ANTON BEAN & BENITO BONITO IN THE COCOS ISLAND

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.

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

TONYI POPPINS EXPLORES THE COSTA RICAN JUNGLE

Tonyi Poppins in La Cascada path, Costa Rica

Tonyi Poppins has visited Costa Rica, the amazing and wonderful Central American country, whose national natural parks are one of the most wonderful things around the planet, and whose people are charming, pleasant and unforgettable.

Costa Rica or the Republic of Costa Rica is a country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Ecuador to the south of Cocos Island. It has a population of around 4.9 million, in a land area of 51,060 square kilometers; over 300,000 live in the capital and largest city, San José with a population of an estimated 333,980 in 2015.

More information: Costa Rica

Costa Rica has been known for its stable democracy in a region that has had some instability and for its highly educated workforce, most of whom speak English.

Tonyi Poppins in the Costa Rican jungle

Other challenges facing the country in its attempts to improve the economy by increasing foreign investment include a poor infrastructure and a need to improve public sector efficiency.

Historians have classified the indigenous people of Costa Rica as belonging to the Intermediate Area, where the peripheries of the Mesoamerican and Andean native cultures overlapped. More recently, pre-Columbian Costa Rica has also been described as part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area.

The oldest evidence, stone tool making, of human occupation in Costa Rica is associated with the arrival of various groups of hunter-gatherers about 10,000 to 7,000 years BCE in the Turrialba Valley. The presence of Clovis culture type spearheads and arrows from South America opens the possibility that, in this area, two different cultures coexisted.

Agriculture became evident in the populations that lived in Costa Rica about 5,000 years ago. They mainly grew tubers and roots, like carrots. For the first and second millennia BCE there were already settled farming communities. These were small and scattered, although the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the main livelihood in the territory is still unknown.

More information: Lonely Planet

Accounts differ as to whether the name la costa rica, Spanish for rich coast, was first applied by Christopher Columbus, who sailed to the eastern shores of Costa Rica during his final voyage in 1502, and reported the presence of vast quantities of gold jewelry among the natives, or by the conquistador Gil González Dávila, who landed on the west coast in 1522, met with the natives, and appropriated some of their gold.

Tonyi Poppins in her Costa Rican hut

Like the rest of Central America, Costa Rica never fought for independence from Spain. On September 15, 1821, after the final Spanish defeat in the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821), the authorities in Guatemala declared the independence of all of Central America. That date is still celebrated as Independence Day in Costa Rica even though, technically, under the Spanish Constitution of 1812 that had been readopted in 1820, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had become an autonomous province with its capital in León.

Historically, Costa Rica has generally enjoyed greater peace and more consistent political stability compared with many of its fellow Latin American nations.

More information: Visit Costa Rica

Since the late 19th century, however, Costa Rica has experienced two significant periods of violence until its first democratic election under the new constitution in 1953. Since then, Costa Rica has held 14 presidential elections. The country is the region's most stable.

During the 41 years that have elapsed since Costa Rica abolished its army, our fundamental freedoms have never been threatened, 

nor do we know a shameful history of repression.

Óscar Arias