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.