This protest was paid due heed, but two years later, an Englishman, Claude Robert Guiness, persuaded the officials of Costa Rica to listen kindly to his plea, and he was granted the right to explore the island for two years. Gissler stood by his guns, drew up a list of grievances, and sailed for the mainland in a small boat to assert his rights to his kingdom. At that time, a wealthy British naval officer, Lord Fitzwilliam, was bound out to Cocos Island in his own steam yacht with a costly equipment of machinery and a heavy crew to find the treasure. He found poor Gissler in a Costa Rican port, became interested in his wrongs, and promptly supported his claims. An English nobleman with surplus wealth is a person to wield influence in the councils of a Central American republic and Gissler was pacified and given a renewal of his documentary rights as governor and population of Cocos Island. Lord Fitzwilliam took him on board the yacht and in this dignified fashion Gissler returned to this kingdom. He earned his passage by telling his own version of the treasure, as he had culled and revised it from various sources, and his bill of particulars was something to gloat over, including as it did such dazzling bits of narrative as this: "Besides the treasure buried by Captain Thompson, there was vast wealth left on Cocos by Benito Bonito himself. He captured a treasure galleon off the coast of Peru and took two other vessels laden with riches sent out from Mexico at the outbreak of the revolution against the Spaniards. On Cocos he buried three hundred thousand pounds' weight of silver and silver dollars, in a sandstone cave in the side of the mountain. Then he laid kegs of powder on top of the cave and blew away the face of the cliff. In another excavation he placed gold bricks, 733 of them, four by three inches in size, and two inches thick, and 273 gold-hilted swords, inlaid with jewels. On a bit of land in the little river, he buried several iron kettles filled with gold coin." Lord Fitzwilliam and his yacht arrived at Cocos in December of 1904, and the party of laborers fell to with prodigious zest. While they were making the dirt fly, another English expedition, commanded by Arnold Gray, hove in sight, and proceeded to begin excavating at inconveniently close range. In fact, both parties were cocksure that the lost cave was located in one spot beneath a great mass of debris that had tumbled down from the overhanging height. The inevitable result was that a pretty quarrel arose. Neither force would yield its ground. Inasmuch as both were using dynamite rather lavishly, treasure hunting became as dangerous as war. When the rival expeditions were not dodging the rocks that were sent hurtling by the blasting, they were using bad language, the one accusing the other of effacing its landmarks and playing hob with its clues.