REAL TREASURE ISLANDS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9071, 11 February 1908, Page 6

REAL TREASURE ISLANDS.

A little sailing yawl manned by three men put into New York harbour the other day, after an adventurous voyage of 129 days from L iverpool, during which time she had covered over seven thousand miles. The aim of her crew is to seek for a treasure buried long ago by pirates on an isinad near the coastfof Honduras. Treasure hunts are continually going on in the West ..Indies and the Spanish Main, but the ." hidden hoards are not often brought to, light. None the less (writes a globe-trotting contributor) I heard of a few cases during five years

spelt in the Caribbees. Bodden, the skipper of a Grand Cayman turtling schooner, had an extraordinary stroke of luck about six years ago. He had brought his little vesssel alongside a barque which had stranded on a coral reef Jamiaca and been abandoned, and was taking what he could find of value from the wreck. Looking over the side he saw a yellow gleam on a shelving rock several feet beneath the clear water.

Thinking it was a piece of _ copper sheathing, he dived for it, and came up with his hands full of gold coins. They were Spanish doubloons and pieces of eightof the seventeenth century. There were hundreds of them on the sunken reef, as well as some pieces of wreckage that apparently had belonged to some ancient Spanish boat. All day long the skipper and his men dived for the coins, and they sold the lot to a merchant in Port Royal Street, Kingston, for close on £6OO. I was there when the deal was made, and examined several of the coins, which were in an excellent state of preservation. How came they to be lost in this strange manner? There are many theories, but probably they were being carried loose in the boat when it was capsized. There were no skeletons by the boat, so it must be supposed the crew were picked up. When I was staying at Nassa, in 1901, a strange story was told by two fishermen, who came to the town from one of the islands near by r ' Bhey said that an American white man came ashore to their fishing hut from a small yacht, and engaged them to r xv>w him to another island several miles £rff. They rowed all night, and in the morning landed. He mado them dig at a spot he ported out, after consulting an old parchment, and he watched over them closely, with a Winchester rifle in his hand. At last they unearthed a small, hut very heavy, iron-bound chest, with which they rowed away to the yacht. As soon as it was hoisted aboard the vessel departed.

This story could hardly have been invented by the fishermen, for the American and his yacht had been at Nassau only a few days before, and he made many inquiries about the islands in the vicinity. What did he find in the chest? Nobody in Nassau doubts that it was Captain Kidd’s famous hoard, said to hav® been hidden thereabouts. ■ The abortive revolution in Hayti, led by General Firmin and Admiral Killick, was largely financed by an old French treasure found by the latter in a ruined chateau on tne island of Tortuga. It had been buried there in the days when the Haytian natives massacred their French masters. The find was not a lucky one for Killick. He perished, after his cause was lost, in the destruction of the cruiser Orete-a-Pierrot as a pirate by the German gunboat Panther. General Matos, who was the richest merchant prince in Venezuela until he lost much of his money in vain efforts to overthrow President Castro, fitted out an expedition in 1898 to the isle of Margherita, off the Venezuelan coast, and found an old' pirate treasure which is said to have realised over £40,000. Matos told me himself that his share came to £32,000, after paying espensesjand giving the Venezuelan Government its share.