TREASURE CURSE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 52, Issue 3750, 1 May 1936, Page 8

TREASURE CURSE

COCOS ISLAND HOARD. CANADIAN SEEKER’S HOPES. Vancouver, March 25. i The Costa Rica Government, for the second time within two years, has ordered a British treasure-seeking expedition to evacuate Cocos Island, and has impounded its instruments and equipment. Cocoa Island has been the objective of several expeditions during the past five years. Two groups have explored the island, financed by public subscription from this city. Each has, like two expeditions from London, fallen foul of the Costa Rica authorities, who do not encourage search for the treasure hidden there by pirates, more than a century ago. The island, forbidding, mountainous, and uninhabited, is only twenty acres in extent, 500 miles from the Central America mainland, in the Pacific. The “curse” associated with Cocos Island is described by Captain Bellamy, of Vancouver, who spent several months there. Believing he might, alone, locate the treasure, he hid on the island when the Costa Rica coastguard escorted to the mainland the expedition of 1932, of which he was a member. The “curse” was laid by a Bishop of Lima on anyone who sought or touched the treasure, when it was stolen by the crew of a vessel, the Mary Dyer, chartered to tranship to Panama gold and silver from the banks, and jewels and valuables from the cathedral at Lima when Bolivar was marching on the city. The crew murdered the official and priests, and buried the treasure on Cocos Island. They were captured, and executed.

“When I was marooned there, I gradually became convinced that the ‘curse’ was a mere myth,” says Bellamy. “I had put no credence in it while I studied all that was written about the island and its treasure, and learned of the misfortune and tragedy that beset searchers in the past hundred years. Though lam a rank materialist, I gradually felt that an evil spirit hovered over the island. Often as I worked I had a feeling that I was being watched, although I knew I - was alone on the island. J fell ill, and had resigned rayself to a lonely death when an American yacht, seeing my distress signal, picked me up.” Bellamy reported that he had found 133 gold and silver Spanish coins, bearing dates of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. He said the pirates’ caches seemed to be in quicksand, and that it would require comprehensive engineering equipment to recover it. Obsessed by the idea that he might be the discoverer of treasure variously estimated up to twenty millions sterling in value, Bellamy fitted out an auxiliary schooner here last summer. After a dispute with his partners, he set out alone, but his vessel was wrecked in British Columbia waters.' A trading vessel, which arranged to drop him at the island, met a similar fate on the Costa Rica mainland. Bellamy says he is determined to continue his search, and is now endeavouring to raise funds for a third attempt to locate the treasure of Cocos Island.