THE PIRATES' HOARD OF TRINIDAD
Of all the freebooters' treasure for which search is still made by
means of curious information having to do with charts and other
plausible records, the most famous are those buried on Cocos Islands in
the Pacific and on the rocky islet of Trinidad in the South Atlantic.
These places are thousands of miles apart, the former off the coast of
Costa Rica, the latter several hundred miles from the nearest land of
Brazil and not to be confused with the better known British colony of
Trinidad in the Leeward Islands group of the West Indies.
Each of these treasures is of immense value, to be reckoned in millions
of dollars, and their stories are closely interwoven because the
plunder came from the same source at about the same time. Both
narratives are colored by piracy, bloodshed and mystery, that of Cocos
Island perhaps the more luridly romantic of the two by reason of an
earlier association with the English buccaneers of Dampier's crew.
Each island has been dug over and ransacked at frequent intervals
during the last century, and it is safe to predict that expeditions
will be fitting out for Cocos or Trinidad for many years to come.
The history of these notable treasures is a knotty skein to
disentangle. Athwart its picturesque pages marches a numerous company
of bold and imaginative liars, every man of them ready to swear on a
stack of Bibles that his is the only true, unvarnished version of the
events which caused the gold and jewels and plate to be hidden.
However, when all the fable and fancy are winnowed out, the facts
remaining are enough to make any red-blooded adventurer yearn to
charter a rakish schooner and muster a crew of kindred spirits.
During the last days of Spanish rule on the west coast of South
America, the wealthiest city left of that vast domain won by the
Conquistadores and held by the Viceroys, was Lima, the capital of Peru.
Founded in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro, it was the seat of the government
of South America for centuries. The Viceregal court was maintained in
magnificent state, and the Archbishop of Lima was the most powerful
prelate of the continent. Here the religious orders and the
Inquisition had their centers. Of the almost incredible amount of gold
and silver taken from the mines of the country, much remained in Lima
to pile up fortunes for the grandees and officials, or to be fashioned
into massy ornaments for the palaces, residences, churches, and for the
great cathedral which still stands to proclaim the grandeur that was
Spain's in the olden days.
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[Illustration: Lima Cathedral]
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When Bolivar, the Liberator, succeeded in driving the Spanish out of
Venezuela, and in 1819 set up the free republic of Colombia, the ruling
class of Peru took alarm which increased to panic as soon as it was
known that the revolutionary forces were organizing to march south and
assault Lima itself. There was a great running to and fro among the
wealthy Spanish merchants, the holders of fat positions under the
Viceroy, and the gilded idlers who swaggered and ruffled it on riches
won by the swords of their two-fisted ancestors. It was feared that
the rebels of Bolivar and San Martin would loot the city, and
confiscate the treasure, both public and private, which consisted of
bullion, plate, jewels, and coined gold.
Precious property to the value of six million sterling was hurried into
the fortress of Lima for safe keeping and after the capture of the city
by the army of liberation, Lord Dundonald, the English Admiral in
command of the Chilian fleet assisting the revolutionists, offered to
let the Spanish governor depart with two-thirds of this treasure if he
would surrender the remainder and give up the fortifications without a
fight. The Peruvian liberator, San Martin, set these terms aside,
however, and allowed the Spanish garrison to evacuate the place,
carrying away the six million sterling. This immense treasure was soon
scattered far and wide, by sea and land. It was only part of the
riches dispersed by the conquest of San Martin and his patriots. The
people of Lima, hoping to send their fortunes safe home to Spain before
the plundering invaders should make a clean sweep, put their valuables
on board all manner of sailing vessels which happened to be in harbor,
and a fugitive fleet of merchantmen steered out from the hostile coast
of Peru, the holds piled with gold and silver, the cabins crammed with
officials of the state and church and other residents of rank and
station. At the same time there was sent to sea the treasure of the
great cathedral of Lima, all its jeweled chalices, monstrances, and
vestments, the solid gold candle-sticks and shrines, the vast store of
precious furniture and ornaments, which had made this one of the
richest religious edifices of the world.
There had not been so much dazzling booty afloat at one time since the
galleon plate fleets were in their heyday during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In 1820 there were no more of those great
buccaneers and gentlemen adventurers who had singed the beard of the
King of Spain in the wake of Francis Drake. They had sailed and fought
and plundered for glory as well as gain, or for revenge as much as for
doubloons. Their successors as sea rovers were pirates of low degree,
base wretches of a sordid commercialism who preyed on honest merchant
skippers of all flags, and had little taste for fighting at close
quarters. The older race of sea rogues had been wolves; the pirates of
the early nineteenth century were jackals.
Many a one of these gentry got wind of the fabulous treasure that had
been sent afloat from Lima, and there is no doubt that much of it
failed to reach Spain. While in some instances, these fleeing ships
were boarded and scuttled by pirate craft, in others the lust of gold
was too strong for the seamen to whom the rare cargoes had been
entrusted, and they rose and took the riches away from their hapless
passengers. It has been believed by one treasure seeking expedition
after another, even to this day, that Captain Thompson of the British
trading brig, _Mary Dear_ received on board in the harbor of Lima as
much as twelve million dollars' worth of gold and silver, and that he
and his crew, after killing the Spanish owners, sailed north in the
Pacific and buried the booty on Cocos Island.
Captain Thompson somehow escaped and joined a famous pirate of that
time, Benito Bonito, who accumulated a large treasure which he also
buried on Cocos Island. The British Admiralty records show that Bonito
was overhauled in his turn by the frigate _Espiegle_ and that rather
than be hanged in chains, he very handsomely blew out his brains on his
own deck.
This same treasure of Lima, or part of it, furnished the foundation of
the story belonging to the volcanic islet of Trinidad in the South
Atlantic. One version of this is that the pirates who chose this
hiding-place had been the crew of a fast English schooner in the slave
trade. While at sea they disposed of their captain by the unpleasant
method of pinning him to the mainmast with a boarding pike through his
vitals. Then the black flag was hoisted and with a new skipper they
stood to the southward, finding a great amount of plunder in a
Portuguese ship which had on board a "Jew diamond dealer" among other
valuable items. After taking an East Indiaman, and other tempting
craft, they buried the total proceeds on the desolate, uninhabited
island of Trinidad, intending to return for it before the end of the
cruise.
Unfortunately, for the successful pirates, they ran afoul of a heavily
armed and manned merchant vessel which shot away their rudder, tumbled
their spars about their rascally ears, boarded them with great spirit
and determination, and clapped the shackles on the twenty gentlemen of
fortune who had survived the engagement. These were carried into
Havana and turned over to the Spanish authorities who gleefully hanged
nineteen, not twenty, mark you, for one had to make a marvelous escape
in order to hand down the secret of the treasure to posterity. This
survivor died in bed in England at a very great age, so the story runs,
and of course he had a chart to set the next generation to digging.
The earlier statements of this narrative may be cast aside as
worthless. The real, true pirate of Trinidad was not in the slave
schooner which captured the "Jew diamond dealer" of the Portuguese
ship. An odd confusion of facts caused the mistake. While Benito
Bonito was harrying the Spanish shipping of the Pacific and burying his
treasure on Cocos Island, there was on the Atlantic a bloodthirsty
pirate by the name of Benito de Soto. He was a Spaniard who sailed out
of Buenos Aires in the year 1827, bound to Africa to smuggle a cargo of
slaves. The crew was composed of French, Spanish, and Portuguese
desperadoes, and led by the mate and De Soto they marooned the captain
and ran away with the ship on a pirate voyage. They plundered and
burned and slaughtered without mercy, their most nefarious exploit
being the capture of the British merchant ship _Morning Star_, bound
from Ceylon to England in 1828, and carrying as passengers several army
officers and their wives and twenty-five invalided soldiers. After the
most fiendish conduct, De Soto and his crew, drove the survivors into
the hold of the _Morning Star_, and fastened the hatches, leaving the
vessel to founder, for they had taken care to bore numerous auger holes
in her bottom. By a miracle of good fortune, the prisoners forced the
hatches and were taken off next day by a passing vessel.
Benito de Soto met his end as the result of being wrecked in his own
ship off the Spanish coast. He was caught in Gibraltar and hanged by
the English Governor. An army officer who saw him turned off related
that he was a very proper figure of a pirate, "there was no driveling
fears upon him,--he walked firmly at the tail of the fatal cart, gazing
sometimes at his coffin, sometimes at the crucifix which he held in his
hand. This he frequently pressed to his lips, repeated the prayers
spoken in his ear by the attendant clergyman, and seemed regardless of
everything but the world to come. The gallows was erected beside the
water, and fronting neutral ground. He mounted the cart as firmly as
he had walked behind it, and held up his face to Heaven and the beating
rain, calm, resigned, but unshaken; and finding the halter too high for
his neck, he boldly stepped upon his coffin, and placed his head in the
noose. Then watching the first turn of the wheels, he murmured,
'farewell, all,' and leaned forward to facilitate his fall ... The
black boy was acquitted at Cadiz, but the men who had fled to the
Caracas, as well as those arrested after the wreck, were convicted,
executed, their limbs severed and hung on iron hooks, as a warning to
all other pirates."
This Benito, who died so much better than he had lived, was not hanged
at Havana, it will be perceived, and the version of the Trinidad
treasure story already outlined is apparently a hodgepodge of the
careers of Benito de Soto, and of Benito of Cocos Island, with a flavor
of fact in so far as it refers to the twenty pirates who were carried
to Cuba to be strung up, or garroted. The Spanish archives of that
island record that this gang was executed and that they had been found
guilty of plundering ships sailing from Lima shortly after the city had
been entered by the revolutionists. Their association with the island
of Trinidad is explained herewith as it was told to E. F. Knight, an
Englishman, who organized and commanded an expedition which sailed in
search of the treasure in 1889.
There was at that time near Newcastle, England, a retired sea captain
who had been in command of an East Indiaman engaged in the opium trade
in the years 1848 to 1850. "The China seas were then infested by
pirates," said Mr. Knight's informant, "so that his vessel carried a
few guns and a larger crew than is usual in these days. He had four
quarter-masters, one of whom was a foreigner. The captain was not sure
of his nationality but thought he was a Finn. On board the vessel the
man went under the name of 'The Pirate' because of a deep scar across
his cheek which gave him a somewhat sinister appearance. He was a
reserved man, better educated than the ordinary sailor, and possessing
a good knowledge of navigation.
"The captain took a liking to him, and showed him kindness on various
occasions. This man was attacked by dysentery on the voyage from China
to Bombay, and by the time the vessel reached port he was so ill, in
spite of the captain's nursing, that he had to be taken to the
hospital. He gradually sank, and when he found that he was dying he
told the captain, who frequently visited him, that he felt very
grateful for the kind treatment given him, and that he would prove his
gratitude by revealing a secret which might make his captain one of the
richest men in England. He then asked the skipper to go to his chest
and take out from it a parcel. This contained a piece of old tarpaulin
with a plan of an island of Trinidad upon it.
"The dying soldier told him that at the spot indicated, that is at the
base of the mountain known as Sugar Loaf, there was an immense treasure
buried, consisting principally of gold and silver plate and ornaments,
the plunder of Peruvian churches which certain pirates had concealed
there in the year 1821. Much of this plate, he said, came from the
cathedral of Lima, having been carried away from there during the war
of independence, when the Spaniards were escaping the country and that
among other riches were several massive gold candle-sticks.
"He further stated that he was the only survivor of the pirates, as all
the others had been captured by the Spaniards and executed in Cuba some
years before, and consequently it was probable that no one but himself
knew the secret. He then gave the captain instructions as to the exact
position of the treasure in the bay under the Sugar Loaf, and enjoined
him to go there and search for it, as it was almost certain that it had
not been removed."
Mr. Knight, who was a young barrister of London, investigated this
story with much diligence, and discovered that the captain aforesaid
had sent his son to Trinidad in 1880 to try to identify the marks shown
on the old pirate's tarpaulin chart. He landed from a sailing ship,
did no digging for lack of equipment, but reported that the place
tallied exactly with the description, although a great landslide of
reddish earth had covered the place where the treasure was hid. This
evidence was so convincing that in 1885 an expedition was organized
among several adventurous gentlemen of South Shields who chartered a
bark of six hundred tons, the _Aurea_, and fitted her at a large outlay
with surf boats, picks, shovels, timber, blasting powder, and other
stores. This party found the island almost inaccessible because of the
wild, rock-bound coast, the huge breakers which beat about it from all
sides, and the lack of harbors and safe anchorage. After immense
difficulty, eight men were landed, with a slender store of provisions
and a few of the tools. The dismal aspect of the island, the armies of
huge land crabs which tried to devour them, the burning heat, and the
hard labor without enough food or water, soon disheartened this band of
treasure seekers, and they dug no more than a small trench before
courage and strength forsook them. Signaling to their ships, they were
taken off, worn out and ill, and thus ended the efforts of the
expedition.
In the same year, an American skipper chartered a French sailing vessel
in Rio Janeiro, and sailed for Trinidad with four Portuguese sailors to
do his digging for him. They were ashore several days, but found no
treasure, and vanished from the story after this brief fling with the
dice of fortune. Now, Knight was of different stuff from these other
explorers. He was a first-class amateur seaman who had sailed his
yacht _Falcon_ to South America in 1880, and was both experienced and
capable afloat and ashore. While bound from Montevideo to Bahia he had
touched at Trinidad, curious to see this remote islet so seldom
visited. This was before he heard the buried treasure story.
Therefore when he became acquainted, several years later, with the
chart and information left by the old pirate, he was able to verify the
details of his own knowledge, and he roundly affirmed:
"In the first place, his carefully prepared plan of the island, the
minute directions he gave as to the best landing, and his description
of the features of the bay on whose shores the treasure was concealed,
prove beyond doubt to myself and others who know Trinidad, that he, or
if not himself some informant of his, had landed on this so rarely
visited islet; and not only landed but passed some time on it, and
carefully surveyed the approaches to the bay, so as to be able to point
out the dangers and show the safest passage through the reefs. This
information could not have been obtained from any pilot-book. The
landing recommended by previous visitors is at the other side of the
island. This bay is described by them as inaccessible, and the
indications on the Admiralty chart are completely erroneous.
"And beyond this, the quartermaster must have been acquainted with what
was taking place in two other distant portions of the world during the
year of his professed landing on the desert island. He knew of the
escape of pirates with the cathedral plate of Lima. He was also aware
that, shortly afterwards, there were hanged in Cuba the crew of a
vessel that had committed acts of piracy on the Peruvian coast.
"It is scarcely credible that an ordinary seaman,--even allowing that
he was superior in education to the average of his fellows,--could have
pieced these facts together so ingeniously into this plausible story."
This argument has merit and it was persuasive enough to cause Knight to
buy the staunch cutter _Alerte_, muster a company of gentlemen
volunteers, ship a crew, and up anchor from Southampton for Trinidad.
There was never a better found treasure expedition than this in the
_Alerte_. The nine partners, each of whom put up one hundred pounds
toward the expenses, were chosen from one hundred and fifty eager
applicants. Articles of agreement provided that one-twentieth of the
treasure recovered was to be received by each adventurer and he in turn
bound himself to work hard and obey orders. In the equipment was a
drilling apparatus for boring through earth and rock, an hydraulic jack
for lifting huge bowlders, portable forge and anvil, iron
wheel-barrows, crow-bars, shovels and picks galore, a water distilling
plant, a rapid fire gun, and a full complement of repeating rifles and
revolvers.
A few days before the _Alerte_ was ready to sail from Southampton an
elderly naval officer boarded the cutter and was kind enough to inform
Mr. Knight of another buried treasure which he might look for on his
route to Trinidad. The story had been hidden for many years among the
documents of the Admiralty, and as a matter of government record, it
is, of course, perfectly authentic. In 1813, the Secretary of the
Admiralty instructed Sir Richard Bickerton, commanding at Portsmouth,
to send in the first King's ship touching at Madeira a seaman who had
given information concerning a hidden treasure, in order that the truth
of his story might be tested.
The Admiralty order was entrusted to Captain Hercules Robinson of the
_Prometheus_ and in his report he states that "after being introduced
to the foreign seaman referred to in the above letter, and reading the
notes which had been taken of his information, he charged him to tell
no person what he knew or what was his business, that he was to mess
with the captain's coxswain, and that no duty would be required of him.
To this the man replied that that was all he desired, that he was
willing to give his time, and would ask no remuneration for his
intelligence."
While the _Prometheus_ was anchored at Funchal, Madeira, Captain
Robinson closely questioned the mysterious seaman whose name was
Christian Cruse. He declared that he had been in a hospital ill of
yellow fever, several years before, and with him was a shipmate, a
Spaniard, who died of the same malady. Before his death he told Cruse
that in 1804 he had been in a Spanish ship, from South America to
Cadiz, with two millions of silver in chests. When nearing the coast
of Spain, they were signaled by a neutral vessel that England had
declared war and that Cadiz was blockaded. Rather than risk capture by
the British fleet, and unwilling to run all the way back to South
America, the captain resolved to try to gain the nearest of the West
Indies and save his treasure.
Passing to the southward of Madeira, a cluster of small, uninhabited
islands, called the Salvages, was sighted. Thereupon the crew decided
that it was foolishness to continue the voyage. The captain was
accordingly stabbed to death with a dirk, and the ship steered to an
anchorage. The chests of Spanish dollars were landed in a small bay, a
deep trench dug in the sand above highwater mark, and the treasure
snugly buried, the body of the captain deposited in a box on top of it.
The mutineers then sought the Spanish Main where they intended to burn
their ship, buy a small vessel under British colors, and return to
carry off the two million dollars.
Near Tobago they suffered shipwreck because of poor navigation and only
two were saved. One died ashore, and the other was the Spanish seaman
who made the dying declaration to Christian Cruse in the hospital at
Vera Cruz.
Captain Hercules Robinson was a seasoned officer of His Majesty's navy,
used to taking sailors' yarns with a grain of salt, but that he was
convinced of the good faith of Christian Cruse and of the truth of the
narrative is shown by his interesting comments, as he wrote them down a
century ago:
"May Cruse not have had some interested object in fabricating this
story? Why did he not tell it before? Is not the cold-blooded murder
inconceivable barbarity, and the burying the body over the treasure too
dramatic and buccaneer-like? Or might not the Spaniard have lied from
love of lying and mystifying his simple shipmate, or might he not have
been raving?
"As to the first difficulty, I have the strongest conviction of the
honesty of Christian Cruse, and I think I could hardly be grossly
deceived as to his character, and his disclaiming any reward unless the
discovery was made, went to confirm my belief that he was an honest
man. And then as to his withholding the information for four or five
years, be it remembered that the war with Denmark might have truly shut
him out from any intercourse with England. Next as to the wantonness
and indifference with which the murder was perpetrated, I am afraid
there is no great improbability in this. I have witnessed a disregard
of human life in matters of promotion in our service, etc., which makes
the conduct of these Spaniards under vehement temptation, and when they
could do as they pleased, sufficiently intelligible.
"But certainly the coffin over the treasure looked somewhat theatrical
and gave it the air of Sadler's Wells, or a novel, rather than matter
of fact. I enquired, therefore, from Christian Cruse why the body of
the captain was thus buried, and he replied that he understood the
object was, that in case any person should find the marks of their
proceedings and dig to discover what they had been about, they might
come to the body and go no further."
After further reflection, Captain Robinson convinced himself that the
Spanish seaman had been clear-headed when he made his confession to
Cruse, and that it would have been beyond him deliberately to invent
the statement as fiction. The _Prometheus_ was headed for the
Salvages, and arriving off the largest of these islands, a bay was
found and a level white patch of beach above high water mark situated
as had been described to Christian Cruse. Fifty sailors were sent
ashore to dig with shovels and boarding pikes, making the sand fly in
the hope of winning the reward of a hundred dollars offered to the man
who found the murdered captain's coffin.
The search lasted only one day because the anchorage was unsafe and
Captain Robinson was under orders to return to Madeira. Arriving
there, other orders recalled his ship to England for emergency duty and
the treasure hunt was abandoned. So far as known, no other attempt had
been made to find the chests of dollars until Mr. Knight decided to act
on the information and explore the Salvages in passing.
Of this little group of islands it was decided by the company of the
_Alerte_ that the one called the Great Piton most closely answered the
description given Christian Cruse by the Spanish pirate. A bay was
found with a strip of white sand above high-water mark, and Mr. Knight
and his shipmates pitched a camp nearby and had the most sanguine
expectations of bringing to light the rude coffin of the murdered
captain.
A series of trenches was opened up after a systematic plan, and some
crumbling bones discovered, but the ship's surgeon refused to swear
that they had belonged to a human being. The trouble was that the
surface of the place had been considerably changed by the action of
waves and weather, which made the Admiralty charts of a century before
very misleading. The destination of the _Alerte_ was Trinidad, after
all, and the visit to the Salvages was only an incident, so the search
was abandoned after four days. In all probability, the treasure of the
Salvages is still in its hiding-place, and any adventurous young
gentlemen seeking a field of operations will do well to consult for
themselves the documentary evidence of Captain Hercules Robinson and
Christian Cruse, as filed among the records of the British Admiralty
Office.
Trinidad is a much more difficult island to explore than any of the
Salvages group. In fact, this forbidding mass of volcanic rock is a
little bit of inferno. It is sometimes impossible to make a landing
through the surf for weeks at a time, and when a boat makes the attempt
in the most favorable circumstances, the venture is a hazard of life
and death. As a vivid summary of the aspect of this lonely treasure
island, I quote from Mr. Knight, because he is the only man who has
ever described Trinidad at first hand:
"As we neared it, the features of this extraordinary place could
gradually be distinguished. The north side, that which faced us, is
the most barren and desolate portion of the island, and appears to be
utterly inaccessible. Here the mountains rise sheer from the boiling
surf,--fantastically shaped of volcanic rock; cloven by frightful
ravines; lowering in perpendicular precipices; in places overhanging
threateningly, and, where the mountains have been shaken to pieces by
the fires and earthquakes of volcanic action, huge landslips slope
steeply in the yawning ravines,--landslips of black and red volcanic
debris, and loose rocks large as houses, ready on the slightest
disturbance to roll down, crashing, into the abysses below. On the
summit of the island there floats almost constantly, even on the
clearest day, a wreath of dense vapor, never still, but rolling and
twisting into strange shapes as the wind eddies among the crags. And
above this cloud-wreath rise mighty pinnacles of coal-black rock, like
the spires of some gigantic Gothic cathedral piercing the blue southern
sky. It would be impossible to convey in words a just idea of the
mystery of Trinidad. The very coloring seemed unearthly, in places
dismal black, and in others the fire-consumed crags are of strange
metallic hues, vermilion red and copper yellow. When one lands on its
shores, this uncanny impression is enhanced. It bears all the
appearances of being an accursed spot, whereupon no creatures can live,
save the hideous land-crabs and foul and cruel sea birds."
An ideal place, this, for pirates to bury treasure, you will agree, and
good for nothing else under Heaven. The South Atlantic Directory, the
shipmaster's guide, states that "the surf is often incredibly great,
and has been seen to break over a bluff which is two hundred feet
high." Trinidad was first visited by Halley, the astronomer, after
whom the famous comet was named, who called there in 1700 when he was a
captain in the Royal Navy. Captain Amos Delano, the Yankee pioneer in
the Far Eastern trade, made a call in 1803, prompted by curiosity, but
as a rule mariners have given the island a wide berth, now and then
touching there when in need of water or fresh meat in the shape of
turtles.
At one time the Portuguese attempted to found a settlement on Trinidad,
probably before the forests had been killed by some kind of volcanic
upheaval. The ruins of their stone huts are still to be seen as humble
memorials of a great race of explorers and colonists in the golden age
of that nation.
With tremendous exertion, the party from the _Alerte_ was landed with
its tools and stores, and headquarters established close to the ravine
which was believed to be the hiding-place of the treasure as indicated
by the chart and information of the Finn quartermaster with the scar
across his cheek. It was found that there had been no actual
landslide, but the ravine was choked with large bowlders which at
various times had fallen from the cliffs above. These were packed
together by the red earth silting and washing during the rainy season
when the ravines were flooded.
Along the whole of the windward coast were found innumerable fragments
of wreckage, spars, timbers, barrels. From the position of the island,
in the belt of the southeast trade winds, many derelict vessels must
have been driven ashore. Some of this immense accumulation of stuff
may have lain there for centuries, or ever since vessels first doubled
the Cape of Good Hope. Here and there were the gaunt rows of ribs to
show where a ship had been stranded bodily, and doubtless much valuable
property in silver and gold, in bars, ingots, and doubloons, lies
buried in the shattered hulks of these old Dutch East Indiamen, and
galleons from Peru.
As particular landmarks near the ravine, the pirate had mentioned three
cairns which he and his comrades had heaped up. Sure enough, the
previous treasure seekers of the _Aurea_ expedition from England had
found the three cairns, but foolishly demolished them on the chance
that gold might be buried underneath. Mr. Knight could find traces of
only one of them, and he discovered also a water-jar, a broken
wheel-barrow and other tools to show where the others had been digging.
The crew of the _Alerte_ were confident that they were at the right
place, and they set to work with the most admirable zeal and fortitude,
enduring hardships cheerfully, and during the three months of their
labors on Trinidad, removing earth and rock literally by the thousands
of tons, until the ravine was scooped out to a depth of from eight to
twenty feet.
Their vessel had to anchor far off shore, and once forsook them for a
fourteen hundred mile voyage to Bahia to get provisions. These London
lawyers and other gentlemen unused to toil with the hands became as
tough and rough and disreputable to see as the pirates who had been
there aforetime. In costume of shirt, trousers, and belt, they became
ragged and stained from head to foot with the soil, and presented a
uniform, dirty, brownish, yellow appearance like so many Brazilian
convicts. Their surf boat was wrecked or upset at almost every attempt
to land or to go off to the _Alerte_, and when they were not fishing
one another out of the surf, they were diving to recover their
submerged and scattered stores. Their leader, Mr. Knight, paid them a
tribute of which they must have been proud:
"They had toiled hard and had kept up their spirits all the while and
what is really wonderful under circumstances so calculated to try the
temper and wear out the patience, they had got on exceedingly well with
each other, and there had been no quarreling or ill feeling of any
sort."
At length the melancholy verdict was agreed upon in council. All the
bright dreams of carrying home a fortune for every adventurer were
reluctantly dismissed. The men were worn to the bone, and it was
becoming more and more difficult to maintain communication with the
_Alerte_. The prodigious excavation was abandoned, and Mr. Knight
indulged himself in a soliloquy as he surveyed the "great trenches, the
piled-up mounds of earth, the uprooted rocks, with broken wheelbarrows
and blocks, worn-out tools, and other relics of our three months strewn
over the ground; and it was sad to think that all the energy of these
men had been spent in vain. They well deserved to succeed, and all the
more so because they bore their disappointment with so much pluck and
cheerfulness."
But, in truth, the expedition had not been in vain. The toilers had
been paid in richer stuff than gold. They had lived the true romance,
nor could a man of spirit and imagination wish for anything more to his
taste than to be encamped on a desert island, with the surf shouting in
his ears, the sea birds crying, all hands up with daybreak to dig for
buried treasure whose bearings were found on a tarpaulin chart that had
belonged to a pirate with a deep scar across his cheek. How it would
have delighted the heart of Robert Louis Stevenson to be one of this
company of the _Alerte_ at Trinidad! The gallant little vessel, only
sixty-four feet long she was, filled away for the West Indies, homeward
bound, while the men aboard amused themselves by wondering how many
nations might have laid claim to the treasure, had it been
found;--England which hoisted its flag on Trinidad in 1770; Portugal
because Portuguese from Brazil made a settlement there in 1750; Brazil,
because the island lay off her coast; Spain, to whom the treasure had
belonged, and Peru from whose cathedral it was taken, and lastly the
Roman Church.
In conclusion, Mr. Knight, to whose fascinating narrative, "The Cruise
of the _Alerte_," I am indebted for the foregoing information, sums it
up like a true soldier of fortune:
"Well, indeed, it was for us that we had not found the pirates' gold;
for we seemed happy enough as we were, and if possessed of this hoard,
our lives would of a certainty have become a burden to us. We should
be too precious to be comfortable. We should degenerate into
miserable, fearsome hypochondriacs, careful of our means of transit,
dreadfully anxious about what we ate or drank, miserably cautious about
everything. 'Better far, no doubt,' exclaimed these cheerful
philosophers, 'to remain the careless, happy paupers that we are.'
"'Do you still believe in the existence of the treasure?' is a question
that has been often put to me since my return. Knowing all I do, I
have very little doubt that the story of the Finn quartermaster is
substantially true,--that the treasures of Lima were hidden on
Trinidad; but whether they have been taken away, or whether they are
still there and we failed to find them because we were not in
possession of one link of the directions, I am unable to say."
In later years, E. F. Knight became a war correspondent, and lost an
arm in the Boer campaign. I met him at Key West during the Spanish war
in which he represented _The London Times_ and found him to be a solid,
well-ballasted man who knew what he was about and not at all one to
have gone treasure seeking without excellent reasons. That he was
adventurous in his unassuming way he proved by landing on the Cuban
coast near Havana in order to interview the Spanish Captain-General. A
newspaper dispatch boat ran close in shore, the skipper risking being
blown out of water by the batteries of Morro Castle, and Knight was
transferred to a tiny flat-bottomed skiff of the tonnage of a bath-tub.
Equipped with a note-book, revolver, water bottle, and a small package
of sandwiches, he said good-by in his very placid manner, and was seen
to be standing on his head in the surf a few minutes later. He
scrambled ashore, probably recalling to mind a similar style of landing
on the coast of Trinidad, and vanished in the jungle. That he ran
grave danger of being potted for an _Americano_ by the first Spanish
patrol he encountered appeared to give him no concern whatever. It was
easy to perceive that he must have been the right kind of man to lead a
treasure-hunting expedition.
Since the _Alerte_ sailed on her dashing quest in 1889, the pirates'
gold of Trinidad has figured in an adventure even more fantastic. Many
readers will doubtless remember the career of the late Baron James
Harden-Hickey who attempted to establish a kingdom of his own on the
islet of Trinidad. He belonged in another age than this and he was
laughed at rather more than he deserved. Duelist, editor,
_boulevardier_, fond of the tinsel and trappings of life, he married
the daughter of John H. Flagler of the Standard Oil Company and with
funds from this excessively commercial source created a throne, a
court, and a kingdom. He had seen the island of Trinidad from a
British merchant ship in which he went round the Horn in 1888, and the
fact that this was a derelict bit of real estate, to which no nation
thought it worth while to lay formal claim, appealed to his active
imagination.
A would-be king has difficulty in finding a stray kingdom nowadays, and
Harden-Hickey bothered his head not in the least over the problem of
populating this god-forsaken jumble of volcanic rock and ashes. Ere
long he blossomed forth most gorgeously in Paris and New York as King
James I of the Principality of Trinidad. There was a royal cabinet, a
Minister of Foreign Affairs, a Chancellerie, and uniforms, court
costumes, and regalia designed by the king himself. Most dazzling of
all the equipment was the Order of the Insignia of the Cross of
Trinidad, a patent and decoration of nobility to be bestowed on those
deemed worthy of the signal honor.
The newspapers bombarded King James I with gibes and jeers, but he took
himself with immense, even tragic seriousness, and issued a prospectus
of the settlement of his kingdom, inviting an aristocracy of intellect
and good breeding to comprise the ruling class, while the hard work was
to be done by hired menials. He mustered on paper some kind of a list
of resources of Trinidad, although he was hard put to name anything
very tangible, and laid special stress on the buried treasure. It was
to be dug up by the subjects and, if found, to be divided among the
patriots who had bought the securities issued by the royal treasury.
Surely a pirates' treasure was never before gravely offered among the
assets of a kingdom, but King James had no sense of humor, and the lost
treasure was as real to him as any other of his marvelous dreams.
Some work was actually done at Trinidad, building material landed, a
vessel chartered to run from Brazil, and a few misguided colonists
recruited, when in 1895 the British Government ruthlessly knocked the
Principality of Trinidad into a cocked hat and toppled over the throne
of King James I. The island was wanted as a cable landing or relay
station, and a naval officer raised the red ensign to proclaim
annexation by reason of Halley's discovery in 1700. At this Brazil set
up a protest on the ground that her Portuguese had been the original
settlers. While the diplomats of these two powers were politely
locking horns over the question of ownership, that unfortunate monarch,
King James I of the Principality of Trinidad, Baron Harden-Hickey of
the Holy Roman Empire, perceived that his realm had been pulled out
from under him, so to speak. Whichever nation won the dispute it meant
no comfort for him. Trinidad was no longer a derelict island and he
was a king without a kingdom.
He surrendered not one jot or tittle of his rights, and to his Minister
of Foreign Affairs he solemnly bequeathed the succession and the claim
to proprietorship. And among these rights and privileges was the royal
interest in the buried treasure. Harden-Hickey, when he could no
longer live a king, died as he thought befitting a gentleman, by his
own hand. It seems a pity that he could not have been left alone to
play at being king, and to find the pirates' gold.