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| Anton Bean and his Cocos Island's map |
Hi! I'm Anton Bean and I want to talk about the Cocos Island.
The Cocos Island or Coco Island was discovered in 1526 by Juan Cabezas de Grado. It is a little isle that has about twenty four kilometres square and was a free land to the year 1869 when was claimed by Costa Rica to establish a penal colony because the distance from the coast and all kind of sharks there were some very hard obstacles to escape it.
The Cocos Island was very popular between the pirates and corsairs at the 17th and 18th centuries because has a lot of fountains of sweet water to resupply their ships and it is near the Humbolt stream and winds that propel the sail ships to the West, get away their pursuers.
The legend sits tree treasures, never found, in the Cocos Island: The Edward Davies treasure, The Benneth ‘Bloody Sword’ (Benito Bonito) treasure and the fabulous Lima’s treasure, but the true treasure of the Cocos Island is its biodiversity in plants and animals, the most of them endemics, and a richer sea bottom with coral and fish. Nowadays, the isle is a marine and a Land National Park.
More information: UNESCO
We are at the year of 1820 in Lima, now Peru, and viceroyalty of Peru then.
The situation of the viceroy and his lacked royal troops is desperate: In land, the troops of General San Martín circled his positions in Lima and El Callao (the port of Lima). In sea, the English corsairs blocked the gate and didn't allow to leave the port any Spanish ship.
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| Anton Bean and Benito Bonito aka Bloody Sword |
Despite this engaged situation, Don Jose Fernando Abascal de Sousa, the viceroy, decided to save the most part of the treasure, a lot of religious pieces in gold, silver and gems, somethings in natural size. His solution appears in form of schooner. The ‘Mary Dear’ arrives to the El Callao commanded by William Thompson and carrying a payload of wool and clothes.
Because the flag of the ‘Mary Dear’ is British and its captain Thomson is Scottish, the corsairs don't block this sail ship.
The viceroy charters the sail ship immediately and the captain Thompson gets the order to carry the new payload to Panama together with a bishop and half dozen troops as escort. Neither the captain nor the crew know exactly the matter of the hundred fifty chest, trunks and boxes of the payload but they suspect that they are very valuable. So, once the ‘Mary Dear’ evades the block of corsairs, the crew kills the little escort and the bishop and changes the course quickly to the Cocos Island. Captain Thompson’s plan is very simple: Hide the loot, resupply the schooner in Panama and come back to share the loot.
But, the ‘Peruvian’, a corsair battleship chartered by the Spanish Crown to break the British block, finds the dead bodies of escorts floating in the sea, and sets bow to Panama to intercept the ‘Mary Dear’... and they get it. Near Panama the ‘Peruvian’ captures the ‘Mary Dear’, all its crew and Captain Thomson but the payload is missing.
After a lot of intense and ‘loving’ interrogations and hung the half of the crew, the rest admits the loot is hidden near the Waffer Bay in the Cocos Island and the ‘Peruvian’ prepares itself to find it, but a scurvy epidemic bursts in the ship and more of the half of the crew is lost. Also, all the prisoners but two reach to escape... But this is another story!
In the last two hundred years a lot of expeditions have searched, officially without success, treasures in the island, included a young Frankin D. Roosvelt, who more years later was the president of USA.
More information: National Geographic
There is more treasure in books than in
all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.
Walt Disney
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