Eyes on the Prize: A Treasure Hunting Reading List
December 03, 2024 at 04:30PM
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Few things capture the imagination like the concept of hidden treasure. Is there anyone who hasn’t daydreamed of stumbling upon some lost and valuable find—a hoard of Roman coins sitting inches beneath our feet, a Fabergé egg nestling among a pile of junk at a yard sale, a lost canvas masterpiece hanging unnoticed on the wall of a charity store? Long before Robert Louis Stevenson published his classic novel Treasure Island in 1883, tales of hidden caches have lit up the human consciousness. During the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors searched restlessly for El Dorado, the city of gold; in the 1850s, thousands of gold seekers panned for fortune in the California hills. Later, plundered relics like the Irish Crown Jewels and the Amber Room eluded investigators and would-be discoverers. For all the unfound treasures, though, discoveries continue: the last century has seen the Dead Sea Scrolls, the wreckage of the Titanic, and the burial site of King Richard III all return to human possession.
Yet, the appeal of the quest transcends material gain or historical significance. Each of these hunts holds at its heart a puzzle to solve—and for some, as the pieces below demonstrate, that puzzle can turn into an obsession, even a fatal one. But the promise remains difficult to resist. After all, a hoard of Roman coins was indeed dug up by an amateur metal detectorist, a Fabergé egg was discovered in a flea market, and a lost masterpiece was reclaimed from a charity store. Keep your passport handy: after reading these stories, you may well be tempted to begin sleuthing yourself.
The Secret of the Temple (Jake Halpern, The New Yorker, April 2012)
Locked vaults, legendary treasures, ancient archives, curious curses: this compelling case features them all. There’s also some fantastic first-person reporting involved, as Jake Halpern travels to India on the long and complicated trail leading to the locked vaults of Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the state of Kerala. Halpern writes with a strong narrative drive, and his novelistic depictions of conversations and events transport us directly into the scene.
I’ve long been fascinated by Hinduism, a subtle and multi-faceted religion, and it serves as a rich backdrop to the tussle over the future of the temple: a lawyer versus the royal family, neither of whom appear entirely in the right (or in the wrong). The tale unfolds before us in real time, as Halpern visits the protagonists before, during, and after the final revelation. The legal status of deities, priestly divinations, and the modern role of religion all come under debate in a remarkable story full of unforeseeable twists and turns. There are no clear answers, and not every door is literally opened, but this remains an absorbing tale of epic proportions.
I asked Padmanabhan what had made him so confident that there was treasure. “These are all historical books,” he said, gesturing at his library. “It is all here.” He pressed the remote control again, and the clerk reappeared. Padmanabhan uttered a command in Malayalam, the regional language. The clerk squeezed between the back of Padmanabhan’s chair and a bookcase, removed a large volume, handed it over, and vanished. Padmanabhan opened the book to a chapter on the temple, and read aloud a sentence that he had underlined: “A cellar underneath the shrine secures the temple jewels.”
A Deadly Hunt for Hidden Treasure Spawns an Online Mystery (David Kushner, Wired, July 2018)
Fair warning here that this piece deals with a parent’s worst nightmare: the loss of a child. Award-winning journalist and writer David Kushner brings this tragic tale to life with sympathy and without judgement, but, as a father myself, it’s difficult not to question the attitude of eccentric arts and antiques dealer Forrest Fenn, whose buried treasure Eric Ashby was seeking when he met his tragic death.
Fenn seems to shrug off any notion of responsibility with remarkable ease—but could he have prevented such an event? It’s possible that he didn’t foresee the hunt for his treasure turning into such a sensation, but it was also his decision to bury said treasure in a dangerous region of the Rocky Mountains. Kushner paints a holistic picture, teasing out details of the fraught relationship between Eric and his father Paul, which adds extra poignancy to events. Mystery still enshrouds the exact circumstances of Eric’s death, and Fenn’s own life story would make for a compelling article on its own. Masterfully weaving all these strands together, Kushner has crafted another fine and engrossing piece of journalism.
By early 2017 Eric had become consumed by Fenn’s treasure hunt, talking about it incessantly. He often stayed up late after waiting tables, smoking weed and compiling clues on his laptop. He tracked possible locations for the treasure on maps, homing in on Royal Gorge Park an hour away. Often he’d call Longworth to tell her how close he was to decoding Fenn’s clues. Eric wasn’t driven by money, she says. He enjoyed the intellectual puzzle of it all. “He was one of the smartest guys I ever met,” Longworth recalls. “He would say his goal in life was to be fascinated by a blade of grass.”
The Extremely Enchanting, Totally Perplexing, Possibly Never-Ending Quest for the Golden Owl (Phil Hoad, Narratively, September 2023)
On the Trail of the Golden Owl was inspired by Kit Williams’ earlier groundbreaking work Masquerade, a lavishly illustrated publication containing clues to a buried golden hare. This excellent article detailing Masquerade’s story takes you deeper into a most curious literary subgenre.
“It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill might have put it. Published in 1993, On the Trail of the Golden Owl was written by Régis Hauser under the pseudonym “Max Valentin” and illustrated by artist Michel Becker. It was supposed to be a fun marketing exercise—a series of coded clues leading to a valuable prize—but the enterprise soon descended into chaos. Phil Hoad recreates the story for us with a great sense of pacing and style, taking in not just the main elements of the tale, but expanding his aperture to explore the larger treasure-hunting subculture.
The Golden Owl has been found! In October 2024, after 31 years, it was announced that the hunt was over. (Details will apparently follow in a documentary next year.) In LinkedIn’s games newsletter, Paolo Pasco interviews a longtime “owler” about the search that became a subculture.
It may revolve around the hunt for a buried statue, but this is a story first and foremost about people: an author who became drunk on his own rising celebrity; a betrayed business partner; a grieving family; and the obsessive fans in whose minds a simple text has become a focal point for their entire lives. There are plenty of twists and turns to this narrative, and more than a few unanswered questions and hidden meanings. Hoad weaves the complex elements together with clarity and perception.
The treasure hunters come in all character and personality types: lone rangers, organized teams, precise rationalists, visionaries prone to imaginative epiphany. Vehement as everyone is in arguing their particular route through the puzzles, at some point in the discussions a veil of coy silence descends. If the reasoning is sound enough to be worth the bother of digging, then it has to remain confidential. “It’s like mushroom hunters with their secret spots,” Mazibra and MH, a husband-and-wife chouetteur outfit, tell me.
Did Jesse James Bury Confederate Gold? (David Montgomery, The Washington Post*, May 2022)
How closely the reality of the Old West matches most people’s perceptions is debatable—legions of Hollywood movies will do that—but the continued draw of this semi-mythical age is not. It’s little wonder, then, that so many treasure hunters have found themselves caught up in the legend of outlaw Jesse James’ buried gold.
Secret signs carved into trees. An organization secretive enough for a Dan Brown book. The tangled politics of the Civil War. Historians digging, metaphorically and not, for clues. There’s no shortage of absorbing details in this case. What interests me most, however, are David Montgomery’s intricate character studies of the treasure seekers, as well as his insight in connecting their consuming passion to a modern-day lack of faith in mainstream media and politicians. As usual, it is the very human stories of desire, belief, and commitment that provide the most fascinating elements of the tale.
He explored the forest, looking for a place to dig. He took a smoke break at one of the only flat places on the hillside, a narrow ledge beside a tree shaped like a W. Somers suddenly had what he described to me as a kind of vision that featured James, wearing an oilskin duster, smoking a cigar, announcing that he would bury his biggest treasure right here. Somers commenced digging.
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The Lost Jewels of Bad King John (Theodora Sutcliffe, BBC, September 2017)
Lincolnshire, England, encompasses one of the most striking landscapes in Great Britain. It’s a largely rural locale, bordered by the dramatic scenery of the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north, the Broads National Park to the south, and the North Sea to the east. Lincolnshire is also flat. Very flat. So much so, in fact, that the thousand-year-old Lincoln Cathedral, which would barely be noticeable in London’s skyline, dominates the view for miles around. The weight of history hangs heavily on this area. It’s not an oppressive atmosphere, but rather one that conjures a lingering sense of connection to ages past.
The area is also home to one of the UK’s most famous lost treasures, the baggage train of “Bad King John.” Known to many as the evil villain from the fictional exploits of Robin Hood, this very real monarch remains a divisive figure in history. It’s a rich setup for any story, and the main protagonist in this article, amateur metal detector Edward Morris, is perhaps as complex a figure as the dead king himself. Treasure hunters are an obsessive breed, and writer Theodora Sutcliffe details Morris and his quest with sympathy and elegant simplicity.
Since finding the object, Morris has been caught in a push-and-pull between the obsession with treasure and a desire just to be free of it, to put his quest aside. “The more I researched, everything pulled into John,” he said. “If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered.” He has even seen the dead king’s face staring back at him from his bathroom mirror, he said.
The Wreck (David Wolman, The Atavist, February 2017)
Writer David Wolman tells a story that in many ways mirrors that of the Titanic: a giant gleaming steamship full of illustrious passengers, concerns over its safety drowned out by media buzz and undue faith in its engineering. The Connaught set sail in 1860, and sank during its second voyage, along with an estimated cargo of $15 million in gold. We have all the necessary ingredients for a thrilling tale here at Longreads‘ sister publication, but what really makes this piece work is Wolman’s narrative structure.
The author presents us with a dual progression: the tale of modern-day father and son treasure hunters and their search for the Connaught, interspersed with a recreation of the fateful journey of that vessel itself. Using eyewitness testimony and contemporary news reports, Wolman brings that tragic voyage to vivid life, investing us in the lives, thoughts, and feelings of the passengers and crew of the Connaught—as well as those of the ship that rushed to its aid. The braiding works brilliantly, transporting the reader to perilous seas in the golden age of steam, and a daring and dangerous rescue mission.Quote: By that point, the fire inside the Connaught was so intense that passengers still stranded on deck could feel the heat through their shoes. More than once, flames leapt out of the ship’s skylights. By sunset, only about 200 people had been carried to the Minnie Schiffer, leaving some 400 yet to be rescued. Darkness would bring more hazards, and crew members from both ships begged Wilson not to send them back to the blazing steamer. A few again tried to hide, this time belowdecks on the cargo brig.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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