BURIED TREASURE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 111, 26 September 1912, Page 8

BURIED TREASURE.

PIRATES' GOLD HIDDEN ON LONELY ISLAND. Once more Coeos, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, is to be visited by an expedition in search of the fabulous treasures reputed to have been buried there by pirates.

Two ladies who were on the island last year are said to have located the precise position of the hoard, whieh successive parties have failed to discover, and a syndicate has been formed to pursue investigations. At Plymouth the steamer Melmorc, a vessel with a tenknot capacity, hitherto engaged in the cross-Channel traffic, is fitting out for the search, and will shortly leave the port for Barry to take in coal preparatory to sailing for Panama, where she will pick up two ladies said to hold the key to the treasure. Thence she will go to Cocos, 500 miles south-west of Panama. Included in the personnel of the expedition is a cinematograph operator to secure films of the treasure seekers at work.

Cocos, says the Daily Chronicle, was invested with its romance of a buried treasure nearly a century ago, but though there have been twenty different expeditions to the island, the secret of the whereabouts of the hoard has remained impenetrable so far. A HAUL OF £2,000,000.

It was in 1821 that the notorious pirate, Bonita, having ravaged the Went Indies and the West Coast of South America, engineered his last great coup of capturing the Mexican treasure. The worth of this haul is estimated at 12 millions, and he buried in on Cocos, where, a fierce fight ensuing among his cut-throat crew, he left 15 of them,dead ere he set sail for the West Indies. Hi* infamous career ended in that region. Fourteen years later the British barqucntine Mary Dier (Captain Thompson) was lying in the harbor of Callao when the Spaniards who were being evicted from Peru, decided to consign their treasure, valued at £4,000.000, to her hold for safety. The honesty of the captain and the crew melted away before the vision of undreamt wealth, and, murdering the guard whom the trusting Spaniards had left in charge of the riches, they slipped away from Callao in the darkness. Tin's treasure was also hidden at Cocos before the Spanish- man-o'-war sent in pursuit captured the captain and his crew, most of whom they shot. The captain escaped this fate and confided the position of the treasure to a Canadian named Keating, who, legend states, twice recovered valuables to the amount of ,t3>im. I'IiKVKH'S SEARCHES.

Thus Cocos has acquired the reputation of a veritable Treasure Island, and, like all the vague islands of that type, it is practically uninhabitable. For sixteen years a Cerman, having obtained concessions from the Costa Rica Government, which controls Cocos, existed there in a Robinson Crusoe primitiveness and sought high and low for clues to the hiding place of the pirates' ill-gotten gains, and at intervals exploring parlies have hunted over its extent of sixteen square miles.