Fortune and Glory Page 7

  That said, some elements of the Montezuma’s Head stories have some backing. For example, there were only three effective trails that could have been used to cross the Estrellas – the northern end’s foothills, a pass below Circus Ridge, and the one mentioned in the story. More interestingly, there have been finds of buried silver in the area, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, when treasure-hunting with metal detectors became fashionable.

  Somebody certainly buried that silver between the 1840s and 1880s. Since Mexico is one of the two biggest silver producers in the world (Peru is the other), it’s likely that there is a core of truth to them having hidden funds during the Mexican–American War, to keep it out of US hands. Since the folktales that grew out of it all talked about vast piles of gold, there’s no record of how much silver was actually deposited, and therefore no way to know whether it was all found by the 1980s.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  Moctezuma’s treasure was found by the Conquistadores back in the day: In fact, it was simply handed over. Like other Mesoamerican nations, the Aztecs put a religious significance on gold, rather than a monetary value. When King Ferdinand of Spain needed it to fund the spreading by fire and sword of the word of God, and Cortés declared war on Moctezuma in 1518, Moctezuma turned over his treasury in 1519.

  The Spanish, as usual, simply couldn’t believe that someone would hand over all their gold, so assumed there must be more stashed away. Moctezuma’s brother attacked and drew Cortés into a war, which convinced the Europeans that the Aztecs were defending loot. By 1521 the Spanish had won their war, but found no more treasure.

  This was repeated all over South America, culminating in Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca, who thought of gold as the tears of the sun.

  About 20 per cent of Moctezuma’s gold was shipped back to Spain. The rest was melted down and turned into coinage for the colonies and décor for churches. Cortés also managed to lose a fair amount of treasure when fighting his way out of Tenochtitlan in 1520. Tenochtitlan was an island city in a lake, and when Cortés’s deputy started a massacre, the Aztecs rebelled and started knocking down causeways so the Spanish couldn’t get away. As Cortés fled along one remaining causeway, his army lost a lot of treasure and most of their equipment.

  Over time, the lake and marshes became drained and the treasures were found a little piece at a time as Mexico City rose on the site. Such finds still continue today during construction work. One of the biggest finds came in March 1981, when a construction worker found a piece of gold weighing around 4lb, and shaped to fit in a Conquistador’s armour. It was valued at $32,000 in 1981, and now resides in the National Institute of Anthropology, in Mexico City.

  European explorers had always overestimated how much gold the South American civilizations actually had. They always assumed that there would always be more to find, but that did not make it so in reality.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  The actual physical structure of Mexico City is the biggest obstacle, after the fact that there pretty much isn’t any treasure hidden by Moctezuma. The city’s built on top of what used to be the Aztec capital, and on the site of the lake into which Cortés lost his loot while legging it from a war crime gone wrong. Somewhere under the city there may still be loot that fell into Lake Texcoco along with dying Conquistadores and their cannons in the summer of 1520, but there’s no way to search for it without demolishing the city.

  Since most of the finds over the past century or so have been made by construction workers, your best bet is pretty much to apply for a job with a construction company in Mexico City, and hope to stumble across something while digging up a road.

  Although there has been, at least, silver lying around the area of Montezuma’s Head in Arizona, none of it matched the description of the legends, so you will have to put aside your preconceptions about the gold, and keep an eye for hidden silver.

  Silver ingots are pretty small compared to a mountain range, and so the odds on finding any are long – and lengthened by the fact that the treasure that has been found doesn’t have a legend attached.

  Arizona is also one of the hottest desert parts of the Southwest, easily reaching 115 degrees in the shade in summer, so proper clothing, sunblock and a good supply of bottled water is essential. Wildlife-wise, there is a good population of rattlesnakes, mainly in the form of the western rattlesnake.

  Then there’s the Arizona bark scorpion, a straw-coloured little varmint never bigger than an inch and a half in length, but one of the most dangerous scorpions in the US, and the only one that the government considers a serious threat to life. These guys like to hang upside-down from branches/rocks/cave roofs … Though most adults survive a sting, it is one of the most painful venoms around, and can take days for the pain to subside.

  Mountain lions are a potential threat in the, well, mountains. These big cats can easily take down a human. Fortunately humans are not their usual choice of prey, but attacks do happen, in which case the cougar will go for a bite to the throat or neck. If one takes an interest in you, the best thing to do is make yourself look big and threatening – shout and throw things at it.

  Another danger to watch for in either Arizona or Utah is the actual medieval Black Death, aka bubonic plague. It’s carried by fleas on prairie dogs, rock squirrels and other cute little rodents across the Southwest. The disease kills the rodents so quickly you’re unlikely to meet an infected live one, but if you camp near a nest – a prairie dogtown – you might be in flea-jumping distance. There are about a dozen human cases a year in the region. Luckily bubonic plague responds to modern medicine. They can carry rabies as well, so make sure your inoculations are up to date.

  There were a lot of open mines in the 19th century around the Sierra Estrellas, and a lot of them still are, albeit empty. Be careful not to fall in. In Utah, the biggest problem is that there never was any Aztec treasure there.

  Aside from the fifty-grand-a-pop snails at Three Lakes, the region is also home to a reasonable population of rattlesnakes – a subspecies called the Great Basin rattlesnake – and people have died from rattler bites while exploring the Johnson Canyon site.

  The same snakes, and diseased rodents mentioned above, are also valid warnings for Utah.

  WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE SNAKES?

  There are venomous snakes, spiders and other assorted creepy-crawlies in various parts of the world, and of course they especially love to hang out in caves, tunnels, jungle ruins and basically the kinds of places where treasure hunters and archaeologists are most likely to be stomping around in search of ancient booty and artefacts. Most people tend to call these creatures poisonous, rather than the correct term of venomous, so let’s first clean up the confusion over terms.

  If a creature bites you, and you get sick or die, it was venomous. If you bite it, and you get sick or die, then it was poisonous. More technically, a venom requires to be injected directly into the bloodstream to take effect, and should not be effective when ingested, whereas a poison is secreted and is effective when ingested and/or touched.

  There’s no reason why a creature can’t be both; the rhabdophis family of snakes, common to Southeast Asia, are the only type of snake to be both poisonous and venomous, but many insects are as well, though mostly only to each other.

  The most venomous snake in the world is the Belcher’s sea snake, found in the waters around Indonesia and Australia. One venomous bite is toxic enough to kill a thousand people. Fortunately, three quarters of the time they bite without injecting venom and are quite docile in disposition. Most of their victims, therefore, tend to be fishermen who get them tangled in nets. On land, thankfully the most dangerous snakes in the world are mostly found in Australia, and none of the treasures in this book will take you there. The exception is the Blue Krait, which also lives in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia.

  There isn’t really a simple definitive way to identify a venomous snake in general terms – they don’t all have coloured markings
or an unusual type of fangs. That said, the important thing is to look out for the general type of snakes in the area. Cobras, found across Africa and Asia, have a distinctive hood that can flare open. Rattlesnakes, found in North and Central America, have the distinctive bone rings on their tails that make the famous rattling sound and often a black diamond pattern on their backs. Vipers, found worldwide, have a very triangular-shaped head (rattlesnakes are also a type of viper). So, overall, if you see a snake with either a hood or whose head is particularly triangular, be extra careful.

  CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE PIRATES’ TREASURE

  WHAT IS IT?

  Iron-bound wooden sea chests, filled to the brim with gold and silver coins – doubloons, pieces of eight, and silver dollars – looted from ships and the early Spanish colonies in the Americas, or, in Kidd’s case, the Indian Ocean, and buried for safekeeping either on the east coast of North America, or on Caribbean islands.

  You’ve seen pirate movies, right?

  HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?

  As far as the average haul plundered from merchant ships by gentlemen of fortune goes, probably nothing. Zip, nada, nowt, zero.

  The thing most people don’t take into consideration is the nature of what pirates took from the ships they raided. Despite what Hollywood shows us, the Caribbean and Atlantic have never been exclusively the territory of treasure ships ferrying gold and gems between noblemen’s estates in Europe and the colonies.

  The vast percentage of shipping has always carried what were the most valuable trading commodities and practical supplies of the day: sugar, molasses, tobacco, rum, weapons, tools, emigrants and slaves. Slaves would often be freed and invited to join the pirates, while other commodities would simply be sold.

  None of these ‘treasures’, therefore, would suit being buried anyway, and certainly wouldn’t be shiny collectibles if you dug them up after 300 years.

  That said, there are exceptions to every rule, and one legendary pirate who actually did properly bury his treasure is Captain William Kidd. The East India Company estimated Kidd’s total treasure to be worth £400,000 in 1701. That’s about £6.576 billion in today’s money. They were revising upwards for the sake of their insurance claims, mind you, as we know that what he actually buried was worth $4.2 million today.

  Another exception is a legendary treasure buried by a nonlegendary pirate: The Treasure of Lima, stolen by Captain William Thompson in 1820. This treasure consisted of 113 gold religious statues (at least one a life-sized Virgin Mary with child), 200 chests of jewels, 273 swords with jewelled hilts, 1,000 diamonds, some solid gold crowns, 150 chalices, and hundreds of gold and silver bars. It was valued at tens of millions of dollars in 1820, and is usually referenced today as being worth around $160 million.

  THE STORY

  Typically, some gentlemen of fortune on the High Seas have attacked and looted ships bearing treasure from the Americas back to England or Spain, and then decided to lie low while the heat cooled off. So as not to be caught with the loot, they buried it on an island to keep it safe. Later, they would have gone back and collected it, but either were caught or killed in battle, and so the treasure remains buried.

  Islands and towns up and down the east coast of North America, from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia, have a plethora of local legends about buried pirate treasure, usually attributed to either Captain Kidd or Blackbeard, although pretty much every pirate has a buried treasure legend attached to their name somewhere.

  The most famous pirate to have actually buried treasure was Scotsman William Kidd. In 1695, he returned from the Colonies (having married a rich widow in order to go into business, and that not having worked out well) and persuaded several government figures from the ruling Whig Party – including Lord Bellomont, Governor of Massachusetts Bay and New York – and even King William III to invest in a proposal for a Privateering and piratehunting expedition to the East Indies.

  Kidd got a Letter of Marque, authorizing him to attack French ships, and set off in the Adventure Galley, a warship with a pirate crew. What could possibly go wrong?

  Well, Kidd, for a start – being an arrogant bully who beat a sailor to death with an iron bucket for no real reason, Kidd soon turned pirate himself, and attacked and plundered British and Indian ships. This culminated in the capture of the Quedagh Merchant, a treasure ship of the Mughals of India.

  The authorities of several countries were soon after him for his crimes, and so Kidd sailed the Quedagh Merchant back to his old Colonial haunts, but ran the ship aground (he really was a rubbish captain). He acquired a new ship, and ran up and down the coast burying portions of the Quedagh Merchant’s treasure in Anguilla and Hispaniola, before returning to Long Island and burying more treasure on Gardiner’s Island, and possibly elsewhere too.

  Kidd was captured, but he tried to bribe various Colonial governors with different amounts of treasure from the stashes he had buried. He offered amounts of £30,000, £40,000 and – after his trial – even the location of £100,000 in treasure in return for a pardon. It didn’t work He was taken back to London for trial, and found guilty of both piracy and the murder of the crewman he whacked over the head with a bucket.

  Kidd was hanged at Admiralty Dock in London in 1701, and his body tarred and left in a gibbet. Since then, people have been searching for his buried loot all along the Long Island coast, as well as in the Caribbean.

  There was another William who turned pirate, in 1820, William Thompson, captain of the Mary Dear (no relation to Hammond Innes’s fictional insurance-scam ship, the Mary Deare, which was more based on a theory about the Mary Celeste).

  In 1820, the Spanish Viceroy of Lima was getting jittery about potential revolution in the city. He and the top clerics at the cathedral decided to evacuate the cathedral’s treasures, and some of the treasury’s holdings – totalling over $12 million at the time – to safe holdings in Mexico. To transport the loot, they hired British sea captain Thompson, apparently not worried by the previous 400 years’ worth of British sailors plundering Spanish treasure from South America. They did, however, at least send six trained soldiers, and a number of priests to keep an eye on this valuable cargo. The Mary Dear set sail from the Peruvian port of Callao, northwards up the Pacific coast of South America.

  Quicker than a ship’s parrot could say ‘pieces of eight’, Thompson had the soldiers’ and priests’ throats cut, and their bodies thrown overboard. He then landed on Cocos Island – or the Isla del Coco to the Spanish – and buried the treasure from Lima. He and his crew agreed to return for it later, but the Mary Dear was soon fallen upon by the Spanish Navy, and the crew captured. Captain Thompson and his First Mate bargained with the treasure for their lives.

  While the rest of their crew was executed, Thompson and his First Mate returned to Cocos Island with the Spaniards, to lead them to the treasure. However, as soon as they were ashore, they disappeared into the jungle and were never seen again.

  PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION

  People have been looking for Kidd’s treasure for a long time – there was already a popular folk song about him, called Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Sea, within months of his execution; the song referring to him having hidden 200 bars of gold. Originally the searchers simply looked on Gardiner’s Island, starting with Lord Bellomont, who would be in an awkward position himself if Kidd didn’t hang. He needed the loot as evidence, and this led him to remind the island’s owner, John Gardiner, of how letting Kidd use his land for loot-storage could be construed as conspiracy. This spurred Gardiner to point out exactly where Kidd’s loot was.

  This didn’t stop local tongues wagging with the suggestion that Kidd had buried more treasure than Gardiner had handed over. First the tales said there was more treasure on the island, then expanded to other islands. Oak Island got roped in to the legend in the 19th century, and nowadays people are even searching for Kidd’s haul in the Pacific Ocean.

  This is probably because Captain Kidd was said to have d
ocked at various anchorages before giving himself up to Bellomont. All of the anchorages were common locations for ships to stop off and debark landing parties and take on provisions. Aside from Gardiner’s Island itself, there were stories of Kidd visiting Block Island, Charles Island, and the Thimble Islands (all in Long Island Sound); as well as Raritan Bay in New Jersey (which no longer exists); Clark’s Island in Massachusetts (locally called Kidd’s Island) and various sites along the Hudson Valley. Old coins have been found in these places, but since they were regular stopping points for ships in general, there’s no reason to assume they came from any specific crew.

  The most persistent stories centre on Block Island, where Kidd was given supplies by a Mrs Mercy Sands Raymond, whom the legends say was paid off by having her apron filled with gold and gems. She certainly came into money at some point, as, when her husband died, she and her family moved to northern Connecticut, and bought a large estate. Local legend referred to the family as ‘enriched by the apron’.

  By 1875, local papers were reporting digs on the western coast of an island called Grand Manan, in the Bay of Fundy, and these references call the scoured coastline ‘Money Cove’.

  Things started to get really interesting for fans of Kidd’s treasure in the late 1920s/early 1930s, when brothers Guy and Hubert Palmer, who ran a pirate museum in Eastbourne, claimed to have found four parchment maps leading to Kidd’s treasure, inside pieces of furniture which Victorian historians had ascribed to Kidd’s ownership.

  These were obviously cool items for a pirate museum to have, especially since they depicted a mystery island. Neither the Palmers nor anyone they showed the maps to were able to identify the island or location, but the brothers claimed to have had the maps certified by experts. The Palmers traced over them and photographed them, before the originals conveniently disappeared.

  By the 1930s, pirate treasure adventure stories were big business, and a writer named Harold T. Wilkins visited the museum. He viewed the map copies, but wasn’t allowed to take copies himself. Nevertheless he recalled a variety of details, and combined them to make his own ‘Skeleton Island’, for his 1935 book Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island. In this book the map is accompanied by coded clues and ciphers to the identity of the island, and the location of the treasure on it.