In 1818, Captain Bennett Graham was an officer in the
British navy that commanded the H.M.S. Devonshire. He was given the task of
taking a team down to the South Pacific for surveying. However, it was at this
time that he decided that there was more money to be made in piracy than there
was in surveying. He decided then to change his occupation and in doing so,
change the mission of The Devonshire.
On one particular mission, he took 350 galleons of
gold from a Spanish ship. Knowing that the waters of Cocos Island are heavily
shark infested, he decided to bury the treasure there and thought that it would
be very safe from prospectors looking for gold. He thought that he would come
back on his trip home and reclaim the treasure. Unfortunately on his mission
home, he and his officers were hunted down and hung. His crew was sent to a
prison in Tasmania and most were never heard from again.
However, in 1853, there came a woman into San
Francisco named Mary Welch, who claimed to have been there at the time that
Graham buried the treasure. She also claimed to know exactly where the treasure
was buried. Not only did she remember the exact location but she also had a map
that Graham had given her to keep safe. She had done exactly that during the
thirty years that she spent in prison and so, she still had it. She gathered a
group of investors and together they all travelled to the place where Graham had
buried the gold.
What Mary hadn’t planned on was that the landmarks
that Graham and she both remembered were no longer there. It had been a long
thirty years that she had been in prison and in the meanwhile, storms and other
natural events had swept the landmarks away. The group still searched the island
and dug in search of the treasure but they never found anything. The treasure
has not been found to this day.
