treasure of Agrihan

The lost treasure of Agrihan Island

In 1817 there was a Scotsman by the name of Roberton. He was a pirate who worked for the Chileans in the fight against the Spanish. He was known not only for his ghastly sight, which was of average height and shocking red hair, he was also known for his cruel and torturous ways. A couple of years later, a bandit known as Benavides appeared and began to stir up real trouble. Roberton took as his prisoner a friend of the bandit and demanded to know where Benavides was. Remembering Roberton’s reputation, the friend told him where the bandit was hiding.

Robertson gathered up an army of men and went to catch Benavides by surprise. While Roberton and his army were successful in capturing all of Benavides’ men, Benavides himself escaped. Roberton first extracted further information from these men and then proceeded to hang all sixty of them. The information he retrieved from them before their deaths was that they knew of gold that was buried on an island just off the coast of Chile. The island was called Mocha. Roberton took his brother and some other faithful followers and moved to the island. One day while they were returning from Valdivia, they ran into trouble and all but Roberton drowned. Roberton had no desire to live on Mocha without his men and so he joined the Peruvian Island. He never gave another thought to the buried treasure that was never found on Mocha Island.
While fighting against Lima, he was captured and taken prisoner by them. They soon let him go and he returned to Peru where he met Teresa Mendez. Teresa was a young woman of 21. She had been married once before and had lost her first husband at sea. She was almost as wealthy as she was beautiful and had many admirers but she really only ever paid attention to the ones that had wealth and came from an upstanding background. Roberton was not wealthy and his family was small and unknown. But he was desperately in love with her and persisted in his attempts to persuade her to love him too. His pleas were always met with a laugh until one day she told him that if he could promise her a life of wealth and luxury, she would marry him. Nobody believed that she would fulfill her end of the promise.
It was during the same time that the ship Peruana was docked in the harbor. One night during a meeting between the officers, Lieutenant Vieyra laughed and suggested that Roberton rob the ship, which held over two million pieces of gold. Then he could take the treasure and show it to Teresa to win her love. That same night Roberton collected a few men who were mostly British. The Peruana did not have very good security and so it was easy to attack the few guards and sail away with the ship and the treasure she held. When morning came, there was no sign of either.
Roberton took his men to Tahiti. He knew however that they could not stay for although they had many hours on their opponent, people would come looking for them. He and two most trusted followers, George and William, agreed. The rest of his crew did not want to leave Tahiti at first and so Roberton also took aboard fifteen women. The men followed shortly after. While the women may have gotten the men back onto the boat, Roberton knew that it only gave him more people he had to get off. The treasure had always in his mind been for him to share with Teresa. His crew and the women would have no part of it. As he started to sail towards the Mariana Islands, he declared that eight of the crew were trying to take over the ship. He ordered that they be left on a deserted island as punishment and continued on to Agrihan Island.
Once on the island, Roberton began to slaughter the women. William, who was very good with a weapon, began shooting them. After all of the women were killed, the remaining seven members of Roberton’s crew loaded the treasure onto rowboats and rowed safely to shore. They found a spot located at the bottom of a cliff and began to dig a hole for their treasure. They then placed their treasure in the hole and covered it up, leaving tree branch markings as a sign of where it was buried. They had kept 20,000 gold pieces for extra money along the way and locked the other members of the crew inside the ship. Using one of the rowboats, Roberton and his crew swam to shore and pretended to be shaken about the terrible shipwreck they had just been in. They talked of how they were the only survivors. What they didn’t know was that their ship hadn’t sunk before one man escaped. The other three had starved to death and it had taken him a year to make it back but he was still alive.
From there, George left the other two to go to Rio de Janeiro. Roberton and William continued to travel together though and wanted to go back to retrieve the treasure they had buried. They began the travel back to Agrihan and stopped in Hobart, Tasmania, where they met Thomson who was a sailor. They quickly convinced Thomson to get a crew together and take the two of them north. After a long night of drinking one evening, William told Thomson the entire story. Not being able to remember the name of the island exactly, Thomson concurred from his description that it must be Agrihan. Not many nights afterward, Thomson was woken up by the sound of William’s screams. Going to check on the problem, Thomson found him murdered. After this, Thomson knew what to expect from Roberton and was very careful around him. However, he was simply not as strong as Roberton and the latter pushed him overboard.
Although he was near-dead when he was rescued, Thomson was found by a Spanish ship and taken aboard. After telling his rescuers his story, they began to aggressively pursue Roberton. Roberton meanwhile, was sailing to Spain so that he could seek refuge in the mountains and hide for awhile. However, the Spanish found him and took him to Agrihan so that he could tell them where the treasure was. But Roberton would not tell them. Instead, he kept trying to escape.
They took him back to their ship and using other forms of torture such as whips, demanded that he give them more information. He finally agreed but as they were taking him back to the island to show them, he jumped overboard, with his chains still around his feet. He quickly sank to the bottom and never saw Teresa again. The Spanish continued for some time to find the treasure but always came up empty-handed. It’s thought that the treasure is still on this island today.