absolutely no gold."

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[Illustration: Treasure-seekers' Camp at Cape Vidal on African coast.]

Divers searching wreck of Treasure ship Dorothea, Cape Vidal, Africa.

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The coast of Madagascar, once haunted by free-booters who plundered the
rich East Indiamen, is still ransacked by treasure seekers, and
American soldiers in the Philippines indefatigably excavate the
landscape of Luzon in the hope of finding the hoard of Spanish gold
buried by the Chinese mandarin Chan Lu Suey in the eighteenth century.
Every island of the West Indies and port of the Spanish Main abounds in
legends of the mighty sea rogues whose hard fate it was to be laid by
the heels before they could squander the gold that had been won with
cutlass, boarding pike and carronade.

The spirit of true adventure lives in the soul of the treasure hunter.
The odds may be a thousand to one that he will unearth a solitary
doubloon, yet he is lured to undertake the most prodigious exertions by
the keen zest of the game itself. The English novelist, George R.
Sims, once expressed this state of mind very exactly. "Respectable
citizens, tired of the melancholy sameness of a drab existence, cannot
take to crape masks, dark lanterns, silent matches, and rope ladders,
but they can all be off to a pirate island and search for treasure and
return laden or empty without a stain upon their characters. I know a
fine old pirate who sings a good song and has treasure islands at his
fingers' ends. I think I can get together a band of adventurers,
middle-aged men of established reputation in whom the public would have
confidence, who would be only too glad to enjoy a year's romance."

Robert Louis Stevenson who dearly loved a pirate and wrote the finest
treasure story of them all around a proper chart of his own devising,
took Henry James to task for confessing that although he had been a
child he had never been on a quest for buried treasure. "Here is
indeed a willful paradox," exclaimed the author of "Treasure Island,"
"for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be
demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a child
(unless Master James), but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a
military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and
suffered shipwreck and prison, an