Evening Star Newspaper, June 19, 1932, Page 77

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JUNE 19, 1932. The Biggest Thrill of My Life It Was Not at the Wheel of a Speeding Car, Says This Noted Automobile Racing Enthusiast, But on Lonley Cocos Island, Digging for a Pirate’s Buried Gold—Enduring Tropic Heat And Insects by Day and Facing the Unknown Terrors of the Cocos “Ghosts” by Night. HERE is hardly a port in the world that does not contain its tar-stained, rum-smelling, tale-pitching crop of lars ready to whisper tales of buried treasure and sell you charts showing exactly where vast troves of pirates’ gold may be found. The rusty funnels and salty topsails of their ships have peeped above every horizon on every sea. Some of thcse treacure seekers have never seen the spot where the treasure of their dreams lies buried. Othors have sweated and scratched, dug and delved on Clipperton Island and in the Galapagos, where Davis and Dam- pier rested and hid their booty. Their picks and shovels have rung on th- rocks of Trinidad in the South Atlantic, where thousands of dol- lars’ worth of plate and jewels taken from the great galleons of the Lima plate fleet are hid- den. Almost everywhere, according to their tales, vast treasure is to be had for the finding. Tobermory Bay, in the north of the Island of Mull, off the West coast of Scotland, each Summer sees regularly rcnewed dredging and scraping of the seabed for the lost treasure of the armada galleon Florencia. Vigo Bay still holds the treasure of the Vigo plate flcet, while the Indian and Chinese Oc:ans are full of legends of lost riches and buried hoards. But 400 miles off the coast of Colombia, South America, lies Cocos, th> most romantic island in the world—a tiny speck of land, lonely, uninhabited, set like a green jewel in the blue vastness of the Southern Pacific. And there, so the tales say, lies one of the greatest treasures of them all. Cocos has known battle, murcer and shipwreck, piracy and plotting. It saw the rise and fall of the Inca civilization. It saw the sails of almost the first white man’s ship that ever entered th- Pacific. It saw the early buccaneers in their high-pooped, painted caracks and caravals, and it knew the agony of blood and murder which th old brigands of the sea brought in their Cocos saw many of these highwaymen of the seas come and go. It shared their darkest secrets, it hid their stolen treasures—and if there is any truth in the tales that yet are told, it hides them still. Cocos has seen expedition after expedition in search of those hidden treasures land on its shores. Ship after ship has anchored in its tiny bays. Bocatload after boatload of picks and shovels and dynamite, of tents and food and guns has been landed in its surf. Its hill- sides are scarred with the pits, holes and trenches dug by successive gcnerations of treas- ure hunters. And here and there you will find the graves or the bleached bcnes of men who have lost in their quest, or who have been slzin by rivals in the fascinating s=arch. It is a small island, about six miles long and not quite as wide, and it rises from the sea, a green mountainous steep, crowned by twin peaks and walled by ramparts of unscal- able rock. And somewhere dcep among the man-high grasses that cover the hillsides like a jungle lie three treasures of gold and silver, jewels and plate, images and weapons, which are said to be the richest and best authenti- cated pirates’ treasures in the world. Together they ave said to total a fabulous fortune—some place it as low as $25.000.000, others as high as $75,000,000. The first treasure-is that of Capt. Edward Davis, a partner with Dampier in his pri- vateering adventures; he blockaced the Bay of Panama and sacked the city of Leon, in Nica- ragua, in 1685. The second is that of Benito Bonito—"Bonito of the Bloody Sword,” a pirate of the early nineteenth century. The third and richest of all is the famous treasure of Lima Cathedral, which was burizd on Cocos in 1821 or thereabouts by a Capt. Thompson, a Scotch merchant skipper, who turned pirate and joined Bonito on the high seas. Hidden in a cave, this vast store of loot is said to be guarded by a ghost and sentineled by life-size images of the Virgin and the Child. And this was the treasure that we went to Cocos to seek. O white man lives on Cocss. The long Pacific surges cream up its beaches and thunder in clouds of spray against the ram- parts of its rocky shores. Thousands of sea birds wheel and scream above it. Inland the peak of Mount Iglesias soars, 2,800 feet into the sky, and behind it another peak, unnamed and probably never climbed by any white man, rises 1,580 feet. The rest of the island is 200 to 600 feet above sea level. Two tiny bays on the north side of the island, separated by a bold and lofty headland, are the only places where a boat can land. One of them is Wafer Bay, named after the buc- caneer, surgeon, author and companion of Dampier, whose book is one of th> most fas- cinating in all the literature of“piracy. The other is Chatham Bay. Near the headwaters of a creek flowing into Chatham Bay the Lima treasure is supposed to lie. It was as the result of a chance conversation that I decided to search for the treasure of Cocos Island. In 1924 I went on a trip to Madeira, and during the cruise the captain of the liner told me of a pirate treasure buried on the Salvage Islancs. I proposed staying for a month at Madeira. When that time had nearly passed and the captain’s story had al- most been forgotten, an incident occured which brought it back to me. A small yacht appeared in the harbor, and during dinner that night my friend, K. Lee Guinness, the famous racing motorist, came into the hotel. He and several friends were on their way back to England aboard the yacht, the Adven- turess, after a trip down the West Coast of Africa as far as Gambia. I suggested that Drawn for The Star's Sunday Magazine by Lu Kimmek I had the feeling that some one was crouching in the bush watching nte, but I could find nothing. By Sir Malcolm Campbell As Told 1o Hal Pink. they visit the Salvage Islands and make the dead pirate captain yield up his treasure. To my surprise they agreed to go if I would join them. And so we all set out on what, on the face of it, was a stupid enterprise. The yacht was on its homeward journey, stores were running low, and she had no equipment whatever for such an adventure. Nor did we have sufficient information or directions. We failed in our first venture, but decided to return to England and fit out a proper expedition. Back in London, Lee Guinness and I dis- cussed our plans. Then I buried myself in pirate literature and read everything that I could find about the Salvage Islands and their treasure. I found that Cocos Island, in the Pacific, seemed to offer a more authentic prize—a prize that remaired undiscovered by 18 or 20 expe- ditions. So we decided to try our luck on Cocos. Three days before we were due to sail, Lee Guinness telephoned me that a man whom he did not know had written that he could put us in touch with some one who possessed excellent clews to the Cocos Island treasure. I got in touch with Guinness' correspondent, who turned out to be an officer of high stand- ing in the BP®itish Navy. He sent me to see a brother officer, sationed at Portsmouth. The story he told seemed so obviously the missing link of the treasure’s history that I felt we were at last on the right track. Two days later we sailed, in a yacht that formerly had been a Liverpool pilot boat. We carried a crew of 12—and a dog. At daybreak one Saturday late in February we saw directly ahead of our bows an island rising abruptly from the sea. It was Cocos. Admiral Nichol- son, one of our party, volunteered to come ashore and stay the first night with me—an agreeable arrangement, for if ever a place was haunted, say the old sailors, it is Cocos. DMIRAL NICHOLSON and I saw no ghosts, however. Following our clews religiously, we dug and grubbed about the island day after day. Once we thought we had won where so many others had failed. We discovered an immense rock, lying exactly on the bearings we had been given. The right spot at last, we thought. For hours we cleared the earth away from the sides. Imagine our excitement when we found a crack travcrsing three sides of the rock. Evidently it marred the door to a concealed cave underneath it! But unfor- tunately there was no fourth crack and there- fore no doorway to a cavern. Neverthcless we drilled holes all over the rock, plugged them with dynamite and blew out great chunks of stone, until we had blasted the top away. ~There were no traces of a cave, however; the rock seemed to be a solid mass. When that hope failed we turned to blasting other large boulders in the vicinity, turning our attention away from that neighborhood only when we had four days left of the time we had allotted to our search. Those four days, we deciced, should be spent hunting the back country for clews to the location of the cave. Nevertheless, I still believe that the treasure of Lima is buried in the vicinity of that huge rock. g Those last four days were pure drudgery. Never shall I forget the fatigue of climbing those steep cliffs in temperature far above 100 degrees, with the sun boiling down upon us. Our hands and arms were blistered and burned with the heat, our flesh was torn by the rocks over which we scrambled, our bodies were pouring with perspiration, and the bugs and insects feasted on us constantly. But several very curious episodes occur::d during those days. We had taken our dog ashore with us. On the first night we spent in the back country three of us were lying in our tent, worn out after the day's mountaineer- ing. My two companions were around the tiny camp. Suddenly the dog, which had been sleeping beside me, l:aped up with a terrifying howl and dashed to the open flap of the tent, bark- ing in a strange, terrified way. I have never seen a dog in such a paroxysm of fear. It was as though he had scen a ghost. His hair on end, he stood there barking and yapping into the blackness. My companicns awoke and sat up. I took my revolver and crawled to the tent door, expecting to meet anything from a ghost to a wild pig. There was nothing, though I could not lose thz feeling that some one was out there, watching me. The great wood fire, built to kecp off the insects, leaped and flickered redly against the velvet background of the tropic dark. The trees, like a tapestry of black velvet, stood brooding and motionless around the tiny camp. Presently the dog ceasei his strange bark- ing, and I went back inside the tent. For an hour I lay awake with my revolver in my hand, waiting for something to happen. Noth- ing did. The next night it happened again. About midnight the dog sprang suddenly to the tent door, yapping and barking and shivering with fear. Again I reconnoitered. Again I had the feeling that some one was crouching in the bush watching me. But I could find nothing, and nothing happened. TWICE afterward the same thing occurred. We could not account for it then, and I cannot explain it now. There are no animals on the island so far as I know, except wild pigs, and they are not steaithy becasts. The only explanation one can advance is the old legend that the island is still inhapited by a lost race of Incas. Perhaps one of their scouts was sent down each nigh{ to spy on us. One day before we started on our expedition I was talking to a man who is a clairvoyant. He told me that I was going to an island which was supposed to be uninhabited. but which in reality was peopled by a race whose existence was unknown. That, so far as I can remems= ber, was all he said, but it stuck in my mind because in some of the old records I had run across a legend that the Incas still inhabited the upper slopes of ths mountains. Recently I was talking to Mrs. Hugh PoM lock, an amateur psychometrist. She was given a pirate spade and an old rusted ringe bolt which I brought from the island, and from those relics she deduced many astonish- ing things, although at the time she did not know to whom they belonged or whence they came. “There are people on the island,” she said, “but no one knows them. They saw you and they knew where the object of your search was.” o I am not a superstitious person, and I do not go in for spiritualism. I am only repeate ing what I was told. Our expedition met with bad luck, but even had our luck been better it is doubtful if we could have succeeded. We had an excellest clew to go upon, but for a small group of men, in the limited time we had at our disposal, to attempt to search an island as large, as densely wooded and as inacccssible as Cocos is farcical. To do the job properly one should go out to Cocos with a strong, ablebodied crew or a gang of workmen who can stand the heats With those human factors and with good tools and blasting apparatus, plus an efficient elece trical divining apparatus—if such a thing can be found—I believe that the treasure can be located. I am planning to go back to Cocos, and when I do I will not give up until I have either found the treasure or convinced myself that it is humanly impossible to discover it. For, strange as it may seem to many of you, I feel that the greatest thrill of my life has not been at the wheel of a racing car, but on lonely Cocos Island, digging for a pirate’s buried golds Cowbird Poor Mother HE cowbird has some admirable points, but so far as its family life is concerned it is open to serious criticism. It is no bird to bure den itself with the responsibility of raising a family. When the question of perpetuating the species comes up, the cowbird hunts out the nest of some other bird, preferably smaller than the cowbird, and the eggs are laid there amorg thcse of the owner of the nest. When the eggs hatch, the cowbird nestling is larger than the offspring of the occupant of the nest, but either, the latter does not care about the deception or does not notice it and feeds the uninvited strangers along with her own young. Tha ccwbird’'s redeeming features, however, is its voracious appetite for insects. It is to be found trailing along after the cows in a pasture or just ahead of it, feeding on the insects stirred up by the grazing of the cow. Sometimes," (f the bird gets tired of walking or if it wants to view the world from a higher elevation, it wilk perch on the cow’s back and ride around & bity