FORREST FENN
Picture this: you’re a multi-millionaire approaching
the end of your life, and you want to leave behind
some sort of legacy. Your average extremely wealthy
individual might fund a library or a new wing of a
hospital. But Forrest Fenn is not your average extremely
wealthy individual. Instead, the U.S. Air Force pilot
turned art dealer and wilful eccentric fi lled a wooden
chest with more than one million dollars worth of
rubies, diamonds and gold coins from his personal
collection – all acquired during controversial, self-
funded archaeological expeditions – and buried them
deep in the Rocky Mountains. If people want to claim
his treasure, all they have to do is decipher a 24-line
poem in Fenn’s self-published 2010 autobiography,
The Thrill of the Chase. While fi gures are hard to come
by, Fenn, now 87, reckons around 350,000 people have
gone hunting for the loot, and he says he receives more
than 100 emails every day from people claiming to
have deciphered the code. The closest guess so far was
apparently just 60 metres o target. Meanwhile, at least
four people have died in their quest for the treasure,
leading the New Mexico police to beg Fenn to call
the whole thing o. Fenn, however, remains unmoved,
simply appending a cautionary message to his blog:
“Please remember that I was about 80 when I made
two trips from my vehicle to where I hid the treasure.
The search is supposed to be fun.”
CAPTAIN KIDDDepending on who you talk to, Captain William Kidd
(1645–1701) was either one of the greatest pirates ever,
or just a guy in way over his head. A much-respected
gentleman of New York, Kidd was employed by the
British to hunt pirates and treacherous French ships
across the Caribbean. Alas, Kidd su ered a series of
unfortunate events (cholera outbreaks, mutinies, a lack
of actual pirates, et cetera) that resulted in his having
to engage in a little light piracy of his own to cover
his losses. While Kidd wasn’t convinced his looting
qualifi ed as piracy per se – his targets were mostly
French ships – the powers-that-be took a di erent view,
and Kidd discovered he was on a fast track towards
execution. Scrambling for options, he deposited his
accumulated treasure on an island, thinking to use it as
leverage in his eventual trial. (This would later serve as
the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Tr e a s u r e
Island.) However, the one man Kidd confi ded in dug
up the treasure and used it as testimony against him.
Desperate, Kidd intimated that there was more treasure
on one of his captured ships, the Quedagh Merchant,
but the British judiciary was unmoved and he went to
the gallows. In 2015, after hundreds of years of fruitless
searching, a team of underwater explorers announced
that they had discovered a 50kg silver bar belonging
to the Quedagh Merchant, but on closer inspection,
it turned out to be lead. The hunt continues.