Treasure Hunt

Ask, Apr 2005

Psssssst! Pirate Bartholomew Sharp here, at your service.

Most people think pirates are after gold and silver. Well, listen close. It's the maps, my friend, the maps, that we most want. And if you can keep a secret, I'll tell you why.

My own story proves the pudding. Back in 1681, me and my lads (aye, a hearty bunch of buccaneers, we) plundered the Spanish ship El Santo Rosario bound for Panama. She was loaded, she was, with the richest booty we had looted on the whole voyage. Best of all were sea charts and maps containing a very accurate and exact description of all the ports, soundings, creeks, rivers, capes, and coasts of the Pacific and all the navigations performed by the Spaniards in that ocean. So valuable were these maps, the Rosario's captain tried to throw them overboard so we couldn't steal them. But by good luck I saved them. The Spaniards cried-and no wonder. Kings and queens would give up the crown jewels to lay ahold of Spanish maps and charts because they were the best and most detailed in the world. With A maps such as these, any country could win trade routes and seize lands and build empires. Well, friend, the best is yet to come, for when I returned to England in the next year, it seems the loss of the Rosario had greatly angered the Spanish, and they asked the English king to punish me. That would mean death on the gallows. But King Charles (long live His Majesty) so appreciated my gift to him of the Spanish charts and maps that he spared me miserable life. Now I'm off on another treasure hunt...

Musical Maps

Here's a clever place or two to hide a map. Before the American Civil War, round about the 1850s, the slaves in the South wanted to escape to freedom in the Northern states. Many planned secretly to make the dangerous journey north, disguising their traveling directions in the words of songs and passing them along. There were many ways to travel north, but only one musical code has survived. A certain Peg Leg Joe (my kind of lad) traveled as a carpenter all over Alabama and Mississippi, teaching the slaves a song called "Follow the Drinking Gourd." The words instructed them to follow the constellation of the Big Dipper (the drinking gourd) north and told them what to look for along the way until they could cross the Ohio River into freedom. Some family stories tell that, along with the songs, secret patterns in quilts were used to signal escape routes to slaves.

Sir Robert Baden-Powell

Now here's a feller I'd like to meet. He'd make a jolly good pirate, methinks, except that he actually founded the Boy Scout movement in 1908. A man of many talents (not unlike yours truly), Sir Robert was something of a naturalist and studied butterflies and insects. He also did a lot of spying for the British during the First World War. Well, when he wanted to secretly communicate the locations of enemy forts back to headquarters, he cleverly disguised drawings of them as insects (on my pirate's honor, 'tis the truth).

Silky Secrets

Maps have saved many more lives than mine. If you were about to break out of a prison camp in a strange country, what would you want most? Well, a map, of course. During World War II, lots of British and American soldiers were captured and imprisoned in Europe. These hearty lads spent their time trying to figure a way to escape. They had some help from the government back home, where secret agents concocted a whole system of delivering special "escape maps" to the prisoners of war. First they printed maps on silk so that they could be folded up really small and hidden anywhere. Silk doesn't make that crunching noise like paper, and it doesn't rip and shred in water. (Too bad us pirates didn't think of that!) Then the government schemed to smuggle the maps into the prisoner-of-war camps inside care packages for the prisoners. They even hid maps in Monopoly game boards and decks of cards. The words "free parking" followed by a period signaled that a Monopoly game had a map of France hidden in it. About 35,000 prisoners escaped during the war, and historians think that as many as 17,000 may have been carrying secret silk maps. A crew of brave lads, I'd say!

So you can see from these few stories that maps can be quite a treasure. But, don't forget, it's a secret!

* Learn more about the Drinking Gourd song at http://pathways .thinkport.org/secrets/gourd1.cfm.

* For more on Robert Baden-Powell, visit www.pinetreeweb.com/ bp-adventure02.htm.

* Go to www.fathom.com/ feature/121990/ to find out about WWII escape maps.