CHAPTER X
THE LURE OF COCOS ISLAND
It will be recalled that Lord Bellomont, in writing to his government of the seizure of Kidd and his treasure, made mention of "a Pirate committed who goes by the name of Captain Davis, that came passenger with Kidd from Madagascar. I suppose him to be that Captain Davis that Dampier and Wafer speak of in their printed relations of Voyages, for an extraordinary stout[[1]] man; but let him be as stout as he will, here he is a prisoner, and shall be forthcoming upon the order I receive from England concerning him."
If Bellomont was right in this surmise, then he had swept into his drag-net one of the most famous and successful buccaneers of the seventeenth century, a man who must have regarded the alleged misdeeds of Kidd as much ado about nothing. Very likely it was this same Captain Edward Davis who may have been at the East Indies on some lawful business of his own, but he had no cause for anxiety at being captured by Bellomont as a suspicious character. He had honorably retired in 1688 from his trade of looting Spanish galleons and treasure towns, in which year the king's pardon was offered all buccaneers who would quit that way of life and claim the benefit of the proclamation.
It is known that he was afterwards in England, where he dwelt in quietness and security. William Dampier mentions him always with peculiar respect. "Though a buccaneer, he was a man of much sterling worth, being an excellent commander, courageous, never rash, and endued in a superior degree with prudence, moderation, and steadiness, qualities in which the buccaneers generally have been most deficient. His character is not stained with acts of cruelty; on the contrary, wherever he commanded, he restrained the ferocity of his companions. It is no small testimony to his abilities that the whole of the buccaneers in the South Sea during his time, in every enterprise wherein he bore part, voluntarily placed themselves under his guidance, and paid him obedience as their leader; and no symptom occurs of their having at any time wavered in this respect or shown inclination to set up a rival authority.[[2]]
During the Kidd proceedings, the Crown officers made out no case against Edward Davis, and he appears at the trial only as a witness in Kidd's behalf. He testified in corroboration of the fact that Kidd had brought home the two French passes taken out of his captures, and his experienced mind was quick to recognize the importance of the documents as a sound defense against the charges of piracy.
Curiously enough, the name of Captain Edward Davis has since been linked with a buried treasure story, that of Cocos Island in the Pacific. Certain it is that he and his comrades took great spoils along the Spanish coasts of South America and the Isthmus, and that he used Cocos Island as a convenient base for careening ship and recuperating the health of his hard-fighting, careless crew. Wafer has given the following description of this popular resort for treasure seekers of modern times:
"The middle of Cocos Island is a steep hill, surrounded with a plain declining to the sea. This plain is thick set with cocoanut trees; but what contributes greatly to the pleasure of the place is that a great many springs of clear and sweet water, rising to the top of the hill, are there gathered as in a deep large basin or pond, and the water having no channel, it overflows the verge of its basin in several places, and runs trickling down in pleasant streams. In some places of its overflowing, the rocky side of the hill being more perpendicular and hanging over the plain beneath, the water pours down in a cataract, so as to leave a dry space under the spout, and form a kind of arch of water. The freshness which the falling water gives the air in this hot climate makes this a delightful place.
"We did not spare the cocoa-nuts. One day, some of our men being minded to make themselves merry went ashore and cut down a great many cocoa-nut trees, from which they gathered the fruit, and drew about twenty gallons of the milk. They then sat down and drank healths to the King and Queen, and drank an excessive quantity; yet it did not end in drunkenness; but this liquor so chilled and benumbed their nerves that they could neither go nor stand. Nor could they return on board without the help of those who had not been partakers of the frolic, nor did they recover under four or five days' time."[[3]]
Captain Edward Davis had found this delectable islet during a singularly adventurous voyage. The English buccaneers and the French filibustiers who had long cruised in the West Indies, were driven from their haunts by the vigorous activity of the European governments, and in 1683 an expedition was organized to go pirating against the Spaniards in the Pacific, or the "South Sea." Dampier was of this number, also Captain John Cook, Captain Edward Davis, and Lionel Wafer who wrote the journal of the voyage. The scheme was hatched on the coast of Hispaniola, and after taking two prizes, French vessels, to Virginia to be sold, the company seventy strong, and most of them old hands at this game, stood out from the Chesapeake in an eighteen-gun ship called the Revenge.
Off the coast of Guinea they found a large Danish ship which better suited their purpose, wherefore she was carried by boarding. They christened her the Batchelor's Delight, and abandoned their old vessel which was burned, "that she might tell no tales." In February of 1684, they rounded Cape Horn and made for the island of Juan Fernandez, which several of the company had previously visited with Watling. Then sailing northward, the ship visited the Galapagos Islands to catch turtle, and bore away for Cocos which was missed because of adverse winds and faulty navigation. On this stretch of the voyage, the Batchelor's Delight passed what was known as the Isle of Plate, or Drake's Island, in latitude 2 min. 42 sec. S., which has an alluring lost treasure story of its own. Says Esquemeling:
"This island received its name from Sir Francis Drake and his famous actions, for here it is reported by tradition that he made the dividend or sharing of that quantity of plate which he took in the Armada of this sea, distributing it to each man of his company by whole bowls full. The Spaniards affirm to this day that he took at that time twelve score tons of plate, and sixteen bowls of coined money a man, his number being then forty-five men in all. Insomuch that they were forced to heave much of it overboard, because his ship could not carry it all. Hence was this island called by the Spaniards themselves the Isle of Plate, from this great dividend, and by us Drake's Isle."[[4]]
The mainland of South America, or New Spain, was sighted near Cape Blanco, where Captain John Cook died, and Edward Davis, then quartermaster, was elected commander. He cruised for some time along the coast, learning among other interesting news that at Point Saint Elena, "many years before a rich Spanish ship was driven ashore for want of wind to work her, that immediately after she struck she heeled off to seaward and sank in seven or eight fathoms of water, and that no one ever attempted to fish for her because there falls in here a great high sea."[[5]]
In the bay of Guayaquil, on the coast of Peru, Davis and Swan, who had joined him in a small ship called the Cygnet, captured four vessels, three of which had cargoes of negroes. Most of them were let go, to the great disappointment of Dampier who was filled with a mighty scheme of treasure finding which he outlined in these words:
"Never was put into the hands of men a greater opportunity to enrich themselves. We had 1000 negroes, all lusty young men and women, and we had 200 tons of flour stored up at the Galapagos Islands. With these negroes we might have gone and settled at Santa Maria on the Isthmus of Darien, and have employed them in getting gold out of the mines there. All the Indians living in that neighborhood were mortal enemies to the Spaniards, were flushed by successes against them, and for several years had been fast friends of the privateers. Add to which, we should have had the North Sea open to us, and in a short time should have received assistance from all parts of the West Indies. Many thousands of buccaneers from Jamaica and the French islands would have flocked to us; and we should have been an overmatch for all the force the Spaniards could have brought out of Peru against us."
Soon after this, the little squadron blockaded the Bay of Panama for several weeks, plundering whatever shipping came their way. There they were joined by two hundred Frenchmen and eighty Englishmen, old buccaneers who had crossed the Isthmus of Darien to have a fling in the South Seas. Presently another party of two hundred and sixty-four sea rovers under French command were added to the fleet, besides a strong force of Englishmen led by one Townley. Davis was made commander-in-chief of this formidable combination of ten ships and nine hundred and sixty men, of which the flagship was the Batchelor's Delight. They laid in wait for the annual treasure fleet sent by the Viceroy of Peru to Panama and found it, but were beaten off because Davis' confederates lacked his eagerness for fighting at close quarters.
Turning his attention to the mainland, Davis sacked and burned the city of Leon on the lake of Nicaragua. There one of the free-booters killed "was a stout, grey-headed old man of the name of Swan, aged about eighty-four years, who had served under Cromwell, and had ever since made privateering or buccaneering his occupation. This veteran would not be dissuaded from going on the enterprise against Leon; but his strength failed in the march, and after being left on the road he was found by the Spaniards, who endeavored to make him their prisoner; but he refused to surrender, and fired his musket amongst them, having in reserve a pistol still charged; on which he was shot dead."[[6]]
After this, the force scattered in small bands to plunder on their own account, Davis keeping together the best of the men whom he took to Cocos Island where a considerable stay was made. Thence he ravaged the coast of Peru, capturing many vessels and taking many towns. With booty amounting to five thousand pieces of eight for every man, Davis sailed to Juan Fernandez to refit, intending to proceed from there to the West Indies, but before the ships and men were ready for the long voyage around Cape Horn, many of the buccaneers had lost all their gold at dice, and they could not endure to quit the South Sea empty handed. Their luckier comrades sailed for the West Indies with Captain Knight, while they chose to remain and try their fortune afresh with Captain Davis, in the Batchelor's Delight. They soon fell in with a large party of French and English buccaneers who had formerly cruised with them, and were now engaged in trying to take the rich city of Guayaquil. They were making sorry business of it, however, and in sore need of such a capable leader as Davis. He finished the task with neatness and dispatch and shared in the gorgeous plunder of gold and silver and jewels, reckoned by one of the Frenchmen in his account of the episode at fifteen hundred thousand livres.
Davis was now satisfied to leave the Pacific, but whether he went first to Cocos Island to bury any treasure, history saith not, although tradition roundly affirms that he did. That he and many of his fellow buccaneers frequently resorted to the Galapagos group, as well as tarrying at Cocos, is a matter of record. Of the former islands, Captain Colnet who touched there in 1793, wrote:[[7]]
"This isle appears to have been a favorite resort of the buccaneers as we found seats made by them of stone and earth, and a considerable number of broken jars scattered about, and some whole, in which the Peruvian wine and liquors of the country are preserved. We also found daggers, nails and other implements. The watering-place of the buccaneers was at this time entirely dried up, and there was only found a small rivulet between two hills, running into the sea, the northernmost of which hills forms the south point of Fresh Water Bay. There is plenty of wood, but that near the shore is not large enough for other use than firewood."
The buccaneers of other voyages than these may have landed at Cocos Island to leave their treasure. Heaven knows they found plenty of it in those waters. There was Captain Bartholomew Sharp, for example, with whom Dampier had sailed several years before. He took a Guayaquil ship called the San Pedro off Panama, and aboard her found nearly forty thousand pieces of eight, besides silver, silver bars and ingots of gold, and a little later captured the tall galleon Rosario, the richest prize ever boarded by the buccaneers. She had many chests of pieces of eight, and a quantity of wine and brandy. Down in her hold, bar upon bar, "were 700 pigs of plate," rough silver from the mines, not yet made ready for the Lima mint. The pirates thought this crude silver was tin, and so left it where it lay, in the hold of the Rosario, "which we turned away loose into the sea,"[[8]] with the precious stuff aboard her. One pig of the seven hundred was taken aboard the Trinity of Captain Sharp "to make bullets of." About two-thirds of it was "melted and squandered," but a fragment remained when the ship touched at Antigua, homeward bound, and was given to a "Bristol man" in exchange for a drink of rum. He sold it in England for seventy-five pounds sterling.
"Thus," says Basil Ringrose, "we parted with the richest booty we got on the whole voyage." Captain Bartholomew Sharp may have been thinking of something else than the cargo of silver, for aboard the Rosario was a woman, "the beautifullest Creature that his Eyes had ever beheld," while Ringrose calls her "the most beautiful woman that I ever saw in the South Seas."
Of these wild crews that flung away their lives and their treasure to enrich romance and tradition, it has been said:
"They were of that old breed of rover whose port lay always a little farther on; a little beyond the sky-line. Their concern was not to preserve life, but rather to squander it away; to fling it, like so much oil, into the fire, for the pleasure of going up in a blaze. If they lived riotously, let it be urged in their favor that at least they lived. They lived their vision. They were ready to die for what they believed to be worth doing. We think them terrible. Life itself is terrible. But life was not terrible to them, for they were comrades; and comrades and brothers-in-arms are stronger than life. Those who live at home at ease may condemn them. The old buccaneers were happier than they. The buccaneers had comrades and the strength to lead their own lives."[[9]]
This stout old breed had long since vanished when Cocos Island once more became the theater of buried treasure legend. The versions of this latter story agree in the essential particular that it was Captain Thompson of the merchant brig Mary Dear who stole the twelve million dollars' worth of plate, jewels, and gold coin which had been entrusted to him by the Spanish residents of Lima in 1820, and buried them on Cocos Island. Then, after he had joined the crew of the pirate, Benito Bonito, and somehow managed to escape alive when that enterprising gentleman came to grief, he tried to return to Cocos Island to recover the fabulous treasure.
The account of his later wanderings and adventures, as handed down in its most trustworthy form, has been the inspiration of several modern treasure-seeking expeditions. It is related that a native of Newfoundland, Keating by name, while sailing from England in 1844, met a man of middle age, "handsome in appearance and having about him something of an air of mystery which had an attraction of its own." This was, of course, none other than Captain Thompson of the Mary Dear. He became friendly with Keating and when they landed at Newfoundland, the latter asked him to accept the hospitality of his home. The stranger, who appeared anxious to avoid public notice, remained for some time with Keating, and wishing to make some return for his kindness, at length confided that he was one of the two survivors of Benito Bonito's crew, and possessed a secret which would make them immensely rich. If Keating could persuade one of the merchants of Newfoundland to fit out a vessel, they would sail to the Pacific and fetch home enough treasure to buy the whole island.
Keating believed the strange tale and passed it on to a ship-owner who agreed to furnish a vessel provided one Captain Bogue should go in command of the expedition. While preparations were under way, Thompson was inconsiderate enough to die, but it goes without saying that he left a map carefully marked with crosses and bearings. Keating and Bogue set sail with this precious document, and after a long and tedious voyage into the Pacific, they cast anchor off Cocos Island.
Treasure-seekers digging on Cocos Island.
Christian Cruse, the hermit treasure-seeker of Cocos Island.
There the brace of adventurers were rowed ashore, leaving the vessel in charge of the mate. Captain Thompson's directions were found to be accurate, and a cave was discovered and in it a dazzling store of treasure to make an honest sailor-man rub his eyes and stagger in his tracks. Keating and Bogue decided that the secret must be withheld from the crew at all hazards, but their excitement betrayed them and all hands clamored that they must be given shares of the booty. Keating protested that a division should not be made until they had returned to their home port and the owner of the ship had been given the greater part which belonged to him by rights.
A mutiny flared up, and the mate and the men went ashore, leaving Keating and Bogue marooned on board, but the search was bootless for lack of directions. They returned to the ship in a very savage temper indeed and swore to kill the two leaders unless they should tell them how to find the cave. Promising to show the way on the morrow, Keating and Bogue slipped ashore in a whale-boat that night, planning to take all the treasure they could carry and hoping to find opportunity to secrete it on shipboard.
This program was spoiled by a tragedy. While trying to get back to the ship through the heavy surf that roared on the beach, the boat was upset. Bogue, heavily ballasted with treasure, went to the bottom like a plummet and was seen no more. Keating clung to the water-logged boat which was caught in a current and carried to sea. Two days later he was picked up, exhausted almost unto death, by a Spanish schooner which put him ashore on the coast of Costa Rica. Thence he made his way overland to the Atlantic, and worked his passage home to Newfoundland in a trading vessel. His ship returned with never a doubloon among the mutinous crew.
This experience seemed to have snuffed out the ardor of Keating for treasure-seeking, and it was as much as twenty years later that he confided the tale to a townsman named Nicholas Fitzgerald. They talked about fitting out another ship, but Keating up and died in the midst of the scheming. He had married a very young wife, and she set great store by the chart and directions preserved as a heritage from Captain Thompson. In 1894 she struck a partnership with a Captain Hackett and they organized an expedition which sailed for Cocos Island in a small brig called the Aurora. This adventure amounted to nothing. There was dissension on board, the voyage was longer than expected, provisions fell short, and the Aurora jogged homeward without sighting the treasure island.
Meanwhile other explorers had been busy. A German, Von Bremer, spent several thousand dollars in excavating and tunneling, but found no reward. The tales of treasure also fired the brain of a remarkable person named Gissler, who took up his solitary residence on Cocos Island more than twenty years ago where he has since reigned with the title and authority of governor of the same, by virtue of a commission duly signed, sealed, and delivered by the republic of Costa Rica. As a persistent and industrious treasure-hunter, this tropical hermit is unique.
He was visited in 1896 by Captain Shrapnel of H.M.S. Haughty who had heard the stories of Thompson and Benito Bonito along the coastwise ports. By way of giving his blue-jackets something to do, he landed a party three hundred strong on Cocos Island whose landscape they vainly blasted and otherwise disarranged for several days, but without success. The Admiralty lacked imagination and reprimanded Captain Shrapnel for his enterprising break in the dull routine of duty. It was decreed that no more naval vessels were to touch at Cocos Island on any pretext whatever.
This by no means discouraged Captain Shrapnel who waited until it was permissible for him to apply for leave of absence. In England he found gentlemen adventurers sufficient to finance an expedition which sailed in the Lytton in 1903. Of this party was Hervey de Montmorency, whose account of the venture includes the following information:
"On the ninth of August, at four o'clock in the morning, every treasure-seeker was on deck straining his eyes to penetrate the mist and darkness; then as the sun rose, the gray mass on the horizon turned to green, and Cocos Island, with its lofty wooded peak, its abrupt, cliff-like shores, its innumerable cascades of sparkling water, was displayed to eager and admiring eyes.
"The anchor was dropped in the little bay, and at the splash, flocks of birds rose screaming and circling overhead. The sandy beach on which the seekers landed is strewn with boulders, on each of which is carved the name and business of some vessel which has called at Cocos. Some of the dates carry one back to Nelson's time; and all sorts of ships seem to have visited the lonely little island, while many a boulder testified to blighted hopes and fruitless errands after treasure.
"Captain Shrapnel's party set to work with the highest expectation. No previous expedition had been so well furnished with clues. Once on the right track, it seemed impossible that they should fail. They searched for ten days, encouraged now by the finding of the broken arm of a battered cross brought from some Peruvian church, again by a glimpse into what promised falsely to be a treasure cave; but all blasting, digging, and damming of streams proved useless. Captain Shrapnel at last called a council of war, and declared his opinion that the search was hopeless; landslips, previous excavations, and the torrential rains of this tropical region had so entirely altered the face of the island that clues and directions were of little avail, nor did their agreement with the owners of the Lytton permit of a longer stay on Cocos.
"We did not leave the island, however, without paying a visit to its governor, Gissler, whose little settlement is on Wafer Bay. Rounding the headland from Chatham Bay, we came into the quiet little nook where he has made his home, and he at once waded out in the surf to greet the visitors,—a tall, bronzed man, with a long, gray heard reaching below his waist, and deep-set eyes which gazed with obvious suspicion. Gissler had learned to distrust the coming of strangers, who have paid small regard to his rights, pillaging his crops, killing his livestock, and even making free with his home.
"Reassured by Captain Shrapnel's party that he had nothing to fear from them, he invited them to his house and clearing, and told them of his long and lonely hunt for the pirate's treasure. When he first went to live on Cocos, he found many traces of the freebooters. There were traces of their old camps, with thirty-two stone steps leading to a cave, old fire-places, rusty pots and arms, and empty bottles to mark the scene of their carousing. He had found only one gold coin, a doubloon of the time of Charles III of Spain, bearing the date of 1788."
In 1901, a company was formed in Vancouver, with a capital of $10,000, to fit out an expedition for Cocos Island. Gissler got wind of this project and formally addressed the government of Costa Rica in these written words:
"Allow me to inform you that no company with any such intent would have the right to land on Cocos Island, as I hold a concession from the authorities of Costa Rica in regard to the said treasure, in which concession the Costa Rica government has an interest. Certainly anything that might be undertaken by such a company from Vancouver would amount to naught without my consent."
This protest was paid due heed, but two years later, an Englishman, Claude Robert Guiness, persuaded the officials of Costa Rica to listen kindly to his plea, and he was granted the right to explore the island for two years. Gissler stood by his guns, drew up a list of grievances, and sailed for the mainland in a small boat to assert his rights to his kingdom. At that time, a wealthy British naval officer, Lord Fitzwilliam, was bound out to Cocos Island in his own steam yacht with a costly equipment of machinery and a heavy crew to find the treasure. He found poor Gissler in a Costa Rican port, became interested in his wrongs, and promptly supported his claims. An English nobleman with surplus wealth is a person to wield influence in the councils of a Central American republic and Gissler was pacified and given a renewal of his documentary rights as governor and population of Cocos Island.
Lord Fitzwilliam took him on board the yacht and in this dignified fashion Gissler returned to this kingdom. He earned his passage by telling his own version of the treasure, as he had culled and revised it from various sources, and his bill of particulars was something to gloat over, including as it did such dazzling bits of narrative as this:
"Besides the treasure buried by Captain Thompson, there was vast wealth left on Cocos by Benito Bonito himself. He captured a treasure galleon off the coast of Peru and took two other vessels laden with riches sent out from Mexico at the outbreak of the revolution against the Spaniards. On Cocos he buried three hundred thousand pounds' weight of silver and silver dollars, in a sandstone cave in the side of the mountain. Then he laid kegs of powder on top of the cave and blew away the face of the cliff. In another excavation he placed gold bricks, 733 of them, four by three inches in size, and two inches thick, and 273 gold-hilted swords, inlaid with jewels. On a bit of land in the little river, he buried several iron kettles filled with gold coin."
Lord Fitzwilliam and his yacht arrived at Cocos in December of 1904, and the party of laborers fell to with prodigious zest. While they were making the dirt fly, another English expedition, commanded by Arnold Gray, hove in sight, and proceeded to begin excavating at inconveniently close range. In fact, both parties were cocksure that the lost cave was located in one spot beneath a great mass of debris that had tumbled down from the overhanging height. The inevitable result was that a pretty quarrel arose. Neither force would yield its ground. Inasmuch as both were using dynamite rather lavishly, treasure hunting became as dangerous as war. When the rival expeditions were not dodging the rocks that were sent hurtling by the blasting, they were using bad language, the one accusing the other of effacing its landmarks and playing hob with its clues.
The climax was a pitched battle in which heads were broken and considerable blood spilt. It is almost needless to observe that no treasure was found. Lord Fitzwilliam sailed home in his yacht and found that the news of his escapade had aroused the displeasure of the naval authorities, after which he lost all zest for finding buried treasure.
Since then, hardly a year has passed but an expedition or two for Cocos Island has been in the wind. In 1906, a company organized in Seattle issued an elaborate printed prospectus, offering shares in a venture to sail in a retired pilot schooner, and recounting all the old tales of Captain Thompson, Benito Bonito, and Keating. At about the same time, a wealthy woman of Boston, after a summer visit to Newfoundland, was seized with enthusiasm for a romantic speculation and talked of finding a ship and crew. San Francisco has beheld more than one schooner slide out through the Golden Gate in quest of Cocos Island.
To enumerate these ventures and describe them in detail would make a tiresome catalogue of the names of vessels and adventurous men with the treasure bee in their bonnets. Charts and genuine information are no longer necessary to one of these expeditions. Cocos Island is under such a spell as has set a multitude to digging for the treasure of Captain Kidd. The gold is there, this is taken for granted, and no questions are asked. The island was long a haunt of buccaneers and pirates, this much is certain, and who ever heard of a true pirate of romance who knew his business that did not employ his spare time in "a-burying of his treasure?"
[[1]] Strong, or robust.
[[2]] History of the Buccaneers of America, by Captain James Burney (1816).
[[3]] Voyage and Description, etc., by Lionel Wafer, London (1699).
[[4]] "The Buccaneers of America," by John Esquemeling (Published, 1684).
[[5]] Dampier. To search for this wreck with a view to recover the treasure in her was one of the objects of an expedition from England to the South Sea a few years later than the voyage of Davis.
[[6]] "History of the Buccaneers of America," by Captain James Burney (1816).
[[7]] Colnet's "Voyage to the Pacific."
[[8]] Esquemeling.
[[9]] "On the Spanish Main," by John Masefield.