Fortune and Glory Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Why Search for Lost Treasures?

  A Brief History of Treasure Hunting

  X Never Marks the Spot

  You Know What a Careful Guy I Am

  THE TREASURES OF AFRICA

  The Pharaoh’s Treasures

  King Solomon’s Mines

  TREASURES OF THE AMERICAS

  El Dorado and Aztec Gold

  Captain Kidd’s (and Others’) Pirate Treasure

  The Oak Island Money Pit

  The Beale Treasure

  TREASURES OF ASIA

  Kusanagi and the Honjo Masamune

  Peking Man

  TREASURES OF EUROPE

  The Holy Grail

  The Templar Treasure

  Nazi Gold

  The Irish Crown Jewels

  TREASURES OF THE MIDDLE EAST

  The Ark of the Covenant

  Treasures of the Copper Scroll

  All at Sea

  Other Types of Treasure

  Ten Books Worth Hunting

  Ten Movies Worth Hunting

  Raid Some Tombs

  Select Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION: WHY SEARCH FOR LOST TREASURE?

  Think of lost treasures or treasure hunting, and you tend to think of Blackbeard digging holes on golden beaches, grizzled adventurers fighting Nazis for possession of ancient relics, or even a lycra catsuit clad debutante swapping finishing school for parkour in lost cities.

  Tales of lost treasures and buried loot from years gone by have always been a staple of adventure stories, mythology and popular history. In books, movies, games and the daydreams of millions of people, the prospect of unearthing a chest full of historic gold and jewels is one to excite absolutely anyone.

  Most people simply enjoy the tales as escapist entertainment, but history is filled with genuine treasures, and people who created, lost and found them. People also go searching for those, adventuring in real life as well as in fiction.

  Perhaps you’ll be inspired to join them, after considering a basic question. It seems like a no-brainer: Why search for treasure?

  The most obvious motive for taking up shovel and map and going off in search of treasure is the simple fact that it is treasure. Gold coins, jewellery, precious stones … Find a good hoard and you’d be able to live the life of luxury, and never work an hour at a boring day job again. Money may not buy happiness, or wisdom, but it certainly can help make living in the material world a damn sight easier. Picking up a pile of gold or silver that’s been left in the ground for years sounds like a great way to get rich with minimal effort.

  Of course, the truth is not so simple. In fact, most people who have hunted or do hunt treasure find that it’s actually more difficult than ‘real’ work. Worse still, treasure hunting properly, on a professional and industrial basis, is a very expensive business. Perhaps surprisingly, though, getting rich quick isn’t the only motive that has driven individuals off in search of buried treasure, legendary historical artefacts and lost cities.

  It’s the historical side that interests some; to find something that no-one has seen or touched for perhaps centuries, and bring it back to public view. You could find glory without fortune: if someone found a buried empty chest proven to have belonged to, say, Blackbeard, the kudos of having found something so historically significant could still win book deals and a lucrative career on the lecture circuit.

  The puzzle element intrigues others. Finding lost treasures isn’t just about digging holes in the ground, or travelling to far-flung and exotic locales. There’s a lot of putting the intellect to use, trying to figure out what happened to things. There is the mental challenge of pitting one’s wits against the people who hid the treasures, or against the natural world that conceals them – and, of course, against rival seekers. There is bound to be a great thrill in outthinking the deviousness with which some Obergruppenführer stashed his truckloads of Reichsbank gold and looted art. On a treasure site, you have to think, plan, negotiate with authorities and put a lot of brainpower into figuring out how to safely get at the treasure – especially since ancient artefacts are likely to be fragile, and you definitely don’t want to destroy them in the process of digging them up (unless your name is Schliemann, in which case that’s pretty much your modus operandi). Anyway, the fact is an awful lot of people like a brain-bending puzzle in real life, and not just in videogames.

  There is the physical challenge as well. For some, the need to scuba dive in search of sunken galleons, or climb mountains, or trek across deserts, is exciting enough to make even the most fruitless search worthwhile.

  Others are bitten simply by the straight-out lust for adventure, and the potential treasure at the end of the rainbow is merely an excuse to indulge in it. While a war correspondent during the Boer War, Winston Churchill wrote that ‘there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without result’. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if he was packing a shovel and a map showing buried Afrikaner gold when he said it.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF TREASURE HUNTING

  People have hunted treasure for as long as the concept of material value has existed, although presumably they started off hunting it in the sense that a predator tracks its prey, as bandits hunting down the owners of said treasure in order to rob them. As people still do today.

  Hunting for lost treasure is an only slightly more recent phenomenon, insofar as there needed to be a recognized past in which said treasure could actually have been lost. The Ancient Egyptians liked to loot the tombs of their ancestors, but this isn’t necessarily treasure hunting in the sense that we know it, as they did so much sooner after the loot had been hidden and, as the saying goes, they knew where the bodies (and their bling) were buried. So that was just looting rather than treasure hunting.

  The Greeks included treasure hunting in their myths and histories, so the concept of treasure being lost by previous generations, which can be found by adventurers, had taken hold in society. Greek heroes occasionally found themselves stumbling across valuables left behind by the gods, and had to learn the hard way that they should be responsible about what they did with it.

  This is a natural product of the end of habitations. When a town, village, or temple has fallen into disuse and been forgotten, the next people who rediscover it would often attribute it to those – ancestors, gods, or supernatural creatures – who must have been wealthy, and who might have left something behind. If that sounds daft, just remember that, for example, Ancient Egypt lasted so long that even the Ancient Egyptians forgot who had built the Pyramids.

  The Romans also conducted many treasure-grabbing missions of the conquer and rob variety, but the concept of stumbling across lost treasure was so established that they introduced the first treasure trove laws: defining buried treasure as ‘an ancient deposit of money, of which no memory exists, and no present owner’. If someone found treasure on their own land, or on sacred ground, they could keep it. Otherwise the finder and the landowner – which could well be the Emperor – got half each.

  Under the feudal system in Europe, things got complicated. In Britain, Edward the Confessor had the common law define treasure trove in the 11th century as a hoard of valuables consisting of over 50 per cent gold or silver, which been deliberately hidden. The original owner could turn up and claim it, otherwise it belonged to the landowner or the Crown. If the loot was not deliberately hidden, but simply lost, or buried as grave goods, then it belonged to either the finder, the landowner, or a combination thereof, depending on local laws.

  YE SEEK THE GRAIL?

  Intentional treasure hunting as a genre archetype came to the fore in medieval times, when writers such as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes gave the legendary
King Arthur and his knights their most famous task: searching for the Holy Grail.

  This was really the first time that searching for a lost valuable was viewed as a formal discipline, which could be learned and aspired to. It was seen as a votive act rather than a simple profession, however, akin to a pilgrimage or crusade, done in service of faith and God, to find the true Christian elements within the searcher himself. That was the official line, but should a knight happen to come across some gold or jewellery, then that was a bonus worth having.

  Scholars then also began to take an interest in searching for artefacts that would prove evidence for biblical events. At first this meant relics of the Apostles and Saints, and fragments of the true cross – things that, again, would bring the seeker and/or his audience closer to godliness – but over time this expanded into the realms of other elements, to prove the existence and settle the facts about individuals and events from the Bible.

  Although this is how archaeology began, and although it has over the past century or two altered to become more about seeking the historical facts regardless of their relationship (or lack thereof) to Scripture, there are still those who are motivated by this. For the most part, though, they are only really encountered now in the search for Noah’s Ark.

  Things changed, in Europe at least, around the time of the Renaissance, especially in Britain. Treasure hunting as a trade – rather than an opportunistic bonus mission objective for explorers or military units abroad – really got going in the Tudor and Elizabethan eras.

  Because this was the time of exploring the New World and defeating the Spanish Armada, commentators tended to spin the reign of Elizabeth I as a prosperous golden age, and later novelists and Hollywood moviemakers have been more than happy to continue this impression. The great European powers of the time were busy following the Roman model of looting new civilizations found in South America, but these were not treasure hunting expeditions. They were pillaging and piracy expeditions, taking other people’s possessions.

  In Elizabeth’s England, however, things were rather different. Expensive wars with France, Spain and Holland had depleted the treasury, and there were a series of bad harvests and famines throughout the first half of the 16th century. The practical upshot of this is that the Elizabethan era was actually filled with desperate poverty, leading to three courses of action taken by segments of the population: mounting expeditions to the New World in search of riches, or at least Spanish ships which had already found riches; an interest in the subject of alchemy, in the hope of turning lesser metals into more valuable ones; and digging for buried treasure, which was called hill-digging, because people viewed so many low hills as potential old burial mounds from which treasure might be dug up.

  Before there was a bank on every high street, when people lived on the land and had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to buy fancy strongboxes with stout locks, the most secure way of looking after valuables and coins was to bury them. The dissolution of the monasteries, and the view of the church as being corrupt beforehand, meant people assumed that the Church’s dodgy funds might still be buried in the vicinity of churches, abbeys, monasteries, etc. (having been put there to keep it out of the hands of Henry VIII). So, hill-digging became a national industry.

  Everywhere had its legend of clerical gold hidden from Henry VIII, or from the Vikings, or by Robin Hood or King Arthur … The tales of previous centuries had begun to inspire both beliefs about past events, and searches for their treasures.

  As the age of exploration continued into the 17th and 18th centuries, it became clear that there were many places which were no longer occupied, but that previous communities had been lost to time.

  The desire to learn and understand about the past became bound with the desire to plunder, while the recognition grew that taking people’s current possessions was robbery. So explorers and adventurers began to search for those past treasures that couldn’t be said to belong to any contemporary individual or society. They began to plunder the past of its art and valuables.

  In Victorian times, antiquarian scholars began to take most of the interest, as anyone who’s familiar with the ghost stories of M. R. James could tell you (his characters often come a cropper when meddling with ancient relics in old churches, or hunting for buried treasures, like lost crowns of East Anglia).

  Throughout these eras, the treasure hunting action was mainly confined to individuals, and either scholarly or religious organizations. After World War II, however, many more people became beachcombers, due firstly to the spread of military surplus mine detectors, and then in the 1960s and 1970s, the adaptation of that technology to make outright civilian metal detectors, which were marketed with the image of finding pieces of eight or Spanish doubloons on the beach.

  The post-war era also introduced a whole new type of treasure hunting: professional, ‘commercial’ treasure-hunting companies. It’s true that people had always tried to commercialize things by selling maps and information (usually fake, or at least useless) to treasure hunters, and sometimes museums had commissioned adventurers to source exhibits, but now this took on a whole new identity.

  With appropriate vehicles and equipment available, companies could conduct recovery operations for valuable goods from the past. Most of these companies today are, or at least started off as, subdivisions from, maritime salvage companies. They simply diversified into locating historic wrecks as well as conducting recovery operations at contemporary wreck sites.

  Although there have been many discoveries by maritime companies, which could – and do – fill plenty of books on their own, these are not going to be the focus here. If you’re looking to take part in that kind of treasure hunting business, then you need only go to the relevant company website and check out their vacancies page, and apply for a job there.

  This book is aimed at the individual landlubbers who fancy themselves standing right where the treasure is going to be dug up in front of them. It is for the individual, willing to trek through hostile country, pore over dusty manuscripts, have punch-ups in seedy bars and plant a shovel in the right spot in the ground.

  LITERARY TREASURES

  Treasure stories have been around as long as treasure. The mythologists of Classical Greece often had their heroes stumble across treasures, but the Romans, such as Virgil (himself often said to have helped and hindered in searches for buried chests), wrote about people seeking buried treasure deliberately, sometimes seeking supernatural aid, and usually forcing their servants and slaves to do the hard work.

  Tales of pirates and robbers either hiding or distributing wealth remained popular for centuries, but usually with a focus on what the characters were like. As a genre of entertainment and inspiration, however, the definitive story that launched the genre is the 1881 magazine serial The Mutiny of the Hispaniola by Captain George North – or, as it’s better known from its nonpseudonymous publication as a collected novel in 1883, Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  H. Rider Haggard’s novels King Solomon’s Mines and She followed later in the decade, and, between them, the idea of adventurous explorers swashbuckling their way around the world in search of historic loot became established in the public consciousness.

  This was then reinforced in the visual media by the adventures of Tintin (most of whose stories involve lost treasures) and Indiana Jones, and the videogames about Lara Croft and Nathan Drake.

  X NEVER MARKS THE SPOT. USUALLY

  There is – or ought to be – a big difference between how archaeology and treasure hunting work. This is because the two things have somewhat different motives: archaeologists are looking to uncover, preserve and study historical artefacts in a way that keeps them in their original contexts as much as possible, while treasure hunters are looking to get the value of the artefacts.

  This means that archaeologists are more likely to want to uncover material slowly, often leaving it in situ for study, and have a vested interest in co-operating with the autho
rities in order to get the use of facilities and local help. Treasure hunters are more about getting the artefact out and prettied-up so that it will fetch the best price. Except when they don’t, because often it’s scientists, archaeologists and governments who will be the customers.

  In books, movies and videogames, we’re used to seeing characters who are cast or coded as archaeologists actually behaving like treasure hunters – or indeed like soldiers, cops, explorers and bar-room brawlers.

  Indiana Jones is the perfect example: officially an archaeologist, but goes around grabbing artefacts, fighting, bribing officials, dodging ancient booby traps, trying not to get bitten by wild animals and so on. Other fictional archaeologists and treasure hunters are similarly portrayed: Lara Croft, Nathan Drake, Benjamin Gates.

  In real life, things are rather different for both treasure hunters and archaeologists. Research is king, and most work is actually done in libraries, archives and, nowadays, on the Internet. An unsung hero of searching since World War II has been aerial photography, as photos from high altitude show changes to the landscape that are not discernable at ground level. Even sub-surface differences show in high-altitude photos that don’t show at ground level. Subsequently, satellite imagery has proved even more useful, and not just among professionals and academics – amateurs using Google Earth images have discovered over a hundred previously lost pyramids in Egypt.

  Surprisingly, fictional characters rarely use metal detectors, ground penetrating radar, or any form of field equipment. This is doubly unusual since, although these types of equipment do have limitations, they have been used very successfully over the years to discover both historical sites and hoards in a variety of countries.

  Archaeology in the field tends to involve uncovering the layers above the desired history, whether those layers be of soil, concrete, plaster, paint, wood, or anything else. Everything is measured, photographed and described – and this is good practice for treasure hunters too; partly because a lot of your customers for recovered treasure would be archaeologists and museums, who will want that sort of detail, and partly because you can prove you found it, rather than having nicked it from elsewhere.