The Book of Buried Treasure / Being a True History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, etc., which are sought for to this day

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

"The first week the weather was pleasant, but spent in fitting our Engines, which proved very well, and every way suited to the design; and our Divers outdid all examples of this nature. But with the Dog-Days the autumnal rains usually begin in these parts, and for six weeks we had scarce a good day. The whole frame of Nature seem'd inhospitable, bleak, stormy, rainy, windy, so that our Divers could not bear the cold, and despairing to see any amendment of weather I resolved on a journey across the Isle of Mull, to the so much celebrated II-Columb-Kill,[[3]] in English St. Columb's Church....

"The first four miles we saw but few houses, but cross'd a wild desert country, with a pleasant mixture of Woods and Mountains. Every man and thing I met seem'd a Novelty. I thought myself entering upon a new Scene of Nature, but Nature rough and unpolished, in her undress. I observed the men to be large bodied, stout, subtile, active, patient of cold and hunger. There appeared in all their actions a certain generous air of freedom, and contempt of those trifles, Luxury and Ambition, which we so servilely creep after. They bound their appetites by their necessities and their happiness consists not in having much, but in coveting little.

"The Women seem to have the same sentiments as the men; tho' their Habits were mean, and they had not our sort of breeding, yet in many of them there was a natural Beauty, and a graceful Modesty which never fails of attracting. The usual outward habit of both sexes is the Plaid; the women's much finer, the colours more lively, and the squares larger than the men's, and put me in mind of the ancient Picts. This serves them for a Veil and covers both head and body. The men wear theirs after another manner; when designed for ornament it is loose and flowing, like the mantles our painters give their Heroes.

"Their thighs are bare, with brawny Muscles; a thin brogue on the foot, a short buskin of various colours on the leg, tied above the calf with a strip'd pair of garters. On each side of a large Shot-pouch hangs a Pistol and a Dagger; a round Target on their backs, a blue Bonnet on their heads, in one hand a broadsword, and a musquet in the other. Perhaps no nation goes better arm'd, and I assure you they will handle them with bravery and dexterity, especially the Sword and Target, as our veteran Regiments found to their cost at Killie Crankie."

Although Sir William Sacheverall, he of the facile pen and the romantic temper, brought no Spanish treasure to light, he helped us to see those fighting MacLeans and MacDonalds as they were in their glory, and his description was written almost two and a half centuries ago.

The "Spanish wrack" was handed down from one chief of the Campbell clan to another, as part of the estate, until in 1740, John, the second Duke of Argyll, decided to try his luck, and employed a diving bell, by which means a magnificent bronze cannon was recovered. It has since been kept at Inverary Castle, the seat of the Dukes of Argyll, as an heirloom greatly esteemed. This elaborately wrought piece of ordnance, almost eleven feet in length, bears the arms of Francis I of France (for whom it was cast at Fontainebleau) and the fleur-de-lis. It was probably captured from Francis at the battle of Pavia during his invasion of Italy, and the Spanish records state that several of such cannon were put on a vessel contributed to the Armada by the state of Tuscany. At the same time a large number of gold and silver coins were found by the divers, and the treasure seeking was thereby freshly encouraged. Modern experts in wrecking and salvage have agreed that the crude apparatus of those earlier centuries was inadequate to combat the difficulties of exploring a wreck of the type of the Florencia galleon, built as she was of great timbers of the iron-like African oak which to-day is found to be staunch and unrotted after a submersion of more than three hundred years.

The diving bells of those times were dangerous and clumsy, and easily capsized. The men worked from inside them by thrusting out hooks and tong-like appliances, and dared venture no deeper than eight fathoms, or less than fifty feet. In other words, the treasure might be in the galleon, but it was impossible to find and bring it up. For another century and more, the Florencia was left undisturbed until about forty years ago, the present Duke of Argyll, then Marquis of Lorne, considered it his family duty to investigate the bottom of Tobermory Bay, his curiosity being pricked at finding the ancient chart, and other documents already quoted, among the archives stored in Inverary Castle. More for sport than for profit, he sent down a diver who found a few coins, pieces of oak, and a brass stanchion, after which the owner bothered his head no more about these phantom riches for some time.

In 1903, or three hundred and fifteen years after the Florencia found her grave in Tobermory Bay, a number of gentlemen of Glasgow, rashly speculative for Scots, formed a company and subscribed a good many thousand dollars to equip and maintain a treasure-seeking expedition by modern methods. The Duke of Argyll, like his ancestors before him, was ready to grant permission to search the wreck of the galleon for a term of years, conditioned upon a fair division of the spoils. He let them have the chart, without which no treasure hunt deserves the name, and all the family papers dealing with the Florencia. In charge of the operations was placed Captain William Burns of Glasgow, a hard-headed and vastly experienced wrecker who had handled many important salvage enterprises for the marine underwriters in seas near and far.

The contrast between this twentieth century syndicate with its steam dredges and electric lights, and that primitive age when the MacLeans were harassing Captain Adolpho Smith from their fort beside the bay, is fairly astonishing. The gentlemen of Glasgow were not moved by sentiment, however, and soon Captain Burns was spending their money in a preliminary survey of the waters and the sands where the galleon was supposed to be. Although the ancient chart was explicit in its bearings, and these were made when men were living who had seen a part of the wreck above tide, locating the Florencia proved to be a baffling puzzle. During the first season, 1903, divers and lighters were employed in this work of searching, but the salvage consisted of no more than another bronze cannon loaded with a stone ball, several swords, scabbards, and blunderbusses, a gold ring, and some fifty doubloons bearing the names of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Don Carlos.

Two years later, in 1905, the work was fairly begun with a costly equipment. The bottom of the bay was photographed and a mound of sand revealed, which, it was concluded, covered the surviving part of the galleon. Digging into this bank, the divers found many curious trophies, among them more arms and munition, bottles or canteens, boarding pikes, copper powder pans, and other small furniture, much corroded and encrusted. It was surmised that the vessel lay with her stern cocked up, and that in this end, indicated by the swelling of the sand bank, the treasure was hidden.