# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/Hidden Gold

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HIDDEN GOLD
WAS ever a place or a time where and when the people did not believe in hidden wealth? There is a peculiar charm in the rare, the hinted, and the unseen that leads some classes to conceal even their wisdom, while others reveal it only to the initiated. In common with the United States, the British provinces were hiding-places for the gold of pirates, of misers, of adventurers, and of fugitives, and ever and anon it enters some head, that might be better occupied, to search for this treasure. Money is spent in the seeking, but little is taken in return. Hard-minded men say the reason is that there is none to be taken. Certain who are more open to conviction declare the reason to be a pernicious activity of ghosts and goblins in guarding the hoard, for it was a practice with pirates to kill one of their comrades and bury him atop of the chest or keg of doubloons, that his spirit might haunt the spot and scare away intruders. Any self-respecting pirate of this nineteenth century would be so disgusted by this treachery of his shipmates that when he came up out of the sand and found himself dead he would bid all his comrades go hang—as they would be sure to do anyway—and would trudge away to a warmer clime and more congenial occupations. Captain Kidd, who really did bury one box of valuables on Gardiner's Island, New York, where it was found, was consequently ​suspected of having salted the whole Atlantic coast with crowns and cob dollars, but if so he died keeping his secret. A rumor that a part of this wealth was deposited on the shore near Halifax has created some anxious guesses as to where.
Probably the most touching spectacle of confidence exhibited to the gaze of nations was that offered by the people who dug over Oak Island, near Chester, Nova Scotia, in search of this treasure of Kidd's, for they went down into the earth a hundred feet. As if busy pirates had time to dig graves of half that depth for their earnings! But they found masonry and timber, and do not guess their meaning.
A few miles away, near the Dutch town of Lunenburg, are the Ovens,—sea-worn caves in a cliff of gold-bearing rock,—that were much likelier hiding-places for treasure, because a great fear of the Ovens has existed since the time when an Indian, being swept into the biggest of them, was carried to the interior of the earth and presently cast up among the Tuskets, with his geography mixed and his shins bruised. Dark Cove and Money Cove, on Grand Manan, are reputed burial-places for a part of the Kidd gains.
Dead Man's Cove, sometime known as such to the people about Grand Pré, was one of Kidd's banks, and in after-years an effort was made to resurrect the treasure, a fortune-teller having given minute directions where to find it. It was a calm, ​clear night of moonshine when the seekers, after long work, struck their spades against a crock, and, opening the lid, felt their hearts dance within them, for it was full to the brim with Spanish dollars. As they plunged deeper to free the pot from the close-packed clay, one of them found that the iron had pierced a skull, the skull of the murdered watcher. Almost on the instant there fell a bolt of lightning, accompanied by an appalling roar of thunder. A blast of wind blew out the lanterns and tipped one man over, so that work ceased then and there. It is said that if one of the seekers is killed on the spot the spell will be lifted. Some gold is alleged to have been taken from a farm on Campobello by adventurers who promised to share it with the owner of the property if they found it. Perhaps they didn't find it. Anyway, they never happened around to share it.
Then there was the Frenchman Clairieux, who buried several boxes of money on Grand Island, in Niagara River, where a handful of ancient pieces was found two centuries later, and Fontenoy, another Frenchman, who buried his money—he had made it by cheating the Indians—in a brass kettle at Presque Isle, near Detroit. At the ancient forges on the St. Maurice River—which are the oldest smelters of iron in America, unless that distinction can be proved for the smelter at Principio, Maryland—the French authority was represented by a governor who lived in a stately château ​near by. When the English took Canada they heard rumors of the manufacture of shot and cannon in these forges, and forthwith a detachment of red-coats appeared before the place, demanding the surrender of everything and everybody. The governor was absent at the time, but Demoiselle Poulin, a young relative, who spoke for him, threw the keys into the river rather than give them up. The English then entered the château and the forge by force; but it is said that the delay caused by Demoiselle Poulin's obduracy was long enough to enable the servants and workmen to bury many of the valuables about the premises. So, when dim lights and shadowy shapes are seen about the ruins, the traveller knows that the old governor and his domestics are trying to discover where they hid their gold.
It is sad that the great block of lapis lazuli should have disappeared, for it was "worth ten crowns an ounce." It lay two or three miles off the island of Grand Manan, and was a guide to mariners aiming to enter St. John River. An officer, who broke off the piece that was valued as above, and the veracious Charlevoix, are authority for this rock. It is worth dredging to the surface, maybe.
And as Mount Washington had its carbuncle that lighted the clouds with a ruddy glow at night, so the great cliff of six hundred feet that guards the entrance to the Basin of Minas has its enormous ​Diamond of Blomidon. It is seen flashing from afar, but every attempt of seekers to wrest the gem from the mocking spirits of the crag has been a failure. Copper you find there, and agate, amethysts, garnets, and beautiful zeolites, but the diamond dims as you approach it, and close at hand fades utterly from view.
Wreck, more often than Piracy, threw wealth on the shores of Sable Island, "land of sand and ruin and gold," "the charnel-house of North America." Gales uncover the skeletons of cast-aways, but the winds and waves have buried only the more deeply the crocks of doubloons and pieces of eight that perhaps the high-seas-men did not put here. Sarcastic, indeed, is the name of "French Gardens," as applied to this spot of blight, where the forty convicts sent as slaves to the new colony were set ashore by De la Roche, to await a call that never came, except from death. Only a dozen escaped this call, and five years later they were taken off, a shaggy lot, half turned to beasts in appearance, if not in nature. It is guessed that the only available riches of the island are in its berries and wild pigs.
On Fisguard Street, Victoria, British Columbia, stands a dilapidated house of two stories and a ghost story. Who or what the ghost is the people are forgetting; but they recall the Australian who bought it twenty-five years ago when he arrived from the gold-fields of the antipodes, and it is ​alleged that some of them prowl about the yard when the weather keeps the police in-doors; for, in spite of its ghost, its spiders, and its rats, the place has a rare interest for them. There is Australian gold in the yard,—a pot of it. The Australian had an ignorant horror of banks, bonds, stock, mortgages, and the usual interest-paying investments, so he committed his wealth to the earth, taking it up and increasing it from time to time. When he died he enjoined his wife never to reveal its hiding-place. She refused to sell or lease the property. Hence the visits of folks with shovels and divining-rods.
When gold-hunters went to the rich fields of the Klondike they heard reports from the Indians of a "Too-Much-Gold Creek," whose sands were yellower than those of Pactolus; but the natives themselves had forgotten, and the others, though they moved the name to another stream, never found just where the water flowed. It has taken its place on the maps of other days,—the maps on which one finds the islands most affected by mermaids and the seas vexed by serpents and krakens.