Pirate treasure off the coast of Ecuador - a treasure that gives hope

It is one thing to go out into a field with a detector and hope for a nice find, it is quite another to hunt for a specific historical treasure. I have already described and dissected two famous Nazi treasures here, and in both cases I have been forced to conclude that the treasure is most likely not there, or that it has already been collected. This is unfortunately the case with the vast majority of all treasures that are spoken or written about. Fortunately, not all of them. In the huge pile of treasure stories, there are cases that are probably real and where the search can pay off. These cases may be as rare as diamonds in the slush pile, but they are.

I would like to describe one case that I believe would be realistically worth trying. First, a little theory and "bad" examples. For a treasure to be worth a try, six Burden traffic lights have to turn green.

The first Burden traffic light - the treasure must actually exist

Everyone probably knows the Old Bohemian Tales from their childhood and the story of the Opatovice Treasure. How the Emperor Charles the Fourth, came to the monastery in Opatovice nad Labem and asked the abbot to show him their famous treasure. The abbot led the king into the cellars and corridors and there was a chamber with the treasure. Many years later, the ceiling of the underground passageway broke through and the Elbe did not flow for an hour as it filled the underground spaces.

When I was a child, I had a childish idea. Get diving equipment and find the entrance to the dungeon underwater. Unfortunately, even then my dad, a brilliant expert, explained to me that the bedrock of the Abbey is highly permeable and fractured Elbe sandstones, and the monks were not able to dig tunnels in them below the surface of the river because in the Middle Ages they simply did not have powerful enough pumps. So the monks couldn't even have a wine cellar, let alone a passage under the river. In other words, the treasure is just a legend - traffic light #1 is red.

Burden's second traffic light - there must be sufficient information about the treasure's location.

The Incan treasure probably does exist, but it could be basically anywhere in a third of South America. The legends of Pez Chico and Pez Grande are probably just legends and there is no point in chasing them. Traffic light 2 is red.

Burden's third semaphore - information on the location of the treasure must be credible.

In 1686, Captain William Phips discovered the wreck of the galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción on Silver Shoal, which sank in 1641 with a cargo of gold and silver. He recovered over £200,000 from the ship, an incredible fortune at the time. However, he had to sail before he recovered the treasure in its entirety.

William Phips - Wikipedia

The message to investors included the exact location of the wreck in geographical coordinates. Based on these coordinates, the famous Jacques-Yves Cousteau tried to find the treasure. He was unsuccessful, but wrote a book about the search, "Treasure on the Silver Shoal".

It amazes me that anyone thinks that Phips wrote the correct coordinates in his report so that anyone could find the treasure. In the 17th century, sailors were uneducated and the only one who knew how to use a sextant was the captain and then maybe the helmsman. So if the wreck of the galleon with the treasure is not somewhere on Silver Shoal, it's in the coordinates given. Phips definitely wanted no one to go for the rest of the treasure without him. So Burden's third traffic light is red here.

Fourth Burden traffic light-- there must be a plausible assumption that the treasure has not been retrieved in the past.

This is the case of Rommel's treasure at Corsica, which I wrote about here: https://www.lovecpokladu.cz/home/rommeluv-poklad-9664

Fifth Burden Semaphore - the treasure must be in an accessible location

If the treasure is walled up in a palace or castle that is a cultural monument, no one is allowed to search there, break down walls, etc.

Sixth Burden Semaphore - the cost of the search must be reasonable

If the treasure is several kilometres below the ocean surface and the attempt to retrieve it involves an investment of millions of dollars, the ordinary searcher is out of the loop. So much for theory, and now let's look at one instance where all six of my traffic lights turned green.

Treasure on La Plata Island

This is arguably the most famous pirate expedition in history. It became famous not because of the treasure, but because it landed the sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was the forerunner of Robinson Crusoe, on the island of Juan Fernandez.

• Who was Alexander Selkirk? Meet the story of the real Robinson | 100+1 foreign trivia (stoplusjednicka.cz)
• Robinson Crusoe existed. His name was Alexander Selkirk, he survived on the island for years - Deník.cz (denik.cz)

A brief overview of generally known data

The whole thing took place in 1704. The pirate expedition was commanded by the famous Wlilliam Dampier with two ships. He himself commanded the larger one, while a young man from a good family, Lieutenant Thomas Stradling, took command of the smaller ship named Cinque Ports after the captain's death. Stradling had a falling out with Dampier, and the ships split up and fished on their own. The Cinque Ports was an old ship badly damaged by the activities of ship's minnows, which are worms that eat away the wood of ships in tropical waters.(https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0%C3%A1%C5%A1e%C5%88_lodn%C3%AD) The ship began to leak, so it anchored off the coast of Juan Fernandez Island. There, the ship was temporarily repaired, but Selkirk refused to board, so he was abandoned on the island, where he spent more than four years alone before being rescued by the British ship Duke, where, coincidentally, Dampier was the navigator.

This commonly and widely known information is followed up with a story from Robert Charroux's book "Treasures of the World ". https://www.databazeknih.cz/knihy/poklady-sveta-57040

The Cinque Ports in particular had treasure on board. She managed to capture and sink a Spanish mail ship which, according to the bill of lading, had private treasures on board worth over one hundred thousand gold piastres. It could have been more, the cost of the Spanish ships was underestimated because they paid the royal fifth - 20% tax. Many sunken Spanish ships were found to contain far more money than was on the bill of lading.

After sailing away from Juan Fernandez Island, she began to have structural strength problems again, opening cracks in the hull. To save themselves, they first dropped cannons overboard, then the ship sank anyway. The crew and their treasure were rescued on a raft. After many days, they reached the island of La Plata. There was no food, the crew was sick with typhus. Gradually they all died. When a few sailors remained, Stradling blew up the treasure cave with two barrels of powder and signaled for help. A Spanish ship arrived. The sailors died of typhus, only Stradling survived. The Spanish traded him to the French as a prisoner of war and Stradling made it to Saint Malo. There he asked not to be returned to England and told them the story of the treasure. The French minister refused to provide a ship and funds for the expedition without the knowledge of the Spanish king. Stradling was returned to England and then disappeared on another expedition somewhere near Newfoundland. (Treasures of the World pages 60 - 65).

Analysis

At first glance, a common treasure story. However, a closer look reveals several peculiarities.

The first thing that strikes one's eye is the fact that no sooner had they lit a fire on La Plata Island than a Spanish ship was there. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, shipping traffic in the Pacific was not so heavy. Selkirk himself waited more than four years for rescue. But if you look at the island on Google maps, it's right off the mainland and very close to Spanish ports. It makes sense, then, that the Spaniards came immediately on the signal. Well, why did it take Stradling so long to send the signal? He was ahead of the pirate and pirates were hung from the boom without a word. He must have assumed that they would hang him immediately and only sent the signal when he really had nothing to lose and was almost dying anyway. He was incredibly lucky to be in a prisoner exchange project instead of a sling on the boom.

Isla de la Plata

Another oddity is the ship's movement in the Pacific. According to the book, a ship with 12 guns was captured near Cape Bianca on its way to Acapulco, Mexico. That makes sense. Ships usually carried gold and silver from Lima, Peru, to Panama or Mexico, where they were transferred to mules and the cargo was transported across the isthmus to the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico coast and then on galleons to Spain. More than a hundred years before these events, these ships had already been fished by Sir Francis Drake.

When Stradling seized the cargo, he logically headed south to Drake's Passage to cross the Atlantic to reach his home in England. In the meantime, problems with the ship became apparent. It may not be written anywhere, but the Cinque Ports may have taken several hull shots from the mail ship's 12 guns, and that certainly didn't help the rotten ship. So they stopped at Albermarlo in the Galapagos, where they patched up the ship and continued south.

The ship continued to leak, so they stopped for a month on Juan Fernandez Island.

Here they probably made a thorough inspection of the ship and found that they had not the slightest chance of sailing it through the ever-turbulent Drake Passage. Selkirk decided to stay.

What was going through Stradling's mind? Staying on the island obviously meant waiting many years and then sharing the treasure with the crew of the rescue ship. We can only guess that his plan was to come to the coast of South America and sail north to the route of the Spanish ships from Peru to the North, raid and capture a good ship, and then sail around the southern tip of the continent with the captured ship to England. A madly daring plan, but it might have worked. The Pacific, or Pacific Ocean, is so called precisely because there are practically never storms on the coast of South America. It's because of the cold Humboldt Current, which flows north from Antarctica. Stradling was therefore assured that he would not be caught in a storm and could drift north with the current to the Spanish colonies. That makes sense. But the Cinque Ports was in such a lousy state that it sank anyway. And Stradling was trapped. He couldn't expect to be rescued on an islet just off the Spanish coast anyway, and as a pirate, he was 99% of the time facing a jib and rope from the Spanish. He was incredibly lucky, a 1% chance had been converted.

What does that mean for today's treasure hunter?

• The whole story seems plausible, the treasure was probably hidden. Burden's first traffic light is green.
• The island's pretty small, the cave was obviously no Macocha when two barrels of dust blew it up. The coastline is mostly reef. How many beaches are there with suspicious piles of rocks, obviously at the base of a cliff, so there could have been a cave or a large overhang there in the past? Burden's second traffic light is green.

• Thethird traffic light, credibility of information, is green. Stradling had no reason to lie. Without him, they wouldn't have found the treasure.
• Fourth traffic light is green. There's little chance of retrieving the treasure in the past. Stradling tried to organize an expedition, but it was very difficult. He'd need a big ship capable of sailing halfway around the world, including the storms in the Drake Passage, then creeping close to the Spanish coast with a port and risking being hanged as pirates if caught. Such a ship would have to have a pretty big crew and they would want shares, so the yield diminishes. No sane investor or captain would go for that, it would be easier to hunt for a new Spanish ship on the high seas from where you can possibly escape.
• Burden's fifth traffic light. The island is now a nature reserve, with a fee to enter.

• The search costs are reasonable. Today you don't have to sail the Drake Passage, just buy a ticket to Quito, then drive to the coast and buy a ticket. Maybe a small drone to find promising spots and a good detector. Those rocks that fell after the two powder kegs exploded can't be so many that they're out of detector range. Burden's sixth traffic light is green.

If anyone's up to it, good hunting.