Pirates’ Gold

Search For Buried Treasure in French Oceania

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, June 8.

A N old resident of Tahiti recently brought home a new treasure story from Rurutu Island.

For a long time a tale has been going about Rurutu of a treasure of gold buried long ago by pirates on the Maria Islands —a little group of sandy atolls to the westward where Rurutu people go from time to time to collect coconuts. While the narrator was at Rurutu a party of natives had sailed to the Marias to search for the treasure.

These tidings, however, did not cause a single blood corpuscle to jostle another in the arteries of old treasure-island adventurers at Papeete. The scars on their bodies are eternal reminders of the past and warnings for the future. Even the exciting Hiti Island adventure of 1935 did no more than cause sharp, rheumatic pains in old cicatrices and arouse ribald laughter. The bursting of the South Sea Bubble of Pinakl Island had shocked, gassed, and lacerated them beyond all possibility of forgetfulness.

The Pinaki treasure story was a con fection of the most alluring elements of romance and buried gold. Briefly: an ancient mariner befriended in the slums of Sydney; the benefactor later sum moned to hospital where the mariner lay dying; the story told in husky whispers of filibusters in a Peruvian revolution; their appointment to convoy a rich trea sure looted from the churches; their treason; the spiriting of the treasure to the coast; the hiding of the treasure; the flight of the traitors to Panama; the stealthy boarding of a schooner at night; the murder of her crew and the escape with the vessel from the harbour before dawn; the retrieving of the treasure from its hiding place on the coast of Peru; the sailing into the sunset; the birth of fear lest the news of the piracy at Panama overtake them at Sydney; the burial of the treasure on a lonely atoll; the scuttling of the schooner near the Australian coast; the scattering of the pirates; the sole survivor on his death bed; and the rrtap.

A perfect story! Everything was there to inflame the brain with visions of untold wealth near at hand to be had for the mere taking. To top it off, someone remembered a story told by an old native of Nukutayaki (the inhabited island ad jacent to Pinaki) of how a strange ship had been seen for days at Pinaki.

Curiosity as to what the strangers were about inspired a couple of young men to sail over to investigate. They did not return, and a later expedition from Nukutavaki sent to search for them dis covered their murdered bodies on the beach of Pinaki. That was the rivet which completed th£ edifice of belief.

Expedition after expedition was despatched to Pinaki. Treasure-hunters mortgaged their lands to finance the undertakings. The coral sands of Pinaki

were trenched from end to end and its lagoon sounded, over its whole area, with drilling instruments. Years were spent in the search.

If the fires of hope cooled from incandescence to cherry red, some mysterious marks would be found carved on one of the reefs to stoke them again to white heat. But all this delving and prodding and pickaxing and drilling revealed not one jewelled crucifix or emerald-encrusted chalice or even a handful of pieces-ofeight. At long last, it became evident that the whole story was an invention.

The man with the map was deported: the expeditions were dismantled; and the adventurers retired to lick their wounds— the disillusion was complete.

The Hiti treasure expedition was hatched in England. The song of the

sirens was embodied in an epic written on ancient parchment—an heirloom of an old county family. The story was of a Spanish treasure ship laden with Inca gold; a mutiny; the sailing, again, into the sunset; burial of the treasure on a desert isle—and, of course, a map. The bearings on the map, taken from various small atolls in a compact group in the Tuamotu Archipelago, converged on the island of Hiti.

The affair was planned with consum mate skill and even became a matter of negotiation between the foreign offices of governments.

The treasure-hunters duly arrived at Tahiti, clothed themselves with an aura of mystery, and departed stealthily to the east. It soon leaked out, however, that they had landed on Hiti, prodded

about in the lagoon, and had finally located the treasure in a deep under water depression—so filled with sand and coral debris that a coffer-dam would be necessary to clear it out.

Returning to Papeete, the leader em barked for England to gather more funds for the purchase of diving apparatus and materials for constructing the coffer-dam.

He, also, sailed into the sunset, and was never heard of again. The funds col lected, if any, may some day be revealed in some mouldy manuscript as buried on a coral island. Or was a new expedition formed to come secretly from the east to lift the treasure ? Perhaps the millions

in wedge-shaped ingots of gold really lie among the reefs of Hiti. Who knows ?

So far as the Tahitian adventurers are concerned it may lie there until the ocean runs dry and the sun becomes a burned out cinder. The gold of Pinaki was the fast pot at the end of the rainbow our dreamers will ever pursue.

Dr. C. M. Dawson, of Apia, who has been spending three months’ holiday in New Zealand, returned to Samoa by the June Matua.

Mr. Robert D. Head, an old established trader and merchant at Alofi, Niue Island, died early in June.