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.