The Cruise of the "Esmeralda", by Harry Collingwood.
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This is a splendid book, beautifully written, with a strong nautical
background. The hero's family, which had a very long nautical
tradition, was a bit short of money. But there was a story told in the
family that some centuries before an ancestor of his had found an
abandoned vessel which turned out to have a huge amount of gold and
jewels. He had buried this in a secret location on an island in the
Far East, putting directions for finding it in cipher somewhere in his
house in England. Our hero finds the paper with the cipher after a long
search in the house, and sets off to find the fortune, though he had not
yet deciphered the instructions.
All sorts of adventures occur, including being attacked by pirates, whom
they get rid of in a most novel manner. Eventually our hero seems to
work out how to read the cipher, in a dream, but when he awakes he can't
remember how to do it. He does of course remember, and the cipher turns
out to be easy to read, once you realise how many digits you need to get
each character. They get there, and sure enough, find the treasure.
But of course the troubles don't end there, because some of the seamen
think it would be a good idea to kill our hero, and take the treasure
for themselves. That situation gets sorted out, and after further
adventures they get home. They use a novel method of getting the
treasure ashore without anybody in authority noticing.
You'll enjoy this book, especially if you make an audiobook of it. This
will take about 11.6 hours to play, depending on how you do it.
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THE CRUISE OF THE "ESMERALDA", BY HARRY COLLINGWOOD.