We bore it through the marshes in a half-score battered chests, Sinking, in the sucking quagmires, to the sunburn on our breasts, Heaving over tree-trunks, gasping, damning at the flies and heat, Longing for a long drink, out of silver, in the ship’s cool lazareet. The moon came white and ghostly as we laid the treasure down, There was gear there’d make a beggarman as rich as Lima Town, Copper charms and silver trinkets from the chests of Spanish crews, Gold doubloons and double moydores, louis d’ors and ortagues. Clumsy yellow-metal earrings from the Indians of Brazil, Uncut emeralds out of Rio, bezoar stone from Guayaquil, Silver, in the crude and fashioned, pots of old Arica bronze, Jewels from the bones of Incas desecrated by the Dons. We smoothed the place with mattocks, and we took and blazed the tree, Which marks yon where the gear is hid that none will ever see, And we laid aboard the ship again, and south away we steers, Through the loud surf of Los Muertos which is beating in my ears. I’m the last alive that knows it. All the rest have gone their ways, Killed, or died, or come to anchor in the old Mulatas Cays, And I go singing, fiddling, old and starved and in despair, And I know where all that gold is hid, if I were only there. It’s not the way to end it all. I’m old and nearly blind, And an old man’s past’s a strange thing, for it never leaves his mind. And I see in dreams, awhiles, the beach, the sun’s disc dipping red, And the tall ship, under topsails, swaying in past Nigger Head. I’d be glad to step ashore there. Glad to take a pick and go To the lone blazed coco-palm tree in the place no others know, And lift the gold and silver that has moldered there for years By the loud surf of Los Muertos which is beating in my ears. NOTES AND QUESTIONS =Biography.= John Masefield (1875-⸺) is an English poet and playwright. When a small boy he had a mania for running away from home; to satisfy this longing his father sent him to sea when he was fourteen years old, in charge of the captain of a sailing vessel. During his travels he collected much material which he afterward used in his poems. On one of his trips he landed in New York City, where he acquired considerable knowledge of American customs. Next to Kipling he is England’s greatest singer of her “Seven Seas and Five Oceans.” Early in 1916 Masefield came to the United States on a lecture tour which aroused much interest in him and his writings. During the recent World War he served in France in connection with the Red Cross. He also served in the campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula and wrote a splendid account of that unfortunate undertaking.