LOST TREASURE.

Waikato Times, Volume 123, Issue 20635, 22 October 1938, Page 9

LOST TREASURE.

MANY HOARDS EXISTING A DIP INTO HISTORY BIG PRIZE AT COCOS So they have found a bar of the £1,250,000 worth of gold sunk in 1799, when the British frigate Lutine went down off the Dutch coast, where she lies in 20 feet of sand under 40 feet of water, writes J. [Wentworth Day in the Daily Mail. I 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 Florencia. A. Mac Lean, of Duart, blew her up—himself included—in 1588 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 Corfe 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. A Crocus Island Hunt 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 tnoidores .ml 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 tomorrow 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, iiom Yladivostock to Vancouver, from Guam to Grimsby, which has not its crop of tarry-breeked, rum-hoarse, i.le-telling liars ready to pitch you a am 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 They know the Spice Islands and the sandy benches 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.