He was only a clerk in the Colonial Office, was Cecil Mitford, on a
beggarly income of a hundred and eighty a year--how small it seemed now,
when John Cann's money was actually floating before his mind's eye; but
he had brains and industry and enterprise after a fitful adventurous
fashion of his own; and he had made up his mind years before that he
would find out the secret of John Cann's buried treasure, if he had to
spend half a lifetime on the almost hopeless quest. As a boy, Cecil
Mitford had been brought up at his father's rectory on the slopes of
Dartmoor, and there he had played from his babyhood upward among the
rugged granite boulders of John Cann's rocks, and had heard from the
farm labourers and the other children around the romantic but perfectly
historical legend of John Cann's treasure. Unknown and incredible sums
in Mexican doubloons and Spanish dollars lay guarded by a strong oaken
chest in a cavern on the hilltop, long since filled up with flints and
mould from the neighbouring summits. To that secure hiding-place the
great buccaneer had committed the hoard gathered in his numberless
piratical expeditions, burying all together under the shadow of a petty
porphyritic tor that overhangs the green valley of Bovey Tracy. Beside
the bare rocks that mark the site, a perfectly distinct pathway is worn
by footsteps into the granite platform underfoot; and that path, little
Cecil Mitford had heard with childish awe and wonder, was cut out by the
pacing up and down of old John Cann himself, mounting guard in the
darkness and solitude over the countless treasure that he had hidden
away in the recesses of the pixies' hole beneath. As young Mitford grew up to man's estate, this story of John Cann's
treasure haunted his quick imagination for many years with wonderful
vividness. When he first came up to London, after his father's death,
and took his paltry clerkship in the Colonial Office--how he hated the
place, with its monotonous drudgery, while John Cann's wealth was only
waiting for him to take it and floating visibly before his prophetic
eyes!--the story began for a while to fade out under the disillusioning
realities of respectable poverty and a petty Government post. But before
he had been many months in the West India department (he had a small
room on the third floor, overlooking Downing Street) a casual discovery
made in overhauling the archives of the office suddenly revived the
boyish dream with all the added realism and cool intensity of maturer
years. He came across a letter from John Cann himself to the Protector
Oliver, detailing the particulars of a fierce irregular engagement with
a Spanish privateer, in which the Spaniard had been captured with much
booty, and his vessel duly sold to the highest bidder in Port Royal
harbour. This curious coincidence gave a great shock of surprise to
young Mitford. John Cann, then, was no mythical prehistoric hero, no
fairy-king or pixy or barrow-haunter of the popular fancy, but an actual
genuine historical figure, who corresponded about his daring exploits
with no less a personage than Oliver himself! From that moment forth,
Cecil Mitford gave himself up almost entirely to tracing out the
forgotten history of the old buccaneer. He allowed no peace to the
learned person who took care of the State Papers of the Commonwealth at
the Record Office, and he established private relations, by letter, with
two or three clerks in the Colonial Secretary's Office at Kingston,
Jamaica, whom he induced to help him in reconstructing the lost story of
John Cann's life. Bit by bit Cecil Mitford had slowly pieced together a wonderful mass of
information, buried under piles of ragged manuscript and weary reams of
dusty documents, about the days and doings of that ancient terror of the
Spanish Main. John Cann was a Devonshire lad, of the rollicking, roving
seventeenth century, born and bred at Bovey Tracy, on the flanks of
Dartmoor, the last survivor of those sea-dogs of Devon who had sallied
forth to conquer and explore a new Continent under the guidance of
Drake, and Raleigh, and Frobisher, and Hawkins. As a boy, he had sailed
with his father in a ship that bore the Queen's letters of marque and
reprisal against the Spanish galleons; in his middle life, he had lived
a strange roaming existence--half pirate and half privateer, intent upon
securing the Protestant religion and punishing the King's enemies by
robbing wealthy Spanish skippers and cutting off the recusant noses of
vile Papistical Cuban slave traders; in his latter days, the fierce,
half-savage old mariner had relapsed into sheer robbery, and had been
hunted down as a public enemy by the Lord Protector's servants, or later
still by the Captains-General and Governors-in-Chief of his Most Sacred
Majesty's Dominions in the West Indies. For what was legitimate warfare
in the spacious days of great Elizabeth, had come to be regarded in the
degenerate reign of Charles II. as rank piracy. One other thing Cecil Mitford had discovered, with absolute certainty;
and that was that in the summer of 1660, "the year of his Ma'tie's
most happy restoration," as John Cann himself phrased it, the persecuted
and much misunderstood old buccaneer had paid a secret visit to England,
and had brought with him the whole hoard which he had accumulated during
sixty years of lawful or unlawful piracy in the West Indies and the
Spanish Main. Concerning this hoard, which he had concealed somewhere in
Devonshire, he kept up a brisk vernacular correspondence in cypher with
his brother William, at Tavistock; and the key to that cypher, marked
outside "A clew to my Bro. John's secret writing," Cecil Mitford had
been fortunate enough to unearth among the undigested masses of the
Record Office. But one letter, the last and most important of the whole
series, containing as he believed the actual statement of the
hiding-place, had long evaded all his research: and that was the letter
which, now at last, after months and months of patient inquiry, lay
unfolded before his dazzled eyes on the little desk in his accustomed
corner. It had somehow been folded up by mistake in the papers relating
to the charge against Cyriack Skinner, of complicity in the Rye House
Plot. How it got there nobody knows, and probably nobody but Cecil
Mitford himself could ever have succeeded in solving the mystery. As he gazed, trembling, at the precious piece of dusty much-creased
paper, scribbled over in the unlettered schoolboy hand of the wild old
sea-dog, Cecil Mitford could hardly restrain himself for a moment from
uttering a cry. Untold wealth swam before his eyes: he could marry Ethel
now, and let her drive in her own carriage! Ah, what he would give if he
might only shout in his triumph. He couldn't even read the words, he was
so excited.