In 1820, with José de San Martín’s independence forces closing in on Lima, Spanish colonial authorities decided the city’s accumulated wealth — church silver, jeweled ornaments, and reportedly two life-size gold statues of the Virgin and Child — was safer moved out of the country than left for the rebels. Estimates of its value vary enormously depending on the source and era, from roughly $12 million to $60 million in the money of the time, a spread wide enough that the true figure should be treated as unknown rather than precisely $60 million as some retellings claim. The man entrusted with shipping it to safety was Captain William Thompson of the trading vessel Mary Dear. He never delivered it.
A Cargo That Never Arrived
According to the standard version of the story, Thompson and his crew killed the guards and clergy who had been sent to accompany the treasure, disposed of the bodies at sea, and sailed for Cocos Island, an uninhabited, mountainous speck off the coast of Costa Rica more than 300 miles from the mainland. There, they are said to have buried or cached the hoard before scattering. Spanish authorities eventually caught up with the Mary Dear; most of the crew was executed, but Thompson and first mate James Alexander Forbes reportedly bought their lives by agreeing to lead their captors back to the treasure — then vanished into the island’s jungle interior once they were put ashore. Thompson is said to have eventually reached Newfoundland aboard a whaling ship; Forbes settled in California as a businessman and, notably, never returned to search for the fortune he supposedly helped hide.
A Century and a Half of Digging
What happened next is better documented than the theft itself: hundreds of expeditions have combed Cocos Island since the 1820s without recovering anything resembling the legend’s riches. The most methodical searcher was German-born August Gissler, who lived on the island from 1889 to 1908 — nearly twenty years — digging in earnest, and came away with no more than a handful of gold coins for his effort. Other names attached to the hunt over the following decades, including the American gangster Bugsy Siegel and Antarctic explorer Frank Worsley, are widely repeated in popular accounts of Cocos Island, though the historical record on their specific expeditions is thinner than the legend surrounding them.
One Legend, or Several Merged Into One?
Costa Rican authorities, who administer the island as a national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site, no longer permit treasure hunting there and are openly skeptical that anything remains to be found. Part of the problem is that “the Cocos Island treasure” may not be a single story at all: an 1855 newspaper account separately describes a different Spanish galleon’s treasure supposedly buried on the island in 1816, four years before the Lima episode, which has left later tellings blending at least two distinct legends into one. Some researchers have also floated the idea that Thompson, if the theft happened as described, might have cached the goods somewhere else in the Pacific entirely, with Cocos Island simply being the most romantic place for the story to settle.
Why the Legend Outlasted the Search
No credible evidence has ever confirmed the Lima treasure was found, on Cocos Island or anywhere else. What survives is a genuinely documented pattern — a real 1820 evacuation of colonial wealth from a real city under real military threat — wrapped around a treasure-hunting story that has proven impossible to verify and equally impossible to kill. That combination, a plausible historical seed and an unresolved ending, is precisely what has kept people digging on a Costa Rican island for close to two hundred years.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia (Treasure of Lima; August Gissler); National Geographic, “How a Colonial Hoard of Gold Ended Up as Buried Treasure”; Explorersweb, “Exploration Mysteries: The Treasure of Lima.”
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