The Book of Buried Treasure: Being a True History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, etc., which are sought for to this dayPaine, Ralph Delahaye
History
The Book of Buried Treasure: Being a True History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, etc., which are sought for to this day
Paine, Ralph Delahaye
Treasure troves
"To the sixth question concerning what treasure there was in the fleet,
I say there was great stories of money and plate which came in the
galleon wherein the Duke of Medina was (_The San Martin_), and in the
ship of Dom Pedro de Valdez which was taken, and in the Admiral of the
galleons (_The San Lorenzo_), and in the Galley Royal (_The Capitana
Royale_), and in the Vice Admiral wherein was Juan Martinez de Ricalde
(_The Santa Anna_), and in the Vice Admiral whereof was General Diego
(_The San Christobel_), and in the Vice Admiral of the pinnaces (_N. S.
de Pilar de Targoza_), and in the Vice-Admiral of the hulks (_The Gran
Grifon_), and in a Venitian ship in which came General Don Alonzo de
Leyna. The report goeth that this ship brought great stores of
treasure, for that there came in her the Prince of Ascoli, and many
other noblemen. This is all I know touching the treasure."
The name of the _Florencia_ does not appear herein, yet the report of
her vast riches was current in the Western Highlands no more than one
lifetime after the year of the Armada. That men of solid business
station and considerable capital can be found to-day to charter
wrecking steamers, divers, dredges, and what not to continue this
enterprise proves that romance is not wholly dead.
In the town of Tobermory, the busy, mysterious parties of treasure
seekers, as they come year after year with their impressive flotilla of
apparatus, furnish endless diversion and conjecture. The people will
tell you, in the broad English of the Highlander, and in the Gaelic,
even more musical, as it survives among the Western Islands, the legend
of the beautiful Spanish princess who came in the _Florencia_, and was
wooed and won by a bold MacLean, and they will show you the old mill
whose timbers, still staunchly standing, were taken from the wreck of
the galleon. In Mull, and oftener among the islands further seaward
and toward the Irish coast, are to be found black-eyed and black-haired
men and women, not of the pure Celtic race, in whose blood is the
distant strain bequeathed by those ancestors who married shipwrecked
Spanish sailors of the Armada, and perhaps among them are descendants
of these two or three seamen who were hurled ashore alive when the
_Florencia_ was destroyed by the hand of young Donald Glas MacLean.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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