THE RIDDLE OF HIDDEN WEALTH

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3289, 8 March 1926, Page 6

THE RIDDLE OF HIDDEN WEALTH

TREASURES BEYOND RECOVERY Gold is for ever being wrenched from the bowels of the earth. Some Is coined, some made into ornaments which mankind is still savage enough to wear; while other quantities are used in the arts, in acience, or in medicine. How much gold is there in visible existence to-day which was dug more than three or four centuries ago? Coins worn too thin for use, and their battered remains have been melted down. Consider the amount of gold lost in a year, burled or burned! (says a writer in T. P.’S and Cas. sell’s Weekly). Yet man has been digging gold for thousands of years, perhaps for tens of thousands. Very much of this gold to say nothing of monstrous quantities of preclouts stones and of sliver have been deliberately buried. BanKs and strong rooms ,it must be remembered, are very modern institutions, and up to two hundred years ago, even in England, it was necessary to hide money in the ground in times of war and riot. Popys has loft it on record that ho buried his valuables In the garden when danger threaten, ed. Over and over again the whole of England has been swept by war and. every such disturbance has been the cause of wholesale- concealment of j treasure. Not only that, but the habit of using the earth as a bank has been followed even in times of peace, and many of those who secretly buried their treasures died with out revealing their resting places. The amount of valuables hidden beneath the soil must be beyond computation, yet, so thoroughly is it hidden .that it is the rarest thing imaginable for any of it to be disinterred. In many country places you find the tradition of buried treasure ,and it may bo taken that in almost every case there is some foundation for the story. At Bransil, near Malvern. ,at Hulme Castle, at Stokesay, in Shropshire and many , other places near the Welsh border such stories persist. You get similar legends all along both sides of the Scottish border. Vast wealth is believed to be hidden near o runder Hermitage Castle, also at Addleborough, in Yorkshire. For the real romance of lost treasure we must, however, turn to the New World. Read your Prescott, and you will begin to got some Idea of the gigantic wealth possessed by the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas* of Peru. Much of this great, wealth was seized by pirates who' salted the stormy seas in rotten ships ana who. being cut off from Ihe market of the Old World, were rarely able to spend their ill-gotten gains. Unless sunk at sea, these hardy adventurers nearly always buried their gold, or hid it in some inaccessible cave. The chances were always a hundred to one against any of them surviving to dig it up again. This sort of thing went on for nearly three centuries, with the result that' whole shiploads of bullion to-aay lie buried beyond hope of recovery. Of some of those treasures the locationis vaguely known. Before Wolfe - s attack on Quebec in 1759 the wealthy French inhabitants sent an enormous quantity of valuables to the citadel which was supposed to be inpreg. nable. In the Treasury was also a large sum of money newly arrived from France. Before the attack, Montcalm, in order to be on the safe side packed all this treasuer in barrels and boxes and sent it a little way up the Charles River to be buried until the danger was past. The danger did not pass. The British took Que. bee, searched high and low, but could hnd no trace of the treasure. But wait .this is not the end of the story. In 1908 there was round behind the fireplace of an old chateau near Quebec a little silver-bound box and in it a faded script of 1759, with directions as to where to dig. In great excitement the owner and a friend-wept off and dug as directed at “the little bay on the River St. Charles." A second box was round, solid and iron-bound. This held a rough chart, stained and faded, .with directions to cross the river to the wood near the small bay and pcnisula. “Twenty feet N. N.W. by N. towards the group of firs,’’ ran the writing, “fifty feet as the sun sets. Five deep and set in plaster the great treasure of the citadel.” Alas! when the excited treasure-secs-t-rs reached the spot the firs were gone. A great storm had blown them down many years earlier, and even their stumps were lost and rotted away. Another Canadian treasure of which the location is known is that of “Devil” Duval, a French pirate, who in 1763 was hard-pressed by the Brit, ish. His hold was full of treasure, and ho set cut to find a hiding place. On the coast of Gasp e Peninsula stands a freak of Nature, a giant crag known as the Rock of Perce, which towers to a height of 500 feet, sheer and unscalable. An Indian ,a friend of Duval, told him of a secret way to the summit of this crag, a passage which rose from a cavern in the* crag. The Indian himself climbed by this passage, and reaching the top let down a cord, and with it drew up the i tackle. Two prisoners were pulled I up, and Duval himself ascended. Then! the treasure itself was drawn up. i So much was there that the work; went on all day and all the following moonlight night. , Then fbc Indian and Ducal carnet down, but not the prisoners. With muskets Duval and his men shot away the tackle, sailed away and never returned. For years and years those dangling ends of shot rope hung swinging in j the sea winds until they rotted away, and year by year treasurc.seckers tiled in vain to reach the terrible summit. Will it be believed that so many lives were lost that at last the Government of Quebec passed a special Act forbidding anyone to climb without special signed leave j from the Governor of the Province? Those wonderful and exquisite caves in the Caribean are full of

buried treasure, and seeking these pirate hoauls is a regular industry Once in ton years or so a hardy venturer meets his reward and blosoms into all sorts of splendour. But the great bulk of such caches are* lost tor over. Any one, of the Gulf cyclones, those terrific circular storms which breed in that hot cauldron of sea, is sufficient to level landmarks and overwhelm islands.