The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-12-10
LOST TREASURE ISLAND
HOME OF THE BOLD BUCCINEERS
 OF THE SOUTH SEAS.

No boupl AN DIu ENlsI-AlthOugn Duly
 Chartered by old-Time Voyagcrs, Navl-
 gators of To-day Fail to Find Any Trace
 of the Island of santa Maria Dc e'Aguada
 An upstairs office in one of the old houses in Clay street. slightly redolent of side leather and phosphates; in an up-tllted wooden chair an ancient mariner grizzled and weaher-be beaten with,an honest, kindly face, an English accent gnarled hands used to curl around a rope with clutch not to be broken by a spiteful gust Captain Jo- seph Spencer of the schooner Moon- light, if you please.
 To him an lnquisltive scribe: And you did not discover your island, cap { tain?"
 Nav, I did not"
 Why not pray"
 "Cause 1t wasn't there"
 Yet Captain Martin saw it and put it down on his charts. It must have been there in his time"
 As to that I know naught On the | two voyages I have made to Mazatlan from San Francisco, my owners have ordered me to look out for an island | SONSleu NllI Eudllo. anu SupppSel tO contain treasure, in such d-such a latitude and such-and-such a longi- tude. I have obeyed orders and been , to the spot. But have seen nary is- land"
 You know that islands or slices of the mainland sometimes disappear in consequence of seismic disturbance"
 "l do I know of an island which used to extend a mile and a half from Oahu, in the Hawaiian group, and which ! dropped out of sight one night in forty fathoms; and I remember an island off the coast of Chilli which had farms and cultivated fields on it twenty odd years ago, and which now is under the waves"
 And then, again, the ocean is wide l and broad. There may be islands on it which lie out of the ordinary run of travel and have not yet been seen by human eye in our time"
 Anything may be. All I say is that I never saw your island"
 The stories of Luke Ringrose and others, which can be found in the "Col- lections of Voyages" are not to be dis credited by mere negative testimony. Ringrose was one of the buccaneers who assisted in the capture of Panama by Morgan in 1870. He narrates how thoroughly the work was done. NO sex or condition was spared As to re- ligious persons, they obtained no quar- ter unless they furnished heavy ran som. The whole country was secured to bring in prisoners from whom ran som might be squeezed. When the buccaneers left they took with them one hundred and seventy-five mules laden with spoil, and six hundred pris- oners, who were held for ransom, and were designedly made to suffer ex- treme hunger and thirst Morgan had every man in his command searched for plunder and in order that it might not be esteemed an affrdnt he permit ted himself to be first searched, even to the very soles of his boots Every person had to be content with what part Captain Morgan was willing to give him. So it was that all com plained of his proceedings, for they judged it impossible that of so many valuable robberies no greater share should belong to them than two hun dred pieces of eight each"
 It was plain to Ringrose and others that Morgan had robbed them, and the necessity for central headquarters where the booty could be collected and | divided was apparent. The business was profitable enough, but the spoil had an unaccountable trick of vanish ing.
 Morgan sailed back to the West In- dies with his plunder His comrades l Panama tn infnTrqrt sells. They captured a ship from Trux- lilo for Panama and took out 2,000 jars of wine, 50 jars of gunpowder and 51,- 900 pieces of eight. Later on, almost under the equinoctial, they made a prize of the San Pedro, which they had captured and released for ransom the year before. They took out of her 21,- 900 pieces of eight in chests and 16000 more in bags. This fine prize was fol- | lowed two or three days later by an other a merchant ship of great bulk and withal heavily laden. At the first yolley the crew ran down into the hold bowling for quarter The buccaneers took several chests of pieces of eight | out of her, a great quantity of silver, 620 jars of wine and brandy and the beautifulest woman that I ever saw in the South Sea" Then followed the Ro- sario, which did not haul down her col ors till the captain was killed. She was from Callao laden with wine, bran dy, oil and fruit, and had as much money in her as yielded to each bucca- neer ninety-four dollars. She had also seven hundred pigs of argentiferous lead, which the buccaneers, not reali- zing it's value, left on board when the l ship was scuttled.
 A second crusade of buccaneers was headed by Dampier, Davis, Swan and Harris in 16S0-90. One of their first stopping places was Robinson Crusoe' s Island, Juan Fernandez. Their visit seems to have inspired them with the idea of establishing an insular depot to serve as a sort of Pacific Hispanola In some respects Juan Fernandez would have answered the purpose, but it was very accessible, and the bucca- neer chiefs were far-sighted enough to discern that sooner or later they would be hunted down by the organized forces of the mercantile nations, and that they must find refuge which could not be easily stormed. Dampier, who lived to command a kings ship surveyed the Galapagos Islands and Cocos Island, but neither would an- swer. It was after the command de- volved upon Edward Davis that the se-