging, however,, continues at intervals on other portions of the island, and at Biloxi, where the pirates frequently came. A hint from any very old negro will set a lot of gold hunters to work vigorously. Just after the time when the treasurehunters were at Matagorda, another party was searching in the neighbourhood of the Delaware Capes for the £5,000,000 in Spanish gold said to have gone down in that neighbourhood in the privateer Deßraak, already alluded to s ." This was the fourth attempt after the same treasure, and it need scarcely be said it was not found. It must be an impossible task to looate a wreck in the shifting sands that lie off these Capes. A little earlier in the year an expedition was fitted out at New lork to search for the treasure—estimated at.£5,000,000 sterling— which undoubtedly went down with an English man-of-war about the time of the revolutionary outbreak on Hell Cate in Long Island Sound. This also was unsuccessful. The United States from the Delaware southward is supposed to have been fancied as a treasure burial ground by Blue Beard and the other men-who - formed the earlier generation of pirates. There is probably not an acre of ground south of the Cape that has not been dug on for sunken treasure. We never heard of more than one authentic find. About seventy years ago an American schooner went ashore somewhere north of Sinepuxint Inlet, and going along the beach the captain found the end of a chest sticking out of the sand. He took it aboard, and getting safely away, went, to Boston. The chest contained a quantity of gold and silver plate, jewelled arms, and some money, supposed to have belongedLtp Bradish Ten, Kind's first mate, who escaped when the captain was taken. The evidence, however, on which the ownership is ascribed to Ten seems very inconclusive. ' : No fewer than three several searches were made last year for the treasure hidden somewhere on Mague Island, in the Gulf of Florida, by an old miserly ex-miner named Nicholson. It wai at first thought, we are told, that Nicholson had just enough money to keep the" wolf from his door. But one day a visitor surprised him as he was bending over a Bhining heap of gold. There were ten and twenty dollar pieces enough to' fill the rude table on which, they were piled, -besides many " slugs," an octagonal shaped piece of Californian gold atfoa»« time in circulation on the coast and ''valued at 150. Shortly afterwards Nicholson died suddenly. He had no relations, had.made no will, and seemingly had left nothing valuable behind him. But what about that table full of gold? The fortune hunters rushed in by the dozen ; searched everywhere about' the hut and its vicinity ; turned up every sod in the garden, and even ploughed the sands of tbe shore all round the island. One of the men who last year endeavoured to locate the bullion took a divining rod with him. He was as successful as his predecessors.