Books: Hordes After Hoards

PANORAMA OF TREASURE HUNTING—Harold T. Wilkins—Dutton ($5).

To Harold T. Wilkins the world is a musty parchment marked “Unexplored,” “Galleon Sunck Heer,” “Ye Treasure iii Leagues S.W.” Panorama of Treasure Hunting is his sixth book on buried ingots and briny chests, prehistoric cities along the feverish Amazon and gold dust combed from the pelts of Klondike grizzlies. Many treasures are hunted, few are found. But their seekers are slaves to the quest as gamblers to the wheel, hopheads to the needle.

Magnetic pole of the gold digger’s globe is 5° 30’N, 87°W: a Pacific isle named Cocos, rainy and “snagged, like an old pirate’s teeth.” There in the last 80 years have gone hundreds of adventurers to ruin their lives, lose their own fortunes in search for three pirate hoards (worth perhaps $60,000,000) which legend has buried about its shores. Biggest find to date: one rusty pistol. So littered with gold diggers’ picks & shovels is Cocos Island that it looks “like an abandoned WPA project.” A frequent visitor: Franklin Roosevelt. At Cocos the President fishes, yarns gleefully about such plunder as he himself once dug for at another famous trove on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Other items in Wilkins’ index of rainbow ends:

> In Benton Harbor, Mich. is cached $10,000,000, the fortune of Benjamin Purnell, founder of the House of David, who died in 1927 soon after conviction for orgies.

> In New York’s Hell Gate, between The Bronx and Queens, lies a British frigate wrecked about 1780 with a reputed $4,800,000 in gold aboard. Among its hunters: Simon Lake, inventor of the submarine.

> In hotels through the U. S. and Canada are great sums cached by the late, eccentric Sarah E. Smith-Collard of Seattle, who once left $500,000 in a clock in a yet undiscovered hotel.

> In a swamp near Beckleyville, Md. are hidden tombstones (dumped there by road builders) which will disperse the genealogical mystery separating the $20,000,000 estate of Henrietta Garrett of Philadelphia from some 25,000 claimants.*

*Six of whom were last fortnight convicted in Philadelphia of forging Bibles to prove that Mrs. Garrett had an illegitimate son & heir.