I
My great-great-great-uncle was one of the many sturdy, honest,
high-spirited men to whom the early years of the last century gave
birth. He was a brave man and a ready fighter, yet was he ever
controlled in his actions by so nice a regard for the feelings of
others, and through the strong fibre of his hardy nature ran a strain
of such almost womanly gentleness and tenderness, that throughout
the rather exceptionally wide circle of his acquaintance he was very
generally beloved.
By profession he was a pirate, and although it is not becoming in me,
perhaps, to speak boastingly of a blood-relation, I would be doing his
memory injustice did I not add that he was one of the ablest and most
successful pirates of his time. His usual cruising-ground was between
the capes of the Chesapeake and the lower end of Long Island; yet now
and then, as opportunity offered, he would take a run to the New England
coast, and in winter he frequently would drop down to the s'uthard and
do a good stroke of business off the Spanish Main. His home station,
however, was the Delaware coast, and his family lived in Lewes, being
quite the upper crust of Lewes society as it then was constituted. When
his schooner, the _Martha Ann_, was off duty, she usually was harbored
in Rehoboth Bay. That was a pretty good harbor for pirate schooners in
those days.
My great-great-great-uncle threw himself into his profession in the
hearty fashion that was to be expected from a man of his sincere,
earnest character. He toiled early and late at sea, and on shore he
regulated the affairs of his family so that his expenses should be well
within his large though somewhat fluctuating income; and the result of
his prudence in affairs was that he saved the greater portion of what he
earned. The people of Lewes respected him greatly, and the boys of
the town were bidden to emulate his steady business ways and habit of
thrift. He was, too, a man of public spirit. At his own cost and charge
he renewed the town pump; and he presented the church--he was a very
regular churchgoer when on shore--with a large bell of singularly sweet
tone that had come into his possession after a casual encounter with a
Cuban-bound galleon off the Bahama Banks.
And yet when at last my great-great-great-uncle, in the fulness of his
years and virtues, was gathered to his fathers, and the sweet-toned
Spanish bell tolled his requiem, everybody was very much surprised to
find that of the fine fortune accumulated during his successful business
career nothing worth speaking of could be found. The house that he owned
in Lewes, the handsome furniture that it contained, and a sea-chest in
which were some odds and ends of silverware (of a Spanish make) and some
few pieces-of-eight and doubloons, constituted the whole of his visible
wealth.
For my great-great-great-aunt, with a family of five sons and seven
daughters (including three sets of twins) all under eleven years of age,
the outlook was a sorry one. She was puzzled, too, to think what had
gone with the great fortune which certainly had existed, and so was
everybody else. The explanation that finally was adopted was that my
great-great-great-uncle, in accordance with well established pirate
usage, had buried his treasure somewhere, and had taken the secret of
its burial-place with him to another and a better world. Probability was
given to this conjecture by the fact that he had died in something of a
hurry. He had been brought ashore by his men after an unexpected (and
by him uninvited) encounter with a King's ship off the capes of the
Delaware. One of his legs was shot off, and his head was pretty well
laid open by a desperate cutlass slash. He already was in a raging
fever, and although the best medical advice in Lewes was procured, he
died that very night. As he lay dying his talk was wild and incoherent;
but at the very last, as my great-great-great-aunt well remembered,
he suddenly grew calm, straightened himself in the bed, and said, with
great earnestness: "Sheer up the plank midway--"
That was all. He did not live to finish the sentence. At the moment,
my great-great-great-aunt believed the words to be nothing more than a
delirious use of a professional phrase; and this belief received color
from the fact that a little before, in his feverish fancy, he had been
capturing a Spanish galleon, and had got about to the part of the affair
where the sheering up of a plank midway between the main and mizzen
masts, for the accommodation of the Spaniards in leaving their vessel,
would be appropriate. Thinking the matter over calmly afterwards, and in
the light of subsequent events, she came to the conclusion that he was
trying to tell her how and where his treasure was hid. Acting upon this
belief, she sheered up all the planks about the house that seemed at all
promising. She even had the cellar dug up and the well dragged. But not
a scrap of the treasure did she ever find.
And the worst part of it was, that from that time onward our family
had no luck at all. Excepting my elderly cousin, Gregory Wilkinson--who
inherited a snug little fortune from his mother, and expanded it into
a very considerable fortune by building up a large manufacture of
carpet-slippers for the export trade--the rule in my family has been a
respectable poverty that has just bordered upon actual want. But all the
generations since my great-great-great-uncle's time have been cheered,
as poverty-stricken people naturally would be cheered, by the knowledge
that the pirate hoard was in existence; and by the hope that some day it
would be found, and would make them all enormously rich at a jump.
From the moment when I first heard of the treasure, as a little boy, I
believed in it thoroughly; and I also believed that I was the member of
the family destined to discover it.