I’d like to find Captain Kidd’s treasure. Really I would.
Having a couple million dollars, or I guess it would be gold doubloons, could
really make my life as a writer much easier. Not that I have a hard life, mind
you, in fact I have a very wonderful life. I get to stay at home and write.
Whole books, even. If I actually had a few million dollars’ worth of gold I
wouldn’t move. I love my house. I wouldn’t buy big dogs because I love my two
cats, and they would object. I wouldn’t do much of anything different except
pour the big pile of gold in the middle of my garage and then sit on it and
gloat. Yes, I would keep the garage door down so none of my neighbors could see
me.
So, how do you find Captain Kidd’s treasure? According to
some very credible historians whom I saw on TV the other night, the Captain had
buried two treasures, one of which was found and the other of which is still
missing. These guys knew what they were talking about. Once again they were on TV. You don’t get on TV if you don’t know what you are talking about.
Well, sometimes you do. Actually, there are a lot of guys on TV who don’t know
what they are talking about, but they mostly give relationship advice to
desperate audience members or try to sell you stuff for your skin. But, anyway,
these guys that I saw on a TV show that wasn’t giving relationship advice said
the first thing to do is get an authentic treasure map.
This is actually the easy part. There are lots of authentic
Captain Kidd treasure maps all over the Internet. Yes, I know they are all
copies or reproductions of the actual map that was found in an old wooden box
that CK used to own, but they’re just as good as the original. You can find the
treasure following one of them because they are copies of the original one,
which is probably in some museum somewhere, so you can check it out for
yourself if you want.
I got one of these, and I’m not going to tell you how much I
paid for it, but it was a reasonable amount considering it leads to a big pile
of gold. However, once my map came in the mail, I found I had two basic
problems with it. First, it shows all these little routes I have to take. You
know what I’m talking about. “Start at a rock. Go ten paces to a stump. Turn to
the west and go two hundred paces to a sink hole, and on and on.”
What I’m saying is that all that walking, and the turning
and the pacing, and the stumps, and the sink holes. Oy. It’s too much. Just put
a little X on the spot and give me two, just two, coordinates – something like
“forty degrees to that little clump of rock to the north and thirty degrees to
that cave to the south that looks like a guy yawning if the light is right.”
You can find any spot on earth with just two coordinates like that. Just make
sure that whatever you are pointing to has some sort of a chance to still be
there two or three hundred years from when you made the map. That rules out
sand dunes, trees, wadded up pieces of paper, feathers from some bird. Things
like that. Okay?
Alright, now for my second beef about the Captain’s little
map. It’s his penmanship. Oh, I know, back in the seventeenth century we were
all totally into writing with the fancy curlicues, the loops, the obsessive
underlining, but hey. Nobody can read that stuff. We certainly can’t read
anything the Captain wrote because it wasn’t enough for him to just be fancy.
He had to be illegible. On all his authentic maps that you can find on the
Internet, not on one can you read the name of the island or its longitude and
latitude. They’re just little squiggles. Like the Captain went spastic for a
second just when he was writing down the TWO MOST IMPORTANT PIECES OF
INFORMATION.
What a jerk. So, we
actually don’t know where the island is. The place where the Captain supposedly buried a bunch of gold. We
only know it’s somewhere in the China Sea. That you can read on the map.
Some guy actually thought he had it figured out. The
location of the island, that is. He found an island in the China Sea that
looked just like the one our fearless Captain drew on the little scrap of paper
which is the treasure map. Now bear in mind that the Captain’s drawing of the
island makes it look a lot like a baked potato, so we don’t really know if the
island looked like that at all. You know, given the Captain’s horrible
penmanship.
So, anyway, this guy found an island in the China Sea that
looked like a baked potato, and he decided to go there, follow all the little
routes from stump to rock to…whatever. There was a big problem, though. Baked
Potato Island was in Vietnamese territory, so the guy had to write the
Vietnamese government for permission to visit the island and do a little
digging. Well, it’ll probably come as no surprise to you that the government
responded with a no. Specifically their note said something like, “No visiting,
walking around or digging allowed on Baked Potato Island.”
This was not a guy who would take no for an answer, even
from the very scary Vietnamese government. So, he got a little boat, recruited
a gullible friend and went to Baked Potato Island anyway.
Okay, so now they’re on the forbidden island. They landed
right around dark, took out their flashlights and had a good look at the map.
They figured what with all the confusing routes the map was going to make them
take that they should wait until morning, and there was the problem. If the map
had just directed them to the spot without all the running around, they might
have gone there, dug up the gold and been on their way before morning. As it turned out, they were awakened by very stern
members of the Vietnamese army, and were taken to a jail somewhere instead of
to the gold. And they didn’t even get breakfast.
So the Vietnamese kept them for a long, long time, making
them stay in little prison cells with bugs and stuff, gave them bad food and
asked them the same questions every day. Evidently the Vietnamese officials had
never heard of a Captain Kidd, didn’t believe that there was gold buried on
Baked Potato Island and were convinced that these two were on some sort of
mission with the CIA.
The good news for them was that the guy’s companion had
written a letter to his brother telling him where they were headed. After a
long time the brother managed to get both of them released. They were scruffy
looking, had long, bushy beards with lots of lice. No surprise that neither of them had plans to return to Baked Potato Island.
I’m sure as hell not planning to go there, I can assure you
of that. Am I done with treasure hunting? Not completely. There’s a story going
around that CK also buried gold somewhere on Long Island. And that’s in New
York, a much more civilized place to look for treasure. Now, I just need to get
me a map.
Contact Will at matlackpr@att.net
View his new novel, Noir Town here.
View his new novel, Noir Town here.
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