Pirate Treasure Story Of Seasons
Leanna Perr
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Last night's episode was set in Queenscliff, a little seaside town situated on the tip of Port Phillip Bay, about 150 kilometres from Melbourne. Miss Fisher and her friends visit for a seaside holiday and, as inevitably is the case in every episode, encountered mysterious dead bodies. One of the sub-plots centred on lost pirate treasure, so of course it struck my interest.
It turns out that this sub-plot connected to the story of the lost treasure of Queenscliff. According to a 2004 issue of the Queenscliff Historical Museum newsletter, the pirate Benito Bonito ambushed a mule train in Central America in 1819, escaped to sea with a fortune of Mexican specie and buried his hoard on Cocos Island, off the coast of Costa Rica. He then sailed across the Pacific Ocean to the south-east coast of Australia, where he navigated to the entrance of the Port Phillip Heads and buried his riches in a cave on the shores of Swan Bay, near Queenscliff.
According to the newsletter, the first attempt was made by James Hillard in 1911. Hillard befriended Carossini who told him to search within the high water mark around Queenscliff. The same newsletter also reported Carossini died in 1902, so its reliability is questionable. Nevertheless, Hillard maintained a solid belief in the treasure until his death in 1964, even after never finding a trace of it.
The dire financial straits of the mid-1930s and the discovery of a handful of gold coins sparked a renewal of the search for the treasure. In 1938, an article on the quest appeared in the Adelaide Advertiser. This article claimed Benito's real name was Bennett Graham, the treasure was from Lima, not Mexico and that Kerosene Jack himself had found the treasure but hidden it in a different spot. It was the new location people were now searching for. The coins were eventually found to belong to the 5,000 stolen by the Swede Martin Wyberg from the Avoca years earlier. Again, despite extensive excavations, no-one found a trace of it.
The treasure of Lima was allegedly removed from the Peruvian city in 1820 as residents began their uprising for independence from Spain. If it even existed, its value was estimated between $12 million and $60 million. Apparently, a British naval captain was placed in charge of it but, unable to resist its allure, turned pirate and headed off to hide it in the caves of Cocos Island. There is some evidence of treasure there: letters from mercenaries fleeing Nicaragua in 1856 refer to finding a chest full of gold Spanish doubloons in a cave on the Island.
As a piracy strategy, burying treasure is always highly flawed but as a seed for future tourism for the island, it was highly successful. Due to the unrelenting pressure placed on the fragile Cocos Island environment by treasure hunters, the Island is now a World Heritage Site. Human settlement and treasure hunting is banned.
Wubbzy finds a treasure map in a library book about pirates. He decides to follow it to the treasure. Walden and Widget come along even though they don't believe that there's really treasure in Wuzzleburg, but Wubbzy knows there's treasure for sure. They end up having a fun pirate adventure together.
I started on the path back and got dive-bombed again- three persistent bees, intent on escorting me away from their little haven. I picked up my pace, noting my son and husband had absconded the little adventure too. Our daughter already waited at the car, whacking her arms as the local mosquito population descended on the afternoon to forcibly accept blood donations.
Early that morning, with a packed picnic of Publix subs, we loaded the kids in the car and headed out on Highway 19 to a little-known beach for some much-needed relaxation and fishing. US-19 is known as the straightest road in Florida. It runs through farmlands and rural communities.
The boat ramp is a steep run into the Suwannee, and so far away from the rest of the world, it remained open. We drove through the small town. Houses lined the river, tall cypresses and swamp stretched out along the opposite side of the road. Where would a pirate bury his loot and why?
Would there a place to toss a line and catch a fish? And maybe reconsider where a pirate would actually bury three chests of treasure. In various stories, I had seen different locations mentioned- under ancient oak trees and also stuck in quick sand.
With those thoughts bouncing in my brain, we parked up and headed down a wooded path with swamp on either side. We passed a swarm of yellow bees rising out of a hole in a tree. Even though it was a sunny day, the earth smelled dank and damp, as if it had just rained. Rays of sunlight filtered through the bright green canopy around us. We were surrounded by nature with not another soul in sight.
A boardwalk stretched over a swampy area to the river. It wound around the cypress trees and zig-zagged through the landscape. The kids had rushed ahead. My husband and I followed more slowly. Stopping to read the information plaques on the boardwalk. We paused beside one. On it was a picture of a Cottonmouth Snake- aka water moccasin. As if in unison, we both looked down into the marsh, as if expecting to see this venomous snake by its sign, and then laughed at the randomness.
An observation tower overlooking the Suwanee awaited at the end of the boardwalk. The crisp blue river stretched out before us, with not a boat to be seen. A fishing lure dangled in the breeze, snagged in a tree over the river. Just as I was wondering how to retrieve it, my husband pointed down. Near it, in a bed of dead brush, a thick brown and black mottled snake stretched out enjoying the sun.
The River Walk is a 2/3-mile loop trail from the visitors parking lot and out to the Suwanee River. It is located near the north entrance and headquarters of the Suwanee River National Wildlife Refuge. There are other hiking trails accessible from the trail head. It is a fee-free area.
a mile south of our River Walk trail adventure, we turned onto a lime rock road, the North Entrance of the 9-mile nature drive through the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge. My son had taken me on another social-distancing adventure through Goethe State Forest a week earlier, and I fully expected this nice hard road to turn into a 4WD adventure, but this road was well maintained, so there were no deep ruts or difficult maneuvering required on the main road.
Aside from a couple of teens, we saw no one else along our drive, but had to stop once and wait as a juvenile alligator took his time to cross the lime rock, his head held high. He was in no hurry to cross the road.
We stopped at pond #8 to cast a line and swat at a descending hoard of mosquitoes. Surrounded by thousands of acres of swamp, we were obvious targets to these tiny beasts with ferocious blood-lusting appetites. So, without a catch, we continued on to our next stop- the wooden boardwalk over picturesque pond.
We passed the turn-off sign for McCormick Creek Boat Ramp- literally in the middle of nowhere, or so it seemed, and then we were out of the woods and back on the tarmac, on the road to Cedar Key. We stopped at Shell Mound to check out the fishing on the pier- a point near the open Gulf waters, it always seems to be very windy there.
Early one morning in August, underwater explorer Barry Clifford and his small crew of researchers left Provincetown harbor and set course for the site of the sunken pirate ship Whydah, off Wellfleet on the eastern forearm of Cape Cod. I joined Barry's dive ops team on that expedition, and helped the divers recover some of the summer's most exciting finds.
Barry's passion for maritime history and doggedness drove his search to find the Whydah, a wreck that eluded treasure hunters for 260 years. Obsessed with buccaneers since age 8, Barry spent his childhood searching for doubloons on Wellfleet's Marconi Beach with his Uncle Bill, who tantalized young Barry with the local legend of a booty-laden pirate ship sunk just beyond the breakers. The submerged wreck, he told Barry, contained "the richest pirate treasure on earth," a claim that, decades later, would prove true.
Bellamy promised them relief from indentured servitude and, in buccaneer parlance, "a merry life, but short!" Many decided to go pirate. Over the next three months, the Whydah's crew pillaged 56 prizes without ever making shore, stacking more than 4 tons of silver and gold coins from a dozen nations, plus bullion and gold dust in 80 bulging sacks, amidst the ballast below deck.
Nearly 300 years later, the water was merciless the first morning of our trip South from Provincetown; whitecaps sent equipment sliding across the deck while the crew worked frantically to strap down what they could. But what we experienced was little compared to what Bellamy sailed into the night the Whydah went down. He encountered a fierce nor'easter near Chatham and foundered at midnight on a bar off Wellfleet, 1,500 feet from Marconi Beach. Bellamy and 143 crewmen died, leaving only two survivors.
As a young man, Barry spent long hours in the map room of Harvard College's Widener Library examining ancient charts and mountainous reams of Colonial documents. There was detailed correspondence between Samuel Shute, Massachusetts governor from 1716 to 1723, and Captain Cyprian Southack, a local salvager and cartographer charged with recovering the sunken lucre. When Southack reached the Whydah a few days later, the ship's wreckage was scattered across four miles off the coast, but part of the haul was still visible above the water's surface. On a map he drew of the site, Southack marked the spot with a black "X" and scribbled, "the riches with the guns would be buried in the sand." Using these records, Barry pinpointed the Whydah.
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