ating where the treasure was hid. And as
it is his invariable practice to secrete and bury his booty, and from
the perilous life he leads, being often killed or captured, he can
never revisit the spot again, therefore immense sums remain buried in
those places and are irrevocably lost. Search is often made by persons
who labor in anticipation of throwing up with their spade and pickaxe,
gold bars, diamond crosses sparkling amongst the dirt, bags of golden
doubloons and chests wedged close with moidores, ducats and pearls; but
although great treasures lie hid in this way, it seldom happens that
any is recovered."[1]

In this tamed, prosaic age of ours, treasure-seeking might seem to be
the peculiar province of fiction, but the fact is that expeditions are
fitting out every little while, and mysterious schooners flitting from
many ports, lured by grimy, tattered charts presumed to show where the
hoards were hidden, or steering their courses by nothing more tangible
than legend and surmise. As the Kidd tradition survives along the
Atlantic coast, so on divers shores of other seas persist the same kind
of wild tales, the more convincing of which are strikingly alike in
that the lone survivor of the red-handed crew, having somehow escaped
the hanging, shooting, or drowning that he handsomely merited,
preserved a chart showing where the treasure had been hid. Unable to
return to the place, he gave the parchment to some friend or shipmate,
this dramatic transfer usually happening as a death-bed ceremony. The
recipient, after digging in vain and heartily damning the departed
pirate for his misleading landmarks and bearings, handed the chart down
to the next generation.

It will be readily perceived that this is the stock motive of almost
all buried treasure fiction, the trademark of a certain brand of
adventure story, but it is really more entertaining to know that such
charts and records exist and are made use of by the expeditions of the
present day. Opportunity knocks at the door. He who would gamble in
shares of such a speculation may find sun-burned, tarry gentlemen, from
Seattle to Singapore, and from Capetown to New Zealand, eager to
whisper curious information of charts and sailing directions, and to
make sail and away.

Some of them are still seeking booty lost on Cocos Island off the coast
of Costa Rica where a dozen expeditions have futilely sweated and dug;
others have cast anchor in harbors of Guam and th