Season 1 1990

The route to Cocos Island has been traveled for 400 years by pirates, explorers and Treasure hunters – from Sir Francis Drake to President Franklin Roosevelt. Most travelers for the last 100 years have had one overwhelming motive…to find the treasures.

Santiago Airport in Chile. From here, the plane sets a course due west. It takes three hours to get from the mainland to one of the most remote islands on earth. Named after the Spanish explorer who first discovered it, it’s the island of Juan Fernandez.

In 1868, ships sailed back into this harbor, carrying a few exhausted survivors, who had been marooned for nearly 2 years on one of the coldest desert islands in the world. In the last hundred years many people have died in the search for the treasure.

Lying in the tropics, between the equator and 10 degrees South, the islands are the peaks of a submerged plateau, left behind by India, when the continental shelf shifted, 65 million years ago.

One of the most secretive tales of treasure comes out of Venezuela. It has the perfect mix for a best-seller, ancient and modern – murder, gold, sex…and a little quirk: a handsome priest, who swapped the love of God – for the love of gold.

Lying off the West coast of South wales, in the middle of the Bristol Channel, is known as an isle of the Seven Sea. It’s an island which, according to an old legend, houses one of the greatest and most mystical of all treasures.

For native American Indians, the pipe of peace was an important symbol. As the White man destroyed their culture, some American Indians sometimes acted in a way that seems very strange to us. The story of Catalina and its treasure is one example of that.

In June 1795, three young men set out to row from the town of Chester to one of the many small islands that lie in this bay. They carried in their hands picks and shovels, and in their dreams of buried treasure.

When Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, (who had long been Hitler’s ally) was executed, everyone suspected that much of the treasure he had looted over the years was hidden somewhere. There have been many theories as to where it was.

The lush islands of the South Pacific. It was here that the author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, came to live in the 1890’s Stevenson was lured partly by the scenery.

This is a tale of one pirate…At least 2 treasure islands, and many unrealistic hopes. The pirate captain William Kidd, who has the strange distinction of being one of the least successful pirates of all time.

Mauritius is the site of one of the most Interesting of all treasure-hunts because it involves a very radical theory of what some buccaneers did with the Treasure they stole from Panama.

The islands of the South Pacific. This is the Image we have of treasure islands. In 1889 the write Robert Stevenson came to live here, after he had written what turned out to be one of the most popular books ever written.