Tale of lost treasure that proves true

VALVERDE’S GOLD: IN SEARCH OF THE LAST GREAT INCA TREASURE

By Mark Honigsbaum

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 348 pages

REVIEWED BY BART McDOWELL

This treasure tale is true. And the treasure itself is dazzlingly documented, with words to whet one’s greed.

Historians have long known that in the Peruvian Andes in the year 1532, Francisco Pizarro took prisoner the ruling Inca, Atahualpa, and demanded that his subjects pay a huge ransom in gold and silver — “more than fifteen thousand men could carry on their backs,” it was reported. After the Indians paid much of the ransom, Pizarro murdered Atahualpa.

William Prescott describes the metalwork — “goblets, ewers, salvers … curious imitations of various plants and animals” and even a garden with “a fountain in gold and silver that … sent up a sparkling jet of gold, while birds and animals of the same material played in the waters at its base.”

The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega noted that not all the treasure was seized by Pizarro, that “most of the riches were buried by the Indians … so carefully concealed that they have never been found.”

Many adventurers have tried, among them, the author of this book. Mark Honigsbaum is a Briton who went to South America seeking information about botany. Mr. Honigsbaum was writing a book about a 19th-century scholar who had come to Ecuador in 1857, seeking plants that might cure malaria, one Richard Spruce.

It seems that on his botanical expedition, Spruce had come upon a treasure map and a manuscript that told the story of a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador named Valverde. The soldier had met an Inca princess and the two fell in love and were married. The bride’s chieftain father was impressed by the kindness

Valverde showed his daughter and other Indians, and at last confided to the soldier the location of a cave where Atahualpa’s missing ransom was hidden. Valverde took portions of the loot from time to time so that he and his bride could live grandly in their Andean village. Eventually Valverde returned to Spain, and on his deathbed bequeathed his map and manuscript to the King of Spain.

Such was Spruce’s information.

One man’s quest leads to another man’s riddle. The botanist Spruce had a nephew in the Royal Navy who, a full generation later, told two sailor friends — Capt. Barth Blake and Lt. George Chapman — about the treasure map. These mariners, in turn, came to Ecuador in 1887 aboard a four-masted schooner, which was conveniently shipwrecked near the port of Guayaquil.

While the ship was being repaired, Blake and Chapman went into the Andes, treasure hunting. There Chapman died and was buried in the mountains. Blake returned to his ship and set sail for North America. At Panama he dispatched a card to Spruce, saying he had found the treasure. But his shipmates had become suspicious, so at Boston, Blake arranged for the maps to be delivered to an old seafaring friend, a captain named Albertson.

Story Continues →