Buried Treasure

[Salty Dog]

Buried Treasure

When Jim Hawkins found the map to Captain Flint's buried treasure among Billy Bones' possessions in Treasure Island the concept of buried pirate's gold entered popular culture for ever. Buried treasure is probably the most common and enduring theme for books and films about pirates since Robert Louis Stevenson put pen to paper and drew the first map of Treasure Island in 1881. In Swallows and Amazons more parallels with Treasure Island emerge when Roger and Titty go hunting for treasure on Cormorant Island, this time the heavy sea chest which burglars have hidden after stealing it from Uncle Jim's houseboat. In Peter Duck, the sequel to Swallows and Amazons the Walkers, Blacketts and Uncle Jim search for buried pirate treasure in the Caribbean.

Films too have played their part in continuing the myth of buried treasure. Several versions of Treasure Island have been made of course, including the 1950 version starring Robert Newton and the 1990 version starring Charlton Heston. Cutthroat Island starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine is a tale of a race to find buried treasure in an uncharted island and recover it before the villain of the piece, Dog Adams (played by Frank Langella). Most recently Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean concerns a treasure hidden in caves on yet another uncharted island.

Historically however the practice of burying treasure was not a common one, and for sensible reasons. Unless there is a very good reason for keeping treasure hidden it is a waste , not only of time but also of the treasure itself, to bury it. Very few pirates ever amassed such a fortune that it needed to be buried when it could be far better employed in the taverns and brothels of the Caribbean or America. In addition it should be remembered that most pirate booty did not consist of gold and silver bars, but saleable goods such as silks and other fabrics, tobacco, spices, and slaves. The cargoes which the pirates stole were generally of little value until they could be taken into a port and sold. Occasionally pirates and privateers might capture a large quantity of gold or silver, but such successes were rare.

[Salty Dog]

Only two real instances of buried treasure stand out as worthy of mention today. In 1573 the greatest of all the Elizabethan sea rovers, Francis Drake carried out a legendary attack on the mule trains carrying silver from the Spanish mines of South America across the Isthmus of Panama to the Caribbean from where it would be transported to Europe. The mule trains were carrying somewhere in the region of 170,000lbs of silver between them, and of course Drake's men could not hope to carry such a weight back to their ships. They loaded as much as they could, buried the rest and set out for the coast to rejoin their vessels, which had unfortunately been forced out to sea by the arrival of powerful Spanish ships. Drake and his men buried the rest of their treasure and made a raft on which they put to sea to rejoin their ships. The same night the English ships returned to the shore and recovered the buried treasure.

In 1700 William Kidd, not nearly so successful as Drake had been, sailed into New York. Kidd knew he was a wanted man and was fully expecting to be arrested, but was sailing to New York to visit his friend and supporter Governor Bellomont, with whose help he hoped to get away with his piracy. Kidd was not a clever man but he was sensible enough to know that if he needed to negotiate with Bellomont then his treasure would be a valuable bargaining counter. It was therefore important that his treasure did not fall into Bellomont's hands if he was arrested, so he made efforts to hide his loot on the islands at the mouth of New York harbour. When Kidd met Bellomont he gave him a detailed list of the treasure he had brought with him and told him where some of it was buried, but at their second meeting Kidd was arrested and eventually sent for trial in England. Bellomont recovered the treasure which Kidd had told him about, but this proved to be worth only £14,000, not £40,000 as Kidd had told him, and even this was only a fraction of the £400,000 which Kidd was widely rumoured to have captured, so Bellomont set about trying to find the rest of Kidd's loot. Long Island and Gardiner's Island were scoured but no more treasure was found. In England Kidd refused to reveal the whereabouts of any more of the treasure and when he was hanged in May 1701 all hope of finding it was lost. In the time since Kidd's execution treasure hunters have continued to search the islands for Kidd's lost treasure, but to no avail. It is of course possible that one or more of Kidd's friends, such as the Gardiners of Gardiner's Island knew the location of the treasure and quietly recovered it themselves. Equally possible is that there is no more buried treasure to be found: it would have been in Kidd's interest to exaggerate the amount of treasure available to Bellomont so if he promised £40,000 perhaps there was only ever £14,000.

[Salty Dog]

As much, if not more, attention has been paid by the treasure hunters to the tiny Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia, where in 1795 a young boy discovered what looked like a pit which had been filled in and over which hung an old block and tackle. The following day the boy came back full of expectations of buried treasure and armed with a shovel, but discovered nothing more than a pit too deep for him to fully excavate. For more than two hundred years others have tried to reach the bottom of the so called "money pit" of Oak Island, and though they have discovered that the shaft is an amazing feat of engineering not a single coin or gold bar has been recovered. There are theories a-plenty about the origin of the money pit; some suggest that the remains of Kidd's loot lies at the bottom, or that the treasure from a mid-seventeenth century Spanish shipwreck, recovered by the English in the 1680s was the reason for the elaborate burial. Less sensible speculations include theories that the money pit was dug by aliens or that the treasure of the Knights Templar (possibly including the Holy Grail itself) is to be found there.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the pit was begun in the late seventeenth century at the earliest and the early eighteenth century at the latest, which supports ideas of Kidd's treasure or buried Spanish gold, but completely destroys any speculation concerning Knights Templar. The enormity of the project suggests work lasted several months at least, probably several years, which makes it unfeasible that it might be Kidd's treasure. We are left then with fewer and fewer possibilities, and must ask ourselves why anyone would undertake an engineering project lasting such a long time to bury some sort of treasure which might easily be hidden in a hole dug in a day. The truth about the Oak Island money pit is that there is no real evidence to show that anything at all is buried at the bottom, let alone pirate treasure, and indeed some serious investigators doubt the existence of the shaft at all. We will probably never know who dug the pit or why, the only certain thing about Oak Island is that credulous treasure seekers will continue to bankrupt themselves trying to find an treasure hoard which probably isn't there.