Treasure (from
Greek θησαυρός -
thēsauros, meaning "treasure store",
[2] romanized as
thesaurus) is a concentration of riches, often one which is considered lost or forgotten until being rediscovered. Some jurisdictions legally define what constitutes treasure, such as in the British
Treasure Act 1996.
The phrase "blood and treasure" or "lives and treasure" has been used to refer to the human and monetary costs associated with various (usually Nation-state/state-initiated) endeavours such as space exploration or war.
Treasure hunting
Searching for hidden treasure is a common theme in legend and fiction, real-life
treasure hunters also exist, and can seek lost wealth for a living.
Howard Pyle illustration of pirates burying treasure, from
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates.
Buried treasure
A
buried treasure is an important part of the popular beliefs surrounding
pirates. According to popular conception, pirates often buried their stolen fortunes in remote places, intending to return for them later (often with the use of
treasure maps).
In English fiction there are three well known stories that helped popularize the myth of buried pirate treasure
[3]: "
The Gold-Bug" by
Edgar Allan Poe, "
Wolfert Webber" by
Washington Irving and
Treasure Island by
Robert Louis Stevenson. They differ widely in plot and literary treatment but are blood kin from the common ancestor of the William Kidd legend.
[4] Stevenson's
Treasure Island was directly influenced by Irving's "Wolfert Webber", Stevenson saying in his preface "It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther.. the whole inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters.. were the property of Washington Irving."
[4]
A number of reports of supposed buried pirate treasure surfaced much earlier than these works indicating that at least the idea was around for more than a century before those stories were published. For example, some underground passages and structures on
Oak Island (in
Nova Scotia) have supposedly
[by whom?] been excavated extensively since 1795 in the belief that one or more pirate captains had stashed large amounts of loot there. These excavations were said
[by whom?] to have been prompted by still older legends of buried pirate treasure in the area. No treasure has ever been found.
Treasure maps
A treasure map is a variation of a map to mark the location of buried treasure, a lost mine, a valuable secret or a hidden location. More common in fiction than in reality, "pirate treasure maps" are often depicted in works of fiction as hand drawn and containing arcane clues for the characters to follow. Regardless of the term's literary use, anything that meets the criterion of a "map" that describes the location of a "treasure" could appropriately be called a "treasure map."
Copper scroll
One of the earliest known instances of a document listing buried treasure is the
copper scroll, which was recovered among the
Dead Sea Scrolls near
Qumran in 1952. Believed to have been written between 50 and 100 AD, the scroll contains a list of 63 locations with detailed directions pointing to hidden treasures of gold and silver. The following is an English translation of the opening lines of the Copper Scroll:
[5]
1:1 In the ruin which is in the valley of Acor, under
1:2 the steps leading to the East,
1:3 forty long cubits: a chest of silver and its vessels
1:4 with a weight of seventeen talents. KEN
Thus far, no item mentioned in the scroll has been found. Scholars remain divided on whether the copper scroll represents real burials, and, if so, the total measurements and the owners.
Pirates
Although buried pirate treasure is a favorite literary theme, there are very few documented cases of pirates actually burying treasure, and no documented cases of a historical pirate treasure map.
[6] One documented case of buried treasure involved
Francis Drake who buried Spanish gold and silver after raiding the train at
Nombre de Dios -- after Drake went to find his ships, he returned six hours later and retrieved the loot and sailed for England. Drake did not create a map.
[6] Another case in 1720 involved British Captain Stratton of the
Prince Eugene who, after supposedly trading rum with pirates in the Caribbean, buried his gold near the mouth of the
Chesapeake Bay. One of his crew,
Morgan Miles, turned him in to the authorities, and it is assumed the loot was recovered. In any case, Captain Stratton was not a pirate, and made no map.
[6]
The pirate most responsible for the legends of buried pirate treasure was
Captain Kidd. The story was that Kidd buried treasure from the plundered ship the Quedah Merchant on
Gardiner's Island, near
Long Island, New York, before being arrested and returned to England, where he was put through a very public trial and executed. Although much of Kidd's treasure was recovered from various people who had taken possession of it before Kidd's arrest (such as his wife and various others who were given it for safe keeping), there was so much public interest and fascination with the case at the time, speculation grew that a vast fortune remained and that Kidd had secretly buried it. Captain Kidd did bury a small cache of treasure on Gardiner's Island in a spot known as Cherry Tree Field; however, it was removed by
Governor Bellomont and sent to England to be used as evidence against him.
[7] Over the years many people have tried to find the supposed remnants of Kidd's treasure on Gardiner's Island and elsewhere, but none has ever been found.
[6]
People have claimed to have discovered maps and other clues that led to pirate treasure, or claim that historical maps are actually treasure maps. These claims are not supported by scholars.
The Story Of El Dorado
In 1595, the English explorer
Sir Walter Raleigh set out to find the legendary city of
El Dorado.
[8] The city was never found but Raleigh wrote at length about his venture to South America in which he claimed to have come within close proximity of "the great Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado)."
[8] Despite the fact that his narrative was quite unrealistic — it described a tribe of headless people, for example — his reputation commanded such respect that other cartographers apparently used Raleigh's map as a model for their own. Cartographer
Jodocus Hondius included El Dorado in his 1598 map of South America, as did Dutch publisher
Theodore de Bry.
[8] The city remained on maps of South America until as late as 1808
[8] and spawned numerous unsuccessful hunts for the city.
In fiction
Treasure maps have taken on numerous permutations in literature and film, such as the stereotypical tattered chart with an over-sized "X" (as in "X marks the spot") to denote the treasure's location, first made popular by
Robert Louis Stevenson in
Treasure Island (1883), a cryptic puzzle (in
Edgar Allan Poe's "
The Gold-Bug" (1843)), or a
tattoo leading to a dry-land paradise as seen in the film
Waterworld (1995).
Literature
The treasure map may serve several purposes as a plot device in works of fiction:
- Motivation, causing the characters to begin a quest
- Plot exposition, explaining in a concise way where the characters must go on their quest
- To illustrate, at various points in the story, how far the quest has progressed.
- To provide conflict where, for example, evildoers attempt to capture the map from the protagonists
While Robert Louis Stevenson is associated with popularizing the treasure map—and the archetypal
X to mark the spot—with
pirates in
Treasure Island,
[6] he is not the first. Author
James Fenimore Cooper's earlier 1849 novel
The Sea Lions, is a tale that begins with the death of a sailor who has left behind "two old, dirty and ragged charts" which lead to a seal-hunting paradise in the
Antarctic as well as a location in the
West Indies where pirates have buried treasure, a plot similar to Stevenson's tale.
Film
In the 1985 film
The Goonies, an old treasure map leads to the secret stash of a legendary 17th century pirate, an almost exact imitation of Stevenson's plot in
Treasure Island. In the 2004 film
National Treasure, a treasure map becomes the source of the quest itself. In the 1994 comedy
City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold, a treasure map is made by criminals who are analogous to modern day pirates. In the film
Waterworld, an extremely vague and cryptic treasure map has been tattooed on the back of the child character Enola. This map leads the characters to dry-land, which in the context of the film, is a treasure.
Treasure chest
Fictional depiction of treasure chest
A
treasure chest is a common element in modern fiction, gaming and video gaming. The primary idea behind the treasure chest is a romantic one, that
pirates and other idealized criminals faced constant persecution and lived such fast-paced lives that they sometimes had to quickly dispose of their ill-gotten gain to return to and reclaim later. Hence, the idea that treasure could easily be held in a wooden chest and buried, with a
treasure map to guide the burier (or a lucky recipient of the map) back, was born.
See also
Spanish treasure lost from the
Spanish treasure fleet consisted of gold, silver, jewels (especially emeralds) and also cocoa, vanilla and brazilwood.
[9]
Legends
In film and literature
References
- ^ "RESOLUCIÓN de 7 de enero de 2003, de la Dirección General de Patrimonio Artístico de la Consejería de Cultura y Educación, por la que se incoa expediente de declaración de bien de interés cultural a favor de la colección arqueológica del Tesoro de Villena. [January 7, 2003, RESOLUTION of the General Direction on Artistic Heritage of the Culture and Education Council, which opens a file on the declaration as Good of Cultural Interest (BIC) the archaeologic collection known as Treasure of Villena]" (in Spanish) (pdf). [Spanish] State Official Bulletin (BOE) (Madrid: Spanish Government) (49): 7798–7802. 1 2003. http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2003/02/26/pdfs/A07798-07802.pdf. Retrieved December 6, 2009. "Desde el punto de vista histórico, artístico y arqueológico, el Tesoro de Villena constituye un «unicum», un depósito no normalizado, por su peso y contenido (A. Perea). De hecho, se trata del segundo tesoro de vajilla áurea más importante de Europa, tras el de las Tumbas Reales de Micenas en Grecia (A. Mederos). (From a historic, artistic and archaeological point of view, the Treasure of Villena constitues a "unicum", a non-normalised deposit, according to its weight and content (A. Perea). In fact, it is the second most important golden tableware finding in Europe, after that of the Royal Graves in Mycenae in Greece (A. Mederos))"
- ^ θησαυρός, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
- ^ Paine, pp. 27–28
- ^ a b Paine, pg. 28
- ^ García Martínez, Florentino and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition, Paperback ed. 2 vols., (Leiden and Grand Rapids: Brill and Eerdmans, 2000).
- ^ a b c d e Cordingly, David. (1995). Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates. ISBN 0-679-42560-8.
- ^ The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd, pg. 241, The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd, pg. 260
- ^ a b c d *Miles Harvey (2000). The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. ISBN 0-375-50151-7.
- ^ Cynthia Zarin, "Green dreams: A mystery of rare, shipwrecked emeralds", The New Yorker, November 21, 2005, pp. 76–83
