The Treasure of Coco Island

The Claim

There are billions worth of treasure buried on Coco Island

Coco Island is a small island located just over 300 miles southwest of the coast of Costa Rica. It’s the first piece of land you come to west of Costa Rica and Panama that isn’t directly next to the coast, and its remote location makes it a perfect spot to hide out as a pirate, which is where the stories of three different treasures supposedly being buried here originated.

The first tale of treasure comes from a woman named Mary Welsh, who claimed to have been part of the crew of pirates led by Captain Bennet Graham. She claimed that over the course of their piracy days, they stole around 350 tons of gold from various Spanish galleons they attacked. She claimed the gold was buried all in the same place somewhere on Coco Island and made a basic map to be able to find it again.

She was sent to a penal colony in Australia for her crimes, and although she claimed to have a map leading to the treasure, none of the authorities thought it was worth checking out. On her release, she travelled to Coco Island with an expedition, but the landmarks she had noted as a reference had changed, and the party was unable to find the location.

The next story of treasure claims that a Portuguese pirate named Benito Bonito used the island as a site to bury his wealth, but he was killed during a battle with another ship, and its location was never revealed.

The most famous story about treasure on Coco Island, and the main reason thousands of treasure hunters have come here searching over the years, is the tale of the treasure of Lima.

Lima was overtaken by the Spanish during the 16th century after the native Inca tribe was defeated. Over the next few hundred years, the Catholic church constantly gathered wealth from the region, mining gold and precious minerals and shipping them back to Spain.

During the early 1800s, South America began to revolt against its foreign occupiers, and an uprising in 1820 meant the city of Lima had to be evacuated. Before the occupying forces left the city, the Spanish-appointed viceroy of Lima sent all of the city’s wealth north to Mexico to avoid it falling into the hands of the locals.

The collective wealth of the city was loaded on board the “Mary Dear”, a ship captained by a man named William Thompson who provided his own crew. The treasure was said to contain 2 life-size gold statues of Mary holding a baby Jesus, and various other solid gold ornaments and jewelry.

Because it was all done in a rush and the uprising wasn’t thought to possess any sea-faring boats to match a galleon, the Mary Dear sailed north alone, following the coast and heading for Mexico.

However, the temptation was too great for Thompson and his crew, and they organised an attack on the Spanish soldiers and priests sent to accompany the gold. Thompson and his crew managed to kill all of the Spanish without a single loss and decided to head towards Coco Island.

The plan was to bury the treasure and wait until enough time had passed so no one was looking for them or the treasure anymore, then return to recover and spend it.

Things didn’t go quite their way, and a few days after leaving the island, their ship was captured and the crew put on trial for piracy. The whole crew was hanged apart from Thompson and his first mate, as they agreed to lead the Spanish to the treasure in exchange for their lives.

Upon reaching Coco Island, the pair managed to slip their captors and escape into the jungle, never to be seen or heard from again. It’s believed they both managed to escape from the island somehow, as neither of their bodies was found, but the chances of making it to the mainland alive on a raft would be pretty slim. It would also be impossible to move several tons of gold on a homemade raft, so even if they did escape, they wouldn’t have been able to take more than a handful of the treasure with them.

So there’s billions worth of pirate treasure on Coco Island? Could that be true?

The main argument against its existence is that no one has ever found any treasure here, apart from a single claim where a treasure hunter apparently found a few gold coins but nothing more. The Costa Rica government has now banned searching for treasure on the island as it’s convinced there isn’t any.

On the other hand, pirates were well known to bury their treasure for various reasons. Using it as a ransom in exchange for their freedom should they ever be captured, and moving freshly stolen goods when people were actively looking for it was too risky. The option of a bank wasn’t open to them, so the only safe place to store it was in the ground.

Coco Island is in the perfect location for a pirate’s hideout if you’re operating on the west coast of Central America, and the island is big enough to have fresh water and provide enough ground to hide, but small enough so that it is very difficult to find if you didn’t already know its exact location.

Perhaps the treasure was recovered previously by one of the people who put it there, or perhaps everyone who knew its location died before they could reach it. If the treasure does contain the amount of gold it is said to, I imagine they would have buried it very deep, too deep for a modern-day standard metal detector.