I’m not presenting this as a tale of treasure found, but it does have the key elements of such. I tend to believe it’s true, and a view of a classical age when treasure hunting by the truly wealthy was much the fashion.
From my own experience, it’s tremendously difficulty to get backing to mount such an expedition on a mere off-chance. I think there’s still a lot to be found out there, but we just don’t have the wealth or leisure that they had in the past in order to pursue it (and the opportunity to just walk in and get it!) It’s a lost age, but I don’t think it’s a lost breed.
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Going back thirty years and more, I set out on a trail to track down the history of a half-dozen treasure maps (
Captain Kidd Treasure Maps: The Reality.) This quest would take me to some strange parts, and meetings with some very strange people.
On the way, I met up with a guy called Percy. I’m sure you’ve met the type - hugely secretive and highly suspicious of other people’s motives - heck, you may even be the type! In this game, how could anyone be anything else?
He believed I’d gotten hold of some information he needed, so for once the ball was in my court, and he opened up fairly quickly when I played non-committal. He revealed to me that his father had been one of a group of dilettante treasure hunters during the early years of the 20th century, and I saw enough to convince me that this was probably so.
He was a true believer in treasure maps, and he may have had good cause. He recounted that in his youth he’d accompanied his father on a number of treasure hunts, though one of these seems to me to have been more of an exploratory trip, though interesting nonetheless. On two occasions the family had gone to live for a couple of years in South America, and he’d attended school in a major city while his father was away.
The family was well heeled, and the father had either hired or borrowed a yacht with which to take pleasure cruises, along with two other gentlemen, but with an ulterior motive. He was interested in two general locations based on given latitudes, but was always looking for something specific in terms of a landfall or a landmark.
On the first series of trips, he was searching for a particular pattern of islands, and had an old-fashioned coloured drawing of the views of these islands from a target point on the mainland, or from another island. I was shown this, and it looked and felt like late 17th or early 18th century to me. You may have seen the type of thing I mean - like a primitive drawing of island outlines with flat bases.
Percy was mostly bored during the second of these trips, though his father did try to involve him early on in the adventure, showing him how to shoot the sun to find his position and involving him in the quest for the anchorage depicted by the island map.
There was some excitement one evening when Percy’s father called him to look at the features of a coastline they were approaching. There were four islands that looked like they may have played the required part, and, even better, it became apparent that they would be unable to obtain the view shown on the map because of an intervening headland. Were this the place, the view would not have been from an island.
.NP
,,,,next time you go there people might know what you are up to I guess,,,hence maybe u need to devise another entry strategy,,,I also agree India is a big treasure potential...
? cwp
