d hard-working pirates
seem picayune, trifling, shabby, the small change of the age of buried
treasure. Why Signor Iberti is so cock-sure of his figures, and how
that wondrous treasure fleet was lost in Vigo Bay is a story worth
telling if there be any merit in high adventures, hard fighting, and
the tang of salty seas in the days when the world was young. No more
than nine years after the first voyage of Columbus, galleons laden with
treasure were winging it from the West Indies to Spain, and this golden
stream was flowing year by year until the time of the American
Revolution. The total was to be counted not in millions but in
billions, and this prodigious looting of the New World gave to Spain
such wealth and power that her centuries of greatness were literally
builded upon foundations of ingots and silver bars.

Before Sir Francis Drake sailed into the Caribbean, the Dutch and
English had been playing at the great game of galleon hunting, but
their exploits had been no more than vexations, and the security of the
plate fleets was not seriously menaced until "El Draque" spread terror
and destruction down one coast of the Americas and up the other, from
Nombre de Dios to Panama. Heaven alone knows how many great galleons
he shattered and plundered, but from the _San Felipe_ and the
_Cacafuego_ he took two million dollars in treasure, and he numbered
his other prizes by the score. Martin Frobisher carried the huge East
India galleon _Madre de Dios_ by boarding in the face of tremendous
odds, the blood running from her scuppers, and was rewarded with
$1,250,000 worth of precious stones, ebony, ivory, and Turkish carpets.

During the period of the English Commonwealth, Admiral Stayner pounded
to pieces a West Indian treasure fleet of eight sail, and from one of
them took two millions in silver, while Blake fought his way into the
harbor of Teneriffe and destroyed another splendid argosy under the
guns of the forts. It is recorded that thirty-eight wagons were
required to carry the gold and jewels thus obtained from Portsmouth to
London. The records of the British Admiralty have preserved a
memorandum of the prize money distributed to the officers and men of
the _Active_ and _Favorite_ from the treasures taken in the _Hermione_
galleon off Cadiz in 1762, and it is a document to make a modern
mariner sigh for the days of his forefathers. Here is treasure finding
as it used to flourish:

The Admiral and the Com