How a Colonial Hoard of Gold Ended Up as Buried Treasure

In the early 1530s, the Spanish military invaded Peru and captured the Inca king Atahualpa. Sensing his life was in danger, Atahualpa offered the Spanish a ransom. He’d noticed their peculiar obsession with shiny metals, and during a meeting with the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, he took a piece of chalk and drew a line approximately eight feet high around the walls of the room they were in. He offered to fill the room up to that line with gold, and then twice more with silver, all within a year.

Now, Atahualpa certainly wasn't the richest king in history. As I explain in my new book—The Museum of Lost Things, about great lost treasures—that honor belongs to a West African king from the 1300s. Still, Atahualpa commanded a vast empire, and given the size of the room he drew the chalk line around, 17 feet by 22 feet, this was a generous offer. Pizarro quickly accepted. Atahualpa’s countrymen scoured temples and palaces across the empire for treasure, and fulfilled their obligation four months early. Pizarro thanked Atahualpa profusely, then executed him anyway.

By the early 1800s, after countless such atrocities, the treasuries of Spanish Peru were groaning with gold and silver. But South America was a tumultuous place at the time, with countries declaring independence left and right. In 1821, revolutionaries in Peru laid siege to the colonial capital of Lima. The local viceroy feared that the $60 million in his vaults (around $1.5 billion today) would fall into enemy hands.

In a spirit of fair play, the revolutionaries were allowing foreign merchants to sail in and out of Lima’s harbor. So the viceroy sought out William Thompson, the trustworthy but foulmouthed captain of the British brig Mary Dear. He asked Thompson to sneak Lima’s gold and silver out of the city, along with 200 chests of gems. Aware that he’d be hanged if the rebels caught him, Thompson quadrupled his normal fee; the viceroy agreed without hesitation. Catholic churches in Lima caught wind of the plan and entrusted their treasures to Thompson as well— chalices, crucifixes, a life-size gold statue of Mary. The viceroy also sent four guards and two priests along to keep Thompson honest.

Thompson had orders to sail around in circles for a few months while Spanish soldiers attempted to subdue the revolutionaries; if they couldn’t, Thompson would sail to Mexico and rendezvous with Spanish agents there. Thompson, however, had other plans. Shortly after departing Lima, he plied the guards and priests with wine, then huddled with his crew and pointed at the treasure chests: “We can work ... the rest of our lives, boys, and not all of us together can ever produce for ourselves as much wealth as there is in one of those big boxes.” (He no doubt added a few salty words for emphasis.) Thompson then made a clinching argument. The Spanish had stolen all that gold from the natives anyway, so they had every right to steal it from the Spanish.

In a flash, the crew turned pirate, slitting the guards’ throats and dumping them overboard. The priests went into the drink, too. Then the Mary Dear hightailed it north for Cocos Island, which sits roughly halfway between the Galápagos Islands and Costa Rica. Although just four miles wide, this spit of land is dotted with 200 waterfalls and supposedly inspired the setting of both Treasure Island and Jurassic Park.

Upon arrival, Thompson’s men began hauling the loot ashore on boats. After 11 such trips, they concealed everything inside a cave, burying it in three locations in the red soil at depths of four to 10 feet. Their plan was to head to the mainland, lie low for a year, then return to claim their prize.

Things didn’t work out that way. A Spanish galleon spotted the Mary Dear on her way to the mainland and pulled alongside. Its captain knew about the arrangement between Thompson and the viceroy in Peru, and wondered what on earth the ship was doing near Cocos. When Thompson couldn’t account for the treasure, the galleon’s crew arrested the pirates and sailed for Panama, where they hanged them one by one. Finally, just Thompson and first mate James Alexander Forbes remained. The two men begged for mercy and, probably more effectively, promised to reveal the treasure’s location if the Spanish spared them. The contingent set sail for Cocos.

There, Thompson outfoxed his captors. Given their long history of duplicity in the New World, he probably didn’t trust the Spaniards to release him, so he and Forbes made a big show of tramping around and measuring the distances between some local landmarks. Just when they seemed to be getting their bearings, the Englishmen bolted. Most of Cocos is dense jungle, clogged with thickets and vines and drenched in rain year-round. Thompson and Forbes darted into this Jurassic landscape and vanished.

The Spanish gave hot chase, but a platoon of angry, thrashing sailors stood little chance of finding two lone men running for their lives. The Spanish kept at it for weeks, but when their supplies ran low, they gave up and sailed off.

Thompson and Forbes survived for the next year on coconuts, bird eggs, and fish. In 1822, a whaling vessel happened by and they screamed themselves hoarse flagging it down. They told the crew they’d been shipwrecked there, and by the smell and ragged look of them, the story seemed credible. The whaler dropped them in Costa Rica.

After all that, Thompson up and died soon after his escape. The Treasure of Lima was now Forbes’s alone to claim, but he migrated to California instead and married into a wealthy Mexican family. He opened a flour mill and a quicksilver mine, and got so stinking rich that he lost all motivation to return to Cocos and unearth the treasure.

But before his death in 1881, Forbes allegedly sketched a map of its location for his son, which got passed down through several more generations. The tale of the lost gold, meanwhile, got passed around far more widely: To date, more than 300 expeditions have tromped through the jungles of Cocos Island in search of it. Bugsy Siegel and Errol Flynn reportedly tried, and when President Franklin Roosevelt went deep-sea fishing near Cocos in 1935, he let his crew have a go. One German fellow spent 19 years scouring every cave and thicket. In total, he found six doubloons.

The person who got closest to finding the treasure, at least according to him, was James Alexander Forbes IV, who inherited his great-grandfather’s map and became obsessed with it. In 1939, he swore he found the very X marking the spot. But just as he was about to dig, he spied a few menacing ships offshore—including one with machine guns. Forbes played it cool and left. According to one source, the filmmaker John Ford had accompanied him on the expedition, and on the voyage back, Ford drew up plans to return and film an adventure flick in which John Wayne “discovered” the treasure on camera. But Forbes, naturally, died immediately upon returning home, and nothing ever came of the idea.

Costa Rica eventually tired of people uprooting the pristine Cocos landscape and declared the island a nature reserve. Today, landslides and storms have so remixed the topography that even if the ghost of William Thompson himself arrived to hunt for his loot, he likely wouldn’t recognize a thing. The Inca and later gold that disappeared from Lima was no myth. But for all we know of its location now, it might as well be just another empty legend of buried pirate treasure.