FINDING OF TREASURE

Taranaki Daily News, 7 December 1929, Page 31 (Supplement)

FINDING OF TREASURE

MOST COMMON DAY-DREAM

MORGAN AND HIS BUCCANEERS.

FASCINATING STORY OF FACT.

(Patrick Vaux in Chambers Journal.) It is a day-dream of most folks now and again, and more so in early age, this finding of buried treasures. And it really does come about at times, z although most who seek do not find, and the present writer is ofle of the unfortunates. Yet, that buried treasure may prove to be no myth is instanced in the great find early in the spring of 1927 among ruins in ' the town of panama. Two Englishmen and an American unearthed there gold ornaments and vessels, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and other precious things from under the debris of the Church of San Jose, which was burned down when Morgan and his buccaneers fired the eity. These valuables were not cached by or for Morgan, who is associated w ith nigh as many reputed caches as Captain Kidd is, but' on account of the rufliians attacking the city. He and his followers, having been baulked of their booty, deliberately set fire to the town in revenge; and thus there lies within the boundaries of old Panama much treasure other than that given to St. Joseph to keep safe. z Concerning these hidden riches there ie-no probability, but all the fascination of facte. And in two directions there phenomenal amounts should be obtain-, ed, Panama being at that time not only a very wealthy seaport, but the repository as well of State and Church funds and valuables that were to be ehipped across the Atlantic. Other deposits there are elsewhere, and they also-are well within scope of recovery. • When the Spaniards appropriated Mexico, Central America, and the West Coast, the natives owned so much of the precious metals that they had no use for the greater part of their gold and silver. Even so late as the sixteenth century an Augustine friar at San Miguel chronicles that gold was the commonest thing there, and looked upon aa mere dross. Thus it came that shiploads of gold and silver —no mere consignments of so many “arrobas’ or 251 b weights, or/cargas/ 2501 b -weights, but tons —were eent to Spain. Incidentally, this deluge of wealth, causing a contempt of hard work, of trade and comlUercial enterprise, brought about that poverty and stagnation from which Spain has not yet recovered. Pirates and buccaneers captured galleons and plundered the Spanish main seaports. At such times riches were cached to keep them out of the sea-wolves’ hands, and those having the knowledge necessary for their recovery were often killed, went amissing in the figthting, or were taken away and died -in slavery, and thus their caches remain intact but lost to ken. Several of those buried hoards are enormous in value •when reckoned at the monetary values of to-day, for in such crises citizens and othere put all their movable riches into the town treasury for cafe keeping, and then all was transported in secret to secure quarters.

THE NEUVITAS TREASURE.

An instance of this -is the Neuvitas Treasure. Once upon a time it did much engross the attention of the present writer and some other questore. In August 1667 that notorious buccaneer, Henry Morgan, having risen to leadership of a cruel and blood-thirsty band, took them against Neuvitas, the new port of Puerto del Principe, with promise of much booty. The authorities, however, hearing of their advance, hastily got together all the treasures of the city, and sent them with the State funds inland by mule-trains in the charge of a very few trusty officers and a, score or two of musketeers. It is on record that the private treasure totalled more than five million dollars (Mexican), and the amount of public and church treasures has been computed at some nine millions—the cathedral and other churches were stripped of every- ' thing valuable to frustrate the buccaneers.

Morgan and his crew outflanked the Spaniards, and overwhelmed them. Sweeping into the seaport, they butchered all and sundry before it came to them that not a stiver of treasure remained in the town. In the fighting and massacring that few men who had cached the valuables were slain; and tradition has it that they and their men-at-arms made the last

stand against the pirates. The huge cache must have been hidden, then, ' within a short distance of Neuvitas, for •’ mule-trains' travel sloav, and over ten million dollars worth of specie, ingots, and other valuables occupy some time in hindling. To recover it appears impossible, but .... An instance, rather similar to the above, came about last century when a certain part of Central America threw off the shackles of Spain for the joybells of a republic. In 1897 two individuals, a Scotsman and a Scots-Ameri-can, went about retrieving it in this wise. First, they found the names of the leading men involved; next, by a process of elimination, they arrived at the two Spanish officers actually concerned in hiding the treasure; and their family archives and traditions were investigated. It Avas through a mere •chance recollection that the cache was found, to the satisfaction of all con-

cerned. Panama City itself retains what is probably the greatest historical treasure trove in tho New World—excepting, of

course, the hidden city of the Incas, re-

; piited to be a “dead” town in the Andes, j To it there was transported their ‘ colossal store of • gold just before the ' Spaniards seized the Peruvians’ capital. Conveyed there it most certainly was, ao the recently-emptied treasure chambers and other evidence revealed to the infuriated invaders; but, from that day to this, the destination of it has remained unknown. It has, however, been stated on good authority- that knowledge of its site is handed down as a sacred thing to the successive heads of two now lowly Araucanian families. When Morgan and his buccaneers carried out their famous Panama expedition, crossing the Isthmus in circumstances of extreme hardships, and fighting all the way, they ransacked tlie butchered town, but found to their rage and amazement very little loot of real value. . The ships in the harbour, too, were empty. Morgan, in his fury and deopair, scuttled them, set the town on fire, and marched back to his vessels. He had helped the Spaniards to hide their treasures. And sixteenth-century Panama was one of the six wealthiest cities in the world.

The authorities and leading citizens had got together the vast treasures of the eity, stripping the churches of their jewelled shrines, solid gold altars, rails, vessels, and other appurtenances, and had placed them on board the vessels in the harbour. But the many millions in gold and silver and jewels and precious stones had been stowed away between the ships’ planking and in their hastilycontrived false bilges. Had the scuttlers not been blind . with drink and blood-lust and fuury they would have hit upon an amount of booty that staggers the imagination. None of it was recovered, the depth of water being too great for the Spaniards’ salving operations. A properly equipped and conducted survey will locate the hulks, or rather the remains of them, and, with twentieth-century methods applied, the retrieving of the Panama treasure should be easy. It is a far cry from finding treasure in Panama to similar endeavour in Arabia, but in the near future, providing all goes well, British initiative may solve the mystery of El Jowf, and remove the Pharaohs’ and other treasure. There, in the ruins of the fort or castle of Marid, lies an amazing amount of wealth. . . . i El Jowf is a peculiarly isolated oasis of Northern Arabia, with Marid, a strange gigantic pile of ruined sandstone, in the north end of it. Utterly deserted, it' is feared and shunned by the Arabs. Strange sights and sounds, they say, are to be seen and heard there at night. Some aver that, on the eve of the Feast of Ramadan, all the blood which has been shed about it oozes from the ground into great red pools around Marid, and drips from its walls till light breaks. Within it lies one of Asia’s gigantic treasures. A place which has been avoided as accursed, since El Hadj ran amok when poisoned, ie not likely to have been rifled even by the Turks.

El Hadj was more than a mere prince of Arabia and looter of caravans. He was a collector and connoisseur, and tracing out old traditions; he obtained by discovery, and by fighting and by purchase, quantities of rare valuables, and all of them be brought to Marid-of-the-seeret-chambers, as the Jowfee tradition runs. Precious stones were his craze, and he, according to the very circumstantial story handed down, got possession of the turquoises of the Pharaohs. At the time of the fall of the Pharaohs there was a great store of the green malachite jewels at the mines of Meghara, south of Elim, and when the slaves fled during the panic of the authorities, the stones were hidden in a drift of one of the workings. El Hadj, learning of the Meghara tradition, went there with a great' force, found the mines and the jewels, and conveyed the wealth to Marid. Egyptologists, on finding the mines twenty-five years ago, found also ample proof of the emirs’ industry there.

THE ROCK CITY OF EDOM.

El Hadj also figures as having sacked Petra, that marvellous rock city of Edom. History and tradition are confused as to the date of the removal of the great wealth in this, the richest city of its time. But tribal traditions and historical hearsay are in uniform agreement that El Hadj, the Emir of El Jowf, captured Petra the unassailable, and emptied three rock chambers known as Pharaoh’s Treasury. El Hadj came to. a sudden end through poison that, driving him mad, caused the emir to turn Marid into a gory shambles. Forthwith the entire place wa§ deserted, and genie and vampire spirits inhabited there. Even until as late as the beginning of this century the story of El Hadj and Marid was looked- upon by Westerners unacquainted with Arabia ha a species of supplement to. the Arabian. Nights’ Entertainment. Since 1920 the oasis of El Jowf has had British visitors, and it is very likely it will have them again, if all goes propitiously..* The most enticing of all treasures, and the most baffling, is that which lies plain to the eye in the China Sea. Several centuries _.ago some junks, laden with tribute from Cochin-China to Peking, were wrecked on a widespread outcrop of rock, situated in, roughly, Lat. N 22 and Long. E 122; and the craft being battered apart, their cargoes of silver ingots became lodged among the crevices and on the saucerlike central bed of the reef. Volcanic fiction has raised the ocean bottom hereabouts, and to-day you may see, on a calm day and in the brief interval between ebb and flow of the neap-tide, numerous long low glittering masses amid the breaking suf. These are the ingots, which are kept bright and shining by the fine sand eupended in the water. Numerous efforts have been made to win a little of the millions lying there in the open. None of them have proved of signal worth, for, not only is theie an outer breastwork of most intricate and dangerous reefs and shoals, but the currents are treacherous and very varying as to direction. Occasionally, a junk or other craft is taken in as close as possible, and a hardy dare-devil Chinaman betakes himself to the water, yet seldom does he succeed in reaching the nearest of the glistening piles, and still more seldom does he return with a bar lashed to his back. The swirling waters and the fangs of rock accomplish his doom, for no boat dares venture in to his rescue.