by Lionel
Great as Fleury’s exploits were, they were overshadowed a century later by those of an outstanding Dutch seaman, Piet Heyn. In 1628, not far from Cuba, Piet captured the entire Spanish treasure fleet. It took a week to unload what he’d captured, and tradition says that one thousand cartloads of treasure followed his triumphant entry into Amsterdam. Not surprisingly, he was promoted to admiral of the fleet, but died soon afterwards while fighting pirates who were raiding the coast of Holland. History sometimes seems to enjoy its ironic moments.
An interface between Eastern and Western piracy followed the Spanish occupation of Manila in the Philippines in 1571. Spanish and Chinese traders dealt in pearls, jade, spices, silk, ivory, and other expensive luxuries — while pirates in their turn preyed on the treasure ships that carried such rich merchandise.
When it became more profitable for kings, queens, princes, and influential politicians to take the lions’ share of the profits of organized and legitimate trade instead of goods stolen at sea, pirates, privateers, and buccaneers were no longer encouraged and protected. It was William Kidd’s fatal misfortune to be an anachronism in the history of piracy. He set out to be a privateer just when licensed piracy had passed its sell-by date.
In 1696, Kidd, in charge of the Adventure Galley, headed for Madagascar — then the proverbial pirate paradise for those working in the Indian Ocean. Kidd eventually captured the Quedah Merchant, which was carrying money, iron, opium, sugar, and silk. That was a ghastly mistake: she belonged to Muklis Khan, who had great influence with the East India Company and demanded that the Company should compensate him for Kidd’s theft of his ship and its cargo. Because the politico-economic climate had changed so much and pirates were now more or less persona non grata, Kidd was flying for his life. It was at this time that he might just have had time and opportunity to hide his treasure on Clarke Island.
He was captured and tried in England, used as a political pawn in an attempt to incriminate and drag down some of the influential people who had allegedly sponsored his doomed trip on the Adventure Galley, and duly hanged on May 23, 1701.
Kidd’s treasure — if he had anything worth burying — may or may not still lie somewhere on Clarke Island, or it may have got as far north as Oak Island, Nova Scotia, where it may have been hidden in the depths of the mysterious money pit. That strange, elaborate, cunningly protected labyrinth, however, seems to be far more complex than anything a pirate in a hurry could have constructed. It would have taken a skilled and disciplined force of well-organized and carefully directed men to create the Oak Island structures. Templars might have done it; Drake’s men could have achieved it — as could Morgan’s — but it would have been far beyond the capabilities of harassed, hurried pirates like Kidd’s rather dubious and untrustworthy crew.
Another unsolved piratical mystery of the sea is what became of Störtebeker’s vast treasure hoard. He was a medieval pirate, skipper of the Red Devil, who raided Bergen and other ports and got away with huge quantities of gold and silver. He was finally captured and executed in 1401, leaving his lost treasure concealed somewhere near Marienhafe, not far from the Frisian shore, in Haven near Lubeck, or perhaps on the island of Bornholm, Denmark.
Some of Henry Morgan’s hidden treasure was discovered on the island of Providencia in the San Andrès archipelago by a young English couple named Seward, who were shipwrecked there in 1734 while on their honeymoon. While exploring a cave they came across almost a million pounds’ worth of gold, silver, and jewels that had been hidden there by Morgan and his men. It was only a small part of what Morgan and his men had captured: most experts on buried treasure believe that far bigger hoards are still hidden somewhere on Providencia.
Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, one of the most famous pirates of all time, was almost certainly clinically insane. He braided coloured ribbons into the huge black beard that gave him his nickname, and also wove slow fuses into that and his hair. It gave him the appearance of a demon emerging from hell when he went into battle surrounded by smoke. Anthony de Sylvestre was an eyewitness to Blackbeard’s death, and in his opinion Blackbeard’s vast fortune in doubloons and pieces of eight was hidden not far from Maryland, U.S.A., on a small island called Mulberry.
One of the most interesting and tantalizing accounts of hidden treasure concerns a hoard of Spanish wealth taken by an English pirate named Bennet Graham, who was better known in piratical circles as Benito. According to some versions of the Benito story, he escaped from a battle with the Spanish navy in 1819 in one of their own treasure ships, the Relampago. He made it as far as Wafer Bay on Cocos Island and hid his treasure there before being caught and hanged. His cabin boy escaped and eventually made his way to Tasmania, where there was a prison settlement in those days. One of the inmates of that penal colony was a woman named Mary Welch. On being released she married and went to San Francisco. According to Mary’s account, she had been Benito’s mistress when she was much younger, and had actually gone with him to Cocos Island to help him bury one load of treasure after another. She also claimed that just before he was hanged he had given her a vital plan of where the various treasures were buried on Cocos. A company was formed — much like the various treasure hunting companies that searched Oak Island, Nova Scotia, throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — and Cocos Island was duly searched from end to end in 1854. According to Mary, everything had changed so much since she was there with Benito that she could not now reconcile his map with the site at all. Nothing was found by that 1854 expedition — but that certainly doesn’t mean that there’s nothing still hidden there today.
Other treasure hunters have frequently visited Cocos looking for different treasures. The daring English pirate Eddie Davis was believed to have gone ashore on Cocos during the seventeenth century with no fewer than seven boatloads of treasure. Yet another semi-legendary Cocos treasure cache was believed to have come from the Mary Dear. Lima, capital of Peru, was under siege in 1821. It looked like the rebels were winning, and the leading citizens decided to load all their valuables onto the Mary Dear. Captain Thompson had other ideas. He sailed the ship to Cocos where he and his mate, Jim Forbes, hid its cargo somewhere. They were later captured and forced to go back to Cocos to reveal where the treasures were hidden. Their captors underestimated their courage and agility: Forbes and Thompson vanished into the jungle. The Lima treasures were not recovered.
Years later, in 1844, a carpenter named Keating obtained a Cocos treasure map from a sailor named Thompson. With his partner, Boag, Keating went to Cocos and came back alone — but very rich. According to him, Boag had drowned in a local river because he was overloaded with gold from the Lima hoard. In 1929, another treasure hunter called Bergmans found a Cocos cave full of treasure — plus a skeleton that he assumed had once been the missing Boag!
The Seychelles hold the key to the unsolved mystery of Olivier le Vasseur’s treasure. Olivier, known as La Buze, meaning the vulture, or the buzzard, was a French buccaneer who was hanged for piracy in 1730. His last words were reputedly, “Let him who can find my treasure!” The challenge was accompanied by several sheets of paper that he threw down derisively among the avid spectators who had come to watch him die.
At least one of Olivier’s strange cryptic messages fell into the hands of the Savy family, from Mahé Island in the Seychelles, who found that Olivier’s clues — if they were clues, and not just his final macabre joke — were extremely difficult to unravel. Determined and highly able Reg Cruise-Wilkins became interested in the Olivier treasure mystery in 1949 when he met one of the Savy family while on holiday on Mahé. He spent decades working on the problem and finally came up with the theory that the enigmatic hints Olivier had left involved the Twelve Labours of Hercules from Greek mythology: so le Vasseur had been an intelligent man, and a versatile cryptographer with a classical mind — as well as a pirate. Although the energetic and determined Cruise-Wilkins found many curious buried things that fit his Labours of Hercules theory,
he never found the treasure itself.
The mystery of treasures hidden close to or even below the sea was not by any means confined to the activities of such pirates and privateers as le Vasseur. Among his many other misfortunes, for example, King John of England (born December 24, 1167, reigned from 1199 to 1216) lost a great deal of treasure in the Wash, the great, shallow inlet of the North Sea that has King’s Lynn as its main seaport. John had been on his way to London when the disaster happened, but retired to Newark, where he died, according to some accounts, in Swinestead Abbey. His reign had caused such suffering and discontent in England that it was widely rumoured that one of the Swinestead monks had poisoned him in the belief that to kill so evil a man was a righteous act. By whatever means John met his end, there can be no doubt that a thirteenth-century fortune still lies under the waters of the Wash as they separate Norfolk from Lincolnshire.
The sea mysteries connected with smugglers frequently refer to alleged hauntings in buildings close to the shore: stories that the smugglers enthusiastically encouraged, as these were the bleak and lonely places in which their contraband goods were hidden until they could be safely dispersed and sold. One such legend from Norfolk, England, concerns the so-called “Shrieking Pits” of Aylmerton, which were believed to be “haunted” by nothing more paranormal than a smuggler trying to discourage people from prying into the area.
The pits themselves are very old — probably Mesolithic — and like all such unexplained prehistoric sites tended to acquire folk names associated with devils and demons or fairies during the Middle Ages. Norfolk also has a famous ghost known as the Brown Lady, seen and photographed at Raynham Hall. Dauntless Captain Marryat, the author of many stirring marine adventure stories, actually stayed at Raynham Hall, encountered the apparition, and boldly fired a pistol ball through her! Fortunately, it was a genuinely inexplicable phenomenon and not, as Marryat suspected, a smuggler in disguise to frighten people away from the area.
Herstmonceaux in East Sussex, England, just fifteen kilometres west of Hastings, has a castle that is credited with numerous ghostly apparitions. Old Lord Dacre was unduly anxious in case younger lovers tempted his beautiful young wife, and, being somewhat eccentric as well as groundlessly jealous, he would parade around beating a drum as a warning to them. A huge, weird, glowing figure of a ghostly drummer was seen on the battlements when the castle was semi-derelict in the eighteenth century — the heyday of smuggling activity in that area. The most likely explanation of the uncanny apparition is that it was a smugglers’ trick to keep the inquisitive away from the castle when the smugglers were using it as a store for contraband.
The unsolved mysteries of the sea are awesome and innumerable, but the mysteries of the human mind are wider and deeper still. When the devious, aberrant, and unpredictable behaviour of pirates, wreckers, buccaneers, slavers, privateers, and smugglers is interwoven with the unanswered riddles of the ocean, the complexity of the fabled Gordian Knot seems as simple as undoing a shoelace.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mysterious Maps and Ancient Sea Kings
One of the most awesome and challenging unsolved mysteries of the sea is the possibility that a civilization with an advanced level of culture and technology existed on Earth millennia ago — many thousands of years earlier than the earliest cultures traditional mainstream historians and archaeologists currently accept. If the accuracy of the renowned Piri Reis Map can be confirmed, and if it can be supported by other corroborative evidence of a similar kind, then it looks as if someone many thousands of years ago may have had a great deal of uncannily accurate information about the geographical details of Antarctica that are now concealed below a layer of ice a mile thick.
Piri Reis, after whom the famous old map is named, was an admiral in the Turkish navy. He was born sometime during the period 1465–1470, with the later date being the more probable one, in Gallipoli (also called Gelibolu), which was then strategically important as a naval base. The Turkish historian Ibni Kemal wrote colourfully that children born in Gallipoli had boats for cradles: there was, in fact, a proud and lengthy tradition of seafaring people there.
Piri’s uncle was another famous Turkish admiral, Kemal Reis, and young Piri had gone voyaging with him from the age of twelve. Despite (or perhaps because of) starting his adult life as a pirate, Uncle Kemal had been appointed admiral in 1494. Young Piri was a keen observer as well as a quick learner when it came to navigational and seafaring skills. During his eye-opening travels with Kemal, he wrote parts of his book, On Navigation, in which he vividly describes the places they visited together and the actions in which they were engaged.
Turkish admiral Piri Reis.
Uncle Kemal was appointed first admiral during the battles between the Turks and Venetians in 1500–1502. He gave Piri command of part of the Turkish fleet, and his nephew more than justified the confidence that Kemal had placed in him. Shortly afterwards, Kemal was killed in a sea battle — and Piri lost his powerful and influential protector. Mediterranean politics were particularly volatile at the start of the sixteenth century, and Piri understandably decided to quit the unpredictable adventures of the open sea for a while and return to Gallipoli to work on his book and his maps.
The end of Piri’s adventurous life is clouded by battle failure — and a woeful retreat that led to his execution. In 1554, having captured Muscat from the Portuguese, he failed to capture Hormuz. Hearing that a vastly superior European force was now sailing towards him, Piri escaped with three ships, abandoning the rest to their fate. By the time Piri docked in Cairo, news had reached the authorities there of his retreat from Hormuz and the loss of the ships he had left behind. He was promptly arrested, imprisoned, and beheaded.
During his long, adventurous career at sea, Piri had learned many things in many places. It may be sensibly surmised that as a writer on navigation, and an expert cartographer in his own right, he had assiduously questioned other navigators and studied older maps in their possession. The ancient libraries of Istanbul (once Constantinople) and Egypt were well known to him — and who can even begin to guess at the lost knowledge that was once stored there? There are good reasons for believing that the Piri Reis Map is based on far older works.
The fierce controversy that rages around the Piri Reis Map and its massive implications often generates more heat than light, and that’s a great pity. The free, open-minded, scientific investigation of evidence in any field of knowledge is hindered by insults, ridicule, and attacks on the intelligence and integrity of the theorist. Attacks on personalities do nothing to prove or disprove a challenging new hypothesis. Facts and logic are the only acceptable weapons in the great war of ideas. Every new theory — however different from the currently accepted view — is entitled to the courtesy of interested, objective examination and evaluation. The suggestion that the Earth was spherical once met a great deal of hostility. Darwin’s ideas about evolution encountered similar vituperative opposition. Energy expended in vicious internecine warfare among scientists, researchers, and investigators creates huge obstacles to progress. All that’s necessary is a polite, “I think your ideas may be wrong — and these are my reasons for doubting your theory. Do you have any stronger evidence or arguments with which you’d like to support and reinforce it?”
The Piri Reis Map is not particularly clear or easy to follow, but it does seem to show with remarkable accuracy — an accuracy that appears rather more than coincidental — the northern coast of Antarctica. Professor Charles H. Hapgood began his academic career as a historian whose students asked him to look into the theories of Atlantis. His researches led him to the ideas put forward by Hugh Brown, who thought that the entire planet could be realigned to rotate around a new axis. Hapgood’s progress based on Brown’s thoughts was that it wasn’t necessary to make such a major and radical terrestrial shift. Hapgood wondered whether it was more probable that the outer crust could move around on a soft, molten layer of rock just beneath it. He put these ideas forward
in 1958 while working with James H. Campbell. There is also clear evidence that a high-ranking USAF commander, Harold Z. Ohlmeyer, wrote to Professor Hapgood about the Piri Reis Map in July 1960. That lieutenant colonel then said: “The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctic and Palma Peninsula, is reasonable. We find that this is the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map.”
Back in the 1950s, the Piri Reis Map was sent to the U.S. navy to be evaluated. The chief of the navy’s Hydrographic Office then was an engineer named Walters, and he consulted Arlington Mallery, who was widely acknowledged at that time as an expert cartographer. There is evidence that Mallery painstakingly worked out the finer details of the projection technique that Piri Reis had apparently used, and once he cracked that, Mallery was able to make a spherical version of the map. According to some researchers, this had a degree of accuracy that both delighted and amazed the expert staff at the navy’s Hydrographic Office.
As though the remarkable evidence of the Piri Reis Map wasn’t enough, Professor Hapgood also examined the mysterious old Oronteus Finaeus Map, which was made in 1531 or 1532 and is now carefully preserved in the map room of the Library of Congress in the U.S. Hapgood said at the time, “I had the instant conviction that I had found here a truly authentic map of the real Antarctica.”