Treasure of Lima (Cocos Island)

The account

In 1820 the city of Lima was about to fall to the revolution sweeping South America, and the Spanish viceroy made a fateful decision: rather than let the rebels seize the wealth of the colonial church, he loaded it onto a ship for safekeeping. Gold candlesticks and ingots, jeweled stones, and two life-sized solid gold statues of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ went into the hold of the trading brig Mary Dear, under an English captain named William Thompson.

Thompson could not resist it. Somewhere out on the dark Pacific he and his crew cut the throats of the guards and the priests, threw the bodies overboard, and turned pirate. They ran for Cocos Island, a green volcanic rock five hundred miles off Costa Rica, and there, the story goes, they buried the treasure of Lima. It did them no good. A Spanish warship caught the Mary Dear, and the crew was tried for piracy. All of them hanged except Thompson and his first mate, who bought their lives by promising to lead the Spanish to the gold, then bolted into the jungle the moment they landed on Cocos and were never caught.

Thompson died without ever going back for it. And so began the most relentless island treasure hunt in history. Hundreds of expeditions have torn at Cocos. One German, August Gissler, lived on the island alone for nearly twenty years digging for it. None of them found the Lima gold, and today Cocos is a protected national park where digging is flatly illegal.

So the loop never closes. Either two golden Madonnas and a church's fortune are still under the roots of an island you can see from a dive boat, hidden by a man who took the secret into the jungle and the grave, or the whole thing is a tale too good to check. Hundreds have given years to finding out, the island has told no one, and now the law has locked the door and thrown away the shovel.

Known intelligence

• In 1820, with revolution closing on Lima, the city's church and royal wealth was loaded aboard the Mary Dear for safekeeping in Mexico.
• Captain William Thompson and his crew turned pirate, killed the guards and priests, and are said to have buried the treasure on Cocos Island.
• The Mary Dear was caught; all but Thompson and his mate were hanged, and the two escaped into the Cocos jungle rather than reveal the spot.
• Hundreds have hunted Cocos since, including August Gissler, who lived on the island from 1889 to 1908 and found almost nothing.

Theories of the hunt

• A genuine church fortune, including golden Madonna statues, still lies buried on the island.
• The whole story is exaggerated or invented; no Spanish record confirms the shipment.

Leads, where the trail points now

• Digging on Cocos is illegal as a national park and UNESCO site, so this is now a documentary hunt, not a dig.
• The two enduring location leads are John Keating's 19th-century claim to have seen it and August Gissler's decades of maps from living on the island from 1889 to 1908; both are vague and unproven.
• Wafer Bay and Chatham Bay are the most-searched landings, and the caves and stream valleys behind them are the traditional targets.
• No Spanish colonial record confirms the shipment, so the first real lead is establishing whether the treasure ever existed at all.

The trail, in order

• 1820: Lima's wealth is loaded aboard the Mary Dear.
• 1820: Thompson turns pirate and buries the treasure on Cocos Island.
• 1889-1908: August Gissler lives on Cocos hunting it, in vain.
• 1978: Cocos becomes a national park; treasure hunting is banned.

Sources and the record

• Treasure of Lima (Wikipedia)
• The Treasure of Lima (Explorersweb)