The True Story That Inspired Pirates Of The Caribbean | The Real Treasure Island | Absolute History

i'm alice loxton and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history we've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount from history hit tv make sure you check out the details below and use the code absolute history all one word when you sign up now on with the show an island [Music] treasure robert louis stevenson's treasure island introduced the world to stories of pirates and buried treasure almost 150 years later his fantastic tale is as alive as ever the most equivalent effect to the effect that treasure island had on popular culture and writing would be indiana jones spielberg with indiana jones was able to revitalize the b movie and to tell a story in a gripping way that caught people's imagination stevenson is in the same kind of situation one historian thinks stevenson's story was inspired by real events he thinks stevenson was on the trail of a real treasure lost 60 years before he published his masterpiece [Music] new research points to a startling possibility that stevenson may have found the treasure that inspired his story [Music] how could an entire family live like royalty without ever having done a day's work where did all this wealth come from if the story's true the author of treasure island is the greatest treasure hunter of all time from pirates to barry gold from walking the plank to x marks the spot every pirate story told today began with robert louis stevenson's treasure island it was the first and remains the most popular of all pirate tales 100 million copies have sold in over 40 languages since it was first published in 1882 martin danahay is an expert in the works of robert louis stevenson when people think of pirates having parrots on their shoulders and having one leg missing or they think of the dead man's chest or they think of yo ho ho and a bottle of rum they're coining from treasure island but they may not even be aware of it his books have seeped into popular consciousness and are now part of our vocabulary and part of our way of perceiving the world and people are influenced by him often without even realizing it [Music] stevenson always claimed treasure island was a work of fiction but swiss historian alexander kappas believes it may have been based in fact his aim is to find out if robert louis stevenson's treasure island was based on historical events i wanted to clear up some of the inconsistencies i found regarding robert louis stevenson in his biographies there appeared to be a few things that crystallized with various points in his novel [Music] kappas is searching for proof that robert louis stevenson knew about a real treasure and real pirates a tale of greed deception and murder the story begins in peru at that time a spanish colony spain has plundered the riches of the continent and its native incans making the capital of lima among the richest cities in the world but now lima is on the brink of civil war the people are taking up arms against their spanish overlords the bishop of lima receives news that the rebel armies are at the gates of the city the bishop fears the wealth of his church will be stolen he orders these vast riches estimated at 60 million dollars today be transported to the harbor and taken by sea out of lima jack fitzgerald historian the people were in an absolute panic in anticipation of an invasion that may have come any day they decided to move all the treasure out of england and all day long these were being put on horses and wagons and so on moving out to fuel mods and stored away in in kaleo [Music] up until this point all the historians are in agreement then the facts get foggy most accounts say that an english captain named thompson offers to help the spanish his merchant ship the mary dear is their best hope of getting the treasure out of the city and the spanish were obliged to entrust their entire fortune to this captain thompson who seemed to be both a trustworthy and an honest man thompson's orders are to use his vast ship to get as far from lima as possible spanish priests will accompany him to keep the treasure safe he'll be moving and the objective was to take this and hide it somewhere on the northern ireland until the rebellion settled down and bring it back and restore it to the church [Music] thompson hoists anchor with the treasure on board [Music] the captain and his first mate chappelle have their own plans for the treasure once they were in three waters the spanish lieutenant in charge of the escort would give him instructions on where to take the treasure looks like it's cocoa's island [Music] by sailing off beyond the horizon captain thompson had fulfilled the first part of his mission what happens next is where the legend of treasure island begins thompson and his crew decide to steal the treasure greed had turned the good captain into a pirate when they got this fortune loaded below decks the crew were assisting and bringing this arm and they could see all this gold going on and the gold statues and everything else be on your way weeks later thompson and his men reappear not on the merry deer but in lifeboats thompson's story was that they'd been caught in a terrible storm and the merry deer had been sunk and now lay at the bottom of the sea the treasure of the church of lima was lost the captain and his crew are thrown in jail the spanish don't believe a word of thompson's story weeks earlier the tide had washed up the body of the priest that thompson murdered [Music] the spanish torture the truth out of thompson's men [Music] the sailors all confessed that there had been no storm and that they sank the ship themselves [Music] they confessed that thompson ordered the murder of the spanish guards and then set sail for the open sea [Music] his destination was a deserted island to hide the treasure he promised his men he would divide the wealth once things blew over with the spanish authorities the greatest treasure of all time worth in the region of about 60 million dollars by today's reckoning was packed into a small cave [Music] thompson's crew were counting on their pirate captain to make them rich men thompson drew a treasure map and marked the cave entrance so that he could find it when he came back then they decided that they would leave this none of them would take anything out of it then for years but they felt that this would look after them and their children for the rest of their lives but not one of thompson's men would ever set eyes on the treasure again where is the treasure before they died they revealed the name of the island [Music] cocos island is about 500 kilometers off the coast of costa rica in exchange for their lives the spanish ordered thompson and his first mate chappelle to take them to the island but thompson is smarter than his spanish captors thompson was intellectually head and shoulders above the other pirates and he was a charming villain and he persuaded the spanish officers that he could take them and bring him to the treasure uncle goes on because he knew if he remained a prisoners with them he would certainly die but if they go get to the island he had a chance of escaping thompson leads them into the jungle he and chappelle get their chance the geography of the island was a very thick jungle they easily lost themselves there and townsend chappelle hid under a fault [Music] the spanish search for weeks and weeks they find neither thompson nor more importantly their gold thompson and his mate chappelle hide on the island for months before being rescued as castaways there was a lot of whaling going on in the area and they were coming there to pick up fresh water and sometimes it would be months before these come in but they managed to get on one of these ships that had come in for water captain thompson goes into hiding two decades later he resurfaces in newfoundland [Music] and the legend of treasure island comes alive once more [Music] in 1820 a pirate named thompson buries 60 million dollars worth of gold silver and jewels on a deserted island he then disappears it takes almost a century for an historian in newfoundland to track him down jack fitzgerald looked through old shipping records and found that the pirate thompson lived in st john's the large registers were very important to me in sorting out the mythology and legends from the truth [Music] 20 years after he buried the treasure of lima thompson finds his way to newfoundland on a merchant ship [Music] the end of his life is near a sea captain named john keating tends to him on his deathbed when it became clear that he was going to die he called a keaney to his bedside [Music] and at that time he drew up the map instructed heating and getting there helping him and getting the details as to where to find the treasure thompson hands down the exact location of the treasure of the church of lima now it's up to john keating to find it keating hires a ship and sets sail for cocos island the only man on his crew who knows his true mission is a fellow captain named william bogue who he's entrusted to help him find the treasure after they arrived in coco's island captain keating and captain barg went to shore first to scout the island keating and bogue land on cocos island with thompson's treasure map it leads them straight to the cave keating was standing up against a huge stone that had knocked the cave to the treasure and when the opening went inside keating later described a spectacular glow according to one story keating returns from the jungle alone another legend is that vogue drowned whatever the case bogue never returns to newfoundland [Music] heating takes only as much treasure as he can carry he does not want to reveal his secret one can only imagine the difficulty that keating had trying not to arouse the interest of his crew that probably explains why he only took a small portion of the treasure with him he never became massively rich he was just content with being rather well off keating returns to newfoundland and dies there four decades later in 1882 after keating the trail to the lost treasure of lima goes cold decades pass before a young scottish writer would set the world's interest in pirates and treasure on fire in 1882 robert louis stevenson writes a fictional tale of pirates and buried treasure to this day every pirate story and movie is based on the characters and images of treasure island robert louis stevenson's personal story does little to explain how he dreamed up the greatest pirate tale of all time born in 1850 stevenson is the son of a long line of engineers bedridden with lung disease since youth stevenson abandons his father's dreams of a life in business he wants to be a writer the father really hoped that stevenson would follow in his footsteps stevenson really from the earliest years knew he wanted to tell stories and be a writer and there was a lot of conflict between them because of that but he was driven really to write it's really the only thing that seems to have really made him happy was to write stories at 29 stevenson has yet to make a penny as a writer he is sick mentally unstable and addicted to opium life is at a low ebb in 1879 he was quite depressed he doesn't hadn't felt he'd achieved what he wanted to achieve as a writer he was in search of something and he didn't know what it was and to make matters worse he's having an affair with a married older woman a 40-year-old american named fanny osbourne it was pretty much love at first sight fanny was 10 years older than stevenson but there was an immediate spark between them and their age difference seemed to make no difference at all to their romance so from the very beginning stevenson felt that he had to be with fanny even though he knew she was married and she had two children so they had an affair which understandably did not sit very well with her husband back in california in 1879 stevenson travels to san francisco to marry fannie he arrives there to discover that she is not yet divorced stevenson is shattered still fanny becomes his muse [Music] she's a controversial figure i like to use the analogy of john lennon yoko ono as far as john lennon was concerned joker owner was a great influence and helped his artistic endeavors and for stevenson fannie was an inspiration a wife and somebody who managed his life for him he was devoted to her waiting for fannie's divorce stevenson kills time in the bars and taverns of san francisco harbor looking for ideas stevenson was interested in all kinds of people and in collecting stories and trying to find out about people's lives so if you hang out in places like you know the docklands of around san francisco or bad areas around san francisco this is consistent with this interest in what other people consider low lifes or disruptable characters [Music] alexander kappas thinks that while stevenson was in san francisco he stumbled upon the material that inspired him to write a pirate story [Music] kappas finds a clue in a san francisco newspaper dated from exactly the time stevenson was there i was going through the san francisco chronicle the addition from october 31st 1879 [Music] treasure hunters search for spanish gold on an island called cocos island it's unthinkable that such a news item wouldn't have interested stevenson kappus thinks he has stumbled upon the clue that sparked the greatest treasure story of all time [Music] a pirate captain buried gold a desert island true events that robert louis stevenson may have heard about before writing treasure island it's not impossible to rule out that he could have read something in san francisco that found its way into treasure island if stevenson did hang around the docks and taverns he could have heard other sailors repeating the legend of captain thompson and the treasure that remained hidden in a cave on a deserted island [Music] kappus thinks this is the story that inspired robert louis stevenson to write treasure island [Music] and suddenly stevenson came up with this masterpiece of a novel treasure island i mean something must have happened [Music] but for his whole life robert louis stevenson claimed he dreamt up his tale of adventure on a rainy holiday in scotland playing with his young step son [Music] and the story is in 1881 one day lloyd was drawing or looking at a map and stevenson looked this map with him and started to make up stories about the map naming the island skeleton island you know putting on spyglass point adding various details to it and gradually from this map the narrative of treasure island took shape so that the whole story was actually generated by a map [Music] alexander kappas believes the lima story is the source of stevenson's novel it was a well-known legend in his lifetime the treasure seekers stevenson read about in 1879 were the first of hundreds to go to cocos island in search of pirate gold dozens of others followed in the century to come all returned empty-handed that didn't deter reinhold ossler who in the 1980s was captivated by cocos and the prospect of pirate gold i felt i just had to go down there and have a look for that treasure as soon as i realized that the island really did exist i was on my way it takes ossler seven years to raise the money for his expedition in 1982 osler and four friends set off to find the gold of lima [Music] osler lives out a fantasy straight from the pages of robert louis stevenson's famed book digging for pirate treasure on a deserted island but the pirate gold made famous in stevenson's novel is nowhere to be found it was simply a very hard struggle we had to fight for every meter the only thing that ossler finds are the traces of other dreamers cocos island has been ravaged by treasure hunters over many decades 600 expeditions over the span of a century have turned cocos island inside out there had been treasure hunters here that had blown away parts of the summit and others that had dynamited whole sections of the cliff changing the landscape entirely nature's also taken its toll in that period of time you've had volcanoes and you've had earthquakes down there and you had all this jungle growth osler and his friends are about to leave defeated then suddenly their instruments start to beat we got a massive reading while we were at waver bay one of our metal detectors just went crazy so we started to dig like mad men right there it took us days but all we found was an old american bulldozer that had been brought in by a previous expedition osler's team finds nothing on cocos island the only person who claims to have discovered treasure on cocos island is newfoundlander john keating in 1840 he says he was led straight to the gold by a deathbed map drawn by pirate captain thompson jack fitzgerald thinks the treasure map was the key to keating's success my thought was given to katie was dead out this this was a a very accurate map but alexander kappas thinks keating did not find the treasure of lima on cocos island he believes the keating story is just another legend the strange thing about cocos island is the number of expeditions that in the best part of 200 years had come up with exactly the same result absolutely nothing cappus thinks he knows why all have failed to find pirates gold it's not there now kappas is hot on the trail of the real treasure island [Music] and he thinks robert louis stevenson got there first [Music] in 1881 robert louis stevenson publishes treasure island as a series of children's stories the poor sick writer is suddenly a star island was immediately a success and what's interesting was success among adults there were stories that the prime minister started reading it couldn't couldn't put it down first people found it an incredibly gripping narrative it was the perfect book at the perfect time his name became a household name at that point it is a great narrative but it also raises a lot of issues and appealed to victorians in particular for a number of different reasons the whole idea of selling off and making your fortune this was the time of britain's imperial expansion across the globe and the whole story of sailing off to a distant land and coming back wealthy was a part of the appeal of heading out anywhere in the empire at this point stevenson says his book is a work of fiction but historian alexander kappas thinks there is some truth behind the fantasy [Music] and kappas thinks the treasure hunters have been looking in the wrong direction when you begin to ask yourself whether we're dealing with the right island at all then the first thing you have to consider is where could captain thompson have tried to get to as speedily as possible while fleeing from the spanish and i'd say it would be somewhere that the winds and the tides would help him to get to the quickest campus decides to seek help in his quest i decided to look for nautical evidence of thompson's possible escape routes his search leads him to oslo norway to the archives of the legendary adventurer thor heyerdahl [Music] the son of thor heyerdahl is himself an oceanographer in 1947 heyerdahl crossed the pacific on a raft to prove his theory that the polynesians had done exactly the same thing thousands of years previously for kappas higher dolls odyssey is a clue that might lead to buried treasure and it was precisely at this point that thor heyerdahl unwittingly provided me with vital evidence as he started off his famous passage across the pacific because by complete coincidence heyerdahl sailed from the very same harbor as captain thompson had over a century before the harbor of lima he discovers that from lima the tides carried higher dolls raft swiftly to the south thousands of kilometers into the middle of the south pacific if you can make that very long trip with a raft just drifting passively with the wind and the current of course you can do the same even more comfortably with the boat if i were a pirate that's exactly what i would have done if heyerdahl is right thompson set sail not for cocos island but for somewhere five thousand kilometers further away and yet every single one of thompson's crew confessed to the treasure being hidden on cocos island [Music] alexander kappas thinks they must have been talking about another cocos island somewhere in the south pacific and he thinks robert louis stevenson might have figured this out too in the 1880s stevenson became obsessed with the south pacific he and finding between them decided to head further west so she went out to san francisco and she found a boat called the casco and told them the boat available for rent and they could rent it and they could travel basically to the south seas and he immediately lapped at the chance alexander kappas believes pirate gold may have led stevenson to the south pacific perhaps while still in san francisco he had the idea that there might be a second island a different treasure island stevenson set off to the south pacific in july of 1888 even though he was suffering from chronic bronchitis [Music] it's a very long way when your voyage starts in san francisco you don't see anything but water for thousands of kilometers stevenson was coughing up blood at the time and he suffered terribly many biographers have documented stevenson's life but none of them have questioned what drove such a sick man to undertake such a rigorous journey it's a well-known fact that he was a very sick man oswald bruckner is a pulmonologist in switzerland [Applause] robert louis stevenson suffered from tuberculosis the truth of it is that back then with a disease like that you only had a 50 chance of survival stevenson has been fighting the disease his whole life he spent whole winters in the swiss alps taking in the cool dry mountain air then suddenly stevenson chose a hot and humid climate [Music] it is like poison to his lungs a voyage that could kill him and it almost does stevenson travels the ocean for two years before reaching samoa in november 1890 [Music] once there stevenson writes to a friend that he plans to leave samoa as quickly as he possibly can but just a few days later stevenson writes in a second letter i'm positively overjoyed at the climate and i fully intend to remain here this doesn't add up for alexander kappas you have to appreciate that december in samoa is the rainy season it gets unbearably hot and humid and it becomes quite difficult to breathe at times it's not a very pleasant experience i cannot imagine that it can be anything other than a plain lie but martin danahay doesn't believe stevenson was in ill health in samoa well stevenson in samoa seems to have been for him quite healthy he really seems to have enjoyed the climate and he had a very settled happy time in samoa he would have a routine of writing or he would go out horse riding he seems to have had quite an active lifestyle and seems to have been in pretty good health so actually settling samoa was not a bad idea for stevenson arriving at samoa airport alex campus is hot on stevenson's trail [Music] kappas believes stevenson must have made some sort of discovery a discovery that he was prepared to risk his life for [Music] he researches in the samoan archives examining long forgotten accounts of the history of the islands [Music] and he makes a shocking discovery one of samoa's adjacent islands is called tafahi but old dutch maps designated the island as coco's island these maps were still in use in captain thompson's day suddenly everything becomes clear to kappus the treasure of the church of lima captain thompson's secret treasure island cocos island [Music] kappus believes robert louis stevenson heard the name cocos and remembered the legend of captain thompson in keating even today tafahi is only accessible by fishing boat it is unlikely that the spanish knew about this other far away cocos island alexander kappas now seeks proof that stevenson went to tafahi in search of pirate treasure the first thing i wanted to do when i got to defy was to find out if there was any evidence at all that stevenson had actually been on the island i'd realized that there was no way of getting on and off the island without somebody noticing if he'd been there someone must have seen him campus now has a startling new theory that the world's greatest treasure writer turned treasure hunter tafahi is a tiny island with just 50 inhabitants [Music] historian alexander kappas can't imagine how a famous scottish writer could have come here without it becoming part of local legend [Music] at first the locals can't help kappas with his questions about stevenson pirates or treasure then a man tells kappas of the legend of fatoulum [Music] according to the legend a strange god named fatoulu first came ashore over 100 years ago [Music] the story is that this particular fish god used to get the village priest to bring him a roasted pig whenever he was hungry now that's very strange behavior for a fish god i'd say that he had more human traits fatoulu first appeared on tafahi exactly when stevenson had arrived on nearby samoa were people afraid of the fish god the legend said that anyone who dares trespass near fatulus rock would surely die if stevenson is fortula how had he managed to drive such fear into the locals an old woman explains that when fatulu appeared the skies were full of thunder and lightning campus believes it was fireworks it's a practice that was rife in the 19th century the european missionaries used to arrive on the polynesian islands using all sorts of technological tricks to impress the natives while they themselves assumed a godlike power over the inhabitants if one speculated that the fish god for tulu were no one other than stevenson himself it would explain why stevenson made a detour to new zealand to stock up on fireworks [Music] a few of the young men of the village lead campus to the spot where the fish god first came ashore [Music] kappus discovers a cave just a stone's throw from the beach just as thompson described [Music] this is an excellent cave it's right behind the beach and set into the cliff itself where the cliff face rises up it's completely concealed it wouldn't be any problem at all just to seal off the entrance with a large rock [Music] campus believes that this is the cave in which pirate captain thompson hid the treasure of lima and that treasure island author robert louis stevenson discovered it 70 years later kappas has formed a startling new theory for historian jack fitzgerald it's too incredible to be believed there's something like 13 caucus islands around the world but any of those claims i think are just wide claims and there's all kinds of theories but i would have an open mind on whether his story might be is something that i think warns investigation [Music] what is certain is that the once poor writer lives like a wealthy man on samoa he orders construction of an english mansion in the heart of the jungle and sends for his entire family to join him there the first time i set eyes on stevenson's house in samoa it rose out of the middle of the jungle like an apparition suddenly i was confronted with all the trappings of a civilized world even the very british lawn had been freshly known stevenson made the modern equivalent of three hundred thousand dollars annually in his peak writing years [Music] most historians agree he could afford to live like a king on samoa his books were very successful his treasure island when it struck afterwards published in the united states was translated to so many different languages and he talks about in his diary about the checks that were coming in he accumulated a lot of wealth from his writings and books but kappas thinks stevenson was spending much more than his earnings on samoa timber from california bricks from new zealand stevenson imports luxury products by the wagon load [Music] wine from france whiskey from scotland and kappas finds one last tantalizing clue there's a massive safe in one of the rooms it's about the size of one that you might find in a large bank i mean it's much too big for the amount of money one might usually keep at home [Music] but stevenson doesn't have time to enjoy his fortune four years after arriving on the island of samoa he dies there in 1894 aged 44. he and fanny were getting ready for dinner and he went down to get a bottle of wine came up to her upstairs up at the veranda suddenly said does my face look different fell unconscious on the ground and died that night and he died from a cerebral hemorrhage so it wasn't his lungs that killed him after several near-death experiences thanks to his lungs throughout his life it was actually his brain that killed him in the end his wife fanny carries out his last wishes that he be buried on the island not in his native scotland alexander kappas is certain that he has solved the mystery and found the true inspiration for stevenson's treasure island his theory that stevenson was inspired by the lost treasure of lima and even discovered it is explosive most stevenson scholars are astonished i'm not sure that stephenson was aware of any particular treasure trove uh he was a great uh collector of stories and he may well have heard this story but he's never given any indication that this particular story was important for his story of treasure island i read robert louis stevenson's papers but as the story developed i think he drew upon this story of treasurer the last treasure of lima and he also drew upon the writings of other uh pirate writers default washington irving and so on for his characters but at no time was there any suggestion in any of his writings that he'd ever even been to copper zone [Music] every pirate story since treasure island owes robert louis stevenson its idea one-legged pirates deserted islands buried treasure it's all stevenson stevenson has shaped the way we perceive various things he's contributed images and words to the language the people quote without even realizing it kappas has woven a good pirate tale worthy of the story that inspired it the legend that treasure island unleashed still burns bright today

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 440,724

Keywords: Absolute History, Forgotten Stories, History Documentary, Literary Masterpiece, Nautical Exploration, Pirate Lore, Robert Louis Stevenson, authentic narratives, enigmatic clues, forgotten legends, historical journey, island exploration, literary masterpiece, lost treasures, marine exploration, mysterious islands, pirate legends revealed, real treasure island, robert louis stevenson, secret treasures, treasure hunting

Id: vZfX7Y-i3Wc

Length: 46min 42sec (2802 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022