"As the total quantity of treasure which arrived at Vigo in 1702 amounted to 126,470,600 pesos, or £27,493,609, there is not the least doubt that the treasure in gold and silver still lying in the galleons of Vigo Bay amounts to as much as 113,396,085 pieces of eight, or £24,651,323, after deducting the treasure unloaded before the battle, the booty taken by the victors, and that recovered by explorers. That would have been the value of the treasure two hundred years ago. To-day, its value would be greater, at a moderate estimate of £28,000,000. Such is the sum which we who are interested in the recovery of the treasure have set our hearts on winning from the sea." ====================================================================== [Illustration: Sir George Rooke, commanding the British fleet at the battle of Vigo Bay.] ====================================================================== After this, the hoards of the most notorious and hard-working pirates seem picayune, trifling, shabby, the small change of the age of buried treasure. Why Signor Iberti is so cock-sure of his figures, and how that wondrous treasure fleet was lost in Vigo Bay is a story worth telling if there be any merit in high adventures, hard fighting, and the tang of salty seas in the days when the world was young. No more than nine years after the first voyage of Columbus, galleons laden with treasure were winging it from the West Indies to Spain, and this golden stream was flowing year by year until the time of the American Revolution. The total was to be counted not in millions but in billions, and this prodigious looting of the New World gave to Spain such wealth and power that her centuries of greatness were literally builded upon foundations of ingots and silver bars. Before Sir Francis Drake sailed into the Caribbean, the Dutch and English had been playing at the great game of galleon hunting, but their exploits had been no more than vexations, and the security of the plate fleets was not seriously menaced until "El Draque" spread terror and destruction down one coast of the Americas and up the other, from Nombre de Dios to Panama. Heaven alone knows how many great galleons he shattered and plundered, but from the _San Felipe_ and the _Cacafuego_ he took two million dollars in treasure, and he numbered his other prizes by the score. Martin Frobisher carried the huge East India galleon _Madre de Dios_ by boarding in the face of tremendous odds, the blood running from her scuppers, and was rewarded with $1,250,000 worth of precious stones, ebony, ivory, and Turkish carpets.