England
p. 19 · Read in the full issue
Cocos Treasure
Another Expedition Leaves England
ARMED with hope, the public school spirit, metal diviners, and a little more hope, 14 men and a cabin boy are setting sail from England on a voyage calculated —if it succeeds —to make the treasure ships of Drake look like a church collection on a fine Sunday in Aberdeen!
For the Golden Quest (says the London Daily Express) is nothing less than the treasure of Cocos Island, estimated vari ously as worth 10, 12, and 15 million pounds. After all, what is a couple of million—when it hasn’t yet been found?
Buried in the jungle-fringed rock of that lonely island, washed by the long combers of the Pacific some 500 miles south-west of Panama, lies bullion, twice stolen during the liberation of Peru.
Captain Bonito, the Portuguese pirate, “banked” some three millions in the same place. And, for good measure, a baga telle of 2½ millions from the sacking of Mexico City was also checked in the cloak-room of Cocos Island. So says tra dition.
Undeterred by the fact that a score of expeditions—in one of which Sir Malcolm Campbell took part—have returned empty handed from digging and blasting in the soil baked hard by the equatorial sun, Captain A. Max Stanton and Mr. G.
Cocknell, of Coventry, will lead their merry men, and Master Leslie Green, of Appledore, the cabin boy, aboard the 50-ton motor schooner Romance. Other members of the expedition are Messrs. C.
G. Hodson, engineer; C. G. Sinsbury, shipwright; and R. R. G. Scantlebury, navigator.
For the last three months Romance — “what’s in a name?”—has been under going repairs at Messrs. Peter Hancock’s yard, Pembroke Dock. She is now a trim
little craft fitted with a copper bottom to withstand the corrosion of tropic seas.
The expedition will, it is planned, be away for two years, and a complete sur vey will be made of the island home of the fabulous treasure.
While previous expeditions have taken electrical devices to trace the resting place of the treasure, or charts marking with a cross the place where the cache was not found, the present company is taking Mr. G. C. Barwood and two other metal diviners to tell their comrades where to dig.