The Story of the Norman Island Treasure By Gerald Singer
In the 1700's the city of Havana, Cuba was a consolidation
point for treasure gathered by Spanish adventurers.
Gold and precious gems were stolen from sacred Inca graves or mined in forced
labor camps where many thousands of indigenous people lost their lives. When
a sufficient quantity was accumulated, it would be brought overland, escorted
by heavily armed soldiers, to the walled city of Cartegena.
Rare and exotic spices, ivory, jade and silk,
gathered in the far off lands of Asia and the East Indies were
sailed across the Pacific and landed at the port cities of Acapulco
and Panamá and then transported on the backs of mules
to Vera Cruz and Portobello.
From these ports on the Caribbean coast the cargo
would be sent to Havana and stored along with shipments of pearls,
indigo, rum, sugar, tobacco, cochineal, quinine, coffee and cocoa
from the islands of the Caribbean.
The consolidated merchandise would finally be
transported to Spain in armed convoys of warships and galleons.
The treasure laden armadas sailed north, riding the currents
of the Gulf Stream until they reached the latitudes of the prevailing
westerlies where they would then turn east sailing downwind to
Spain.
In the summer of 1750 the five hundred ton Spanish
Galleon, Nuestra Señora
de Guadelupe, commanded by Juan Manuel de Bonilla and escorted
by a convoy of seven warships, left Havana Harbor bound for the
Spanish port city of Cadiz. Packed away in the ship's holds was
a vast fortune in gold, silver, wrought plate, indigo, cochineal
and tobacco.
On August 15, 1750 while sailing through a section
of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Devil's Triangle, the armada
encountered a fierce tropical storm. The Nuestra Señora
de Guadelupe went aground off the island of Ocracoke in the British
Colony of North Carolina. Three of her accompanying galleons
disappeared in the same storm and not a trace of their wreckage
has ever been found.
When the seas calmed, the crippled galleon
was visited by the Captain General of the Province of North Carolina.
He claimed that duties were owed on the landed merchandise. Captain
Bonilla disputed this claim, citing the terms of the treaty between
Britain and Spain pertaining to shipping and trade. The Captain
General temporarily placed the treasure in British custody and
Bonilla accompanied him ashore to debate the matter.
Meanwhile the Governor of South Carolina, who
heard of the incident, sent a courier with a message to impound
the Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe in order to
settle claims made by citizens of South Carolina against the
Spanish Governor of Havana. It seems that the Governor had illegally
impounded several English ships after the conclusion of the peace
treaty, and the ship's owners now demanded compensation.
During the negotiations between the Governor General
of North Carolina and Captain Bonilla, and while the South Carolina
contingent was still en route, the treasure was stolen by pirates
who loaded the precious cargo into two shallow draft sailboats
called bilanders, craft designed for inland navigation only.
One of the heavily loaded vessels promptly foundered and sank,
but the other, commanded by the Englishman Owen Lloyd, successfully
sailed over 1000 miles of ocean and made landfall on the Danish
island of St. Croix.
Here the pirates disposed of some of their money
and then sailed north to Norman Island where the chests of gold
and silver were painstakingly hidden. They then set sail for
St. Thomas where they sold the cochineal, indigo and tobacco
along with the unsuitable bilander itself. After a drunken spending
spree Lloyd and his men made their way back to St. Croix where
they bought a sloop and sailed to the British Leeward Islands.
The pirate's behavior on St. Croix and St. Thomas
was, to say the least, indiscreet and as news of the stolen treasure
spread, interested parties soon put two and two together and
had a fair idea of the identity of the suspects and the location
of the treasure.
In all probability the pirates were observed in
the vicinity of Norman Island by seamen coming in and out of
the harbor at Roadtown, Tortola. Whatever the cause, a certain
curiosity must have arisen concerning Norman Island because a
search party was organized to investigate. The searchers apparently
included Abraham Chalwil, the President off the Council in Tortola,
and other leading citizens.
Their suspicions were confirmed and at least a
portion of the stolen booty was found and brought back to Tortola.
The members of the Norman Island expedition, however, did not
relay news of the find to government officials in the Leeward
Islands and simply decided to keep what they found.
As was the case with the original pirates, the
virtue of discretion was not practiced, and rumors of their find
proliferated throughout the West Indies.
Meanwhile both the British and the Spanish were
busily following the trail of the pirates and the treasure, which
both nations now claimed as their own.
The Lieutenant Governor of Antigua, Mr. Fleming,
was the first government official to take direct action. He traveled
to Nevis, St. Kitts, Montserrat and Anguilla where he disseminated
information about the piracy suspects in the hope that they would
be apprehended.
In Anguilla Fleming was informed that a man who
called himself Davidson had been arrested on suspicion after
he tried to buy provisions with a newly minted gold doubloon.
He was interrogated and confessed that his real name was Blackstock
and that he was, indeed, one of the pirates who were so eagerly
being sought.
The next entry into the race to find the hidden
fortune was the Dutch governor of Sint Eustatius (Statia). It
seems that the pirate leader, Owen Lloyd had been arrested on
that island and had furnished a full confession. Possessed of
this information the Governor of Statia was preparing to send
a contingent of soldiers to search for the treasure at Norman
Island. Governor Fleming found out about the affair and put a
stop to the Dutch governor's plan by threatening to confiscate
his vessel and arrest the crew if they entered British territory
on this illegal mission.
When Fleming got to Tortola, he quickly learned
that some of the inhabitants had already been to Norman Island
and had brought the treasure back to Tortola. He also realized
that the Tortolans, who were generally poor and had a history
of being harassed by the Spanish, would be extremely reluctant
to give up what they had found.
In a letter concerning the incident Fleming wrote, "Furnished
with the confession of Blackstock, I landed at Tortola on Monday
the 25 November and finding it, confirmed, in every particular,
I hoped the certainty it gave me as to the species and quantity
of the treasure, would afford me great assistance in my inquiry,
but I did not find it so. I instantly sent for the president,
Abraham Chalwil, who attended me and I had very soon a number
of the best of the inhabitants about me, but they did not bring
with them a disposition to acknowledge for themselves, or betray
the confidences, I am told, they had entered into."
Fleming used "the carrot and stick" solution
to solve the problem. He offered a large reward in the form of
a one third finder's fee for those that turned in their share
and confiscation, arrest and punishment for those who did not.
The President of the Council, along with several
other citizens finally acknowledged the existence and whereabouts
of the treasure and at least a portion of it was returned. Chalwil,
however, was to eventually lose his job over the matter.
Coins and merchandise valued at $20,429 were eventually
turned in, and $7514 of that was issued as a finder's fee.
The estimated value of the cargo originally stolen from the galleon
was over $200,000; this left about $180,000 (worth millions of
dollars by today's standards) still unaccounted for.
The Spanish maintained that the treasure was rightfully
theirs since they were the ones who had stolen it from the native
Americans in the first place. When word spread that the Nuestra
Señora cargo had found its way to the Virgin
Islands, the governor of Puerto Rico sent a contingent of soldiers
to investigate, and there is evidence that they may have met
with some success. This story takes us back to the island of
Anegada and a man named George Norman.
Anegada never developed
a significant plantation or agricultural economy, and at the
time of our story most of the inhabitants of the island were
nefarious and desperate individuals who dedicated themselves
to piracy and the plunder of ships wrecked on the Anegada Horseshoe
Reef.
A deed dated 1747 showed a George Norman to be
the owner of over four- percent of the island of Anegada. How
he earned enough money to buy such a large tract of land is anyone's
guess, but many speculate that his money came from questionable
sources.
According to George Eggleston in his book Virgin Islands, Norman
Island "was
named for a pirate skipper who had a one-man kingdom on the island
and for many years preyed upon the shipping that passed through
Sir Francis Drake Channel."
If George Norman had anything to do with Norman
Island at the time of the piracy, he would have been among the
Virgin Islanders who found portions of the loot there. He may
even have been in cahoots with the pirates.
The book Lagooned in the Virgin Islands by H.
B. Eadie mentions a letter dated December 22, 1750 which refers
to "trouble-some Spaniards infesting the
seas around the Virgin Islands" and their recovery of part of the loot from
the caravel Nuestra Señora which had been buried at Norman
Island.
In Letters From The Virgin Islands, written anonymously,
reference is made of the Spanish recapture of the treasure: "Norman,
a buccaneer, separating himself from his associates, then in
force at Anegada, had settled with his portion of the general
booty, on this Key...in a conflict (with the Spanish)...Norman
and his followers perished."
The next rumor of a treasure find came in the
early nineteenth century after Captain Thomas Southey described
Peter Island in his Chronological History of the West Indies.
He wrote: "In
May (1806) the author with a party visited Peter's Island, one
of those which from the Bay of Tortola, a kind of Robinson Crusoe
spot, where a man ought to be a farmer, carpenter, doctor, fisherman,
planter; everything himself. The owner's house has only the ground
floor; a roof of shingles projects some six or eight feet beyond
the sides, like a Quaker's hat; not a pane of glass in the house;
merely shutters for the apertures. In the centre of the drawing-room
or hall, or best room were triced up ears of Indian corn; on
a chair lay a fishing net; in one corner hung another; spyglass,
a fowling piece, chairs, looking glass, and pictures of the four
seasons composed the furniture; the library consisted of a prayer-book,
Almanack, and one volume of the Naval Chronicle. On the left
hand was a room, with a range of machines for extracting the
seeds from the cotton. Round the house were abundance of goats,
turkeys, fowls, a bull, cow, pigs dogs and cats..."
"The Old Gentleman was dressed in a large
broad-brimmed white hat which appeared to have been in use for
over a century; a white night-cap covered his bald head; his
blue jacket had lapels buttoned back; his duck waistcoat had
flaps down to his knees; the trousers were of the same material
as his waistcoat...the man leading this isolated life with only
his old wife, who looked more like an Egyptian mummy than anything
human, was worth £60,000...He
had lived twenty years on that small island and twenty on Tortola."
The eccentric couple later went to live on Norman
Island supposedly in search of greater seclusion, but the talk
was that they had returned to look for more treasure.
Thomas Southey was the brother of the well-known
poet, Robert Southey, which helped give this rather obscure book
a wide circulation and in conjunction with the later activities
of the hermit couple there arose a renewed interest in the lost
treasure of Norman Island.
A group of English treasure hunters formed the
Norman's Island Treasure Company. The adventurers sailed to Norman
Island where they set off large charges of gunpowder to blast
holes in places where they thought that the loot might have been
hidden. There was no record of a find, but it is said that some
of these holes can be still be seen today.
The most recent report of a treasure find on Norman
Island concerns the Creque family. Eggleston wrote: "just after the turn of the last century an impoverished
Virgin Islander named Creque made a systematic search of the caves and found
the treasure chest previously mentioned. The well-heeled Creque family are prominent
merchants in St. Thomas to this day." (Mr. Creque bought
Norman Island and the Creque family became significant landowners
on St. Thomas and St. John. Creque's Alley in downtown Charlotte
Amalie was the subject of a hit song by the Mommas and the Poppas
in the 1960's)
Julian Putley in The Virgin's Treasure Island
writes: "The southern-most
cave has natural steps carved into one side and it was at the top of these steps
that, in 1910 or thereabouts, a treasure chest was found containing Spanish doubloons.
The find was verified by a fisherman, who, whilst sheltering from the rain, found
an empty iron chest and a few telltale coins ... Rumor has it that when descendants
of Mr. Creque are betrothed a Spanish doubloon hanging from a gold chain is presented
to the lucky bride."
