COCOS— THE ISLE OF PIRATES 241 



the Sandwich Islands with the ships Discovery and 

 Chatham^ put in at Cocos for water and found the 

 letter left by Colnett two years before, he betrays 

 no sign of ever having heard of the man before. 

 His objections to recognizing this as the Cocos 

 described by Dampier and Wafer seem incompre- 

 hensible, as there is nothing extant in their accounts 

 which appears radically or insuperably different 

 from the reality. As for his remark that "this 

 island cannot be considered as having a pleasant 

 appearance in any one point of view," and his refer- 

 ences to the "dreary prospect," one can only accuse 

 him of having the Englishman's occasional afflic- 

 tion in the tropics, a "liver" that casts a pathological 

 gloom over the fairest landscape. 



Chatham Bay was named for Vancouver's armed 

 tender, which lay at anchor there. 



It is to Sir Edward Belcher in His Majesty's 

 Ship Sulphur, that we owe the survey of the coast 

 of Cocos which is the basis for most of the charts 

 of the island. Although Belcher made his maps 

 in 1838, there is to this day an incomplete portion 

 on the south marked "uncharted," a striking illus- 

 tration of how little interest has been taken in this 

 isolated spot, — at least from any point but that of 

 treasure-seeking. 



It is worthy of note that although Belcher was 

 here almost twenty years after the supposed date of 

 the burial of the first lot of treasure, he makes no 

 reference to it, and it is fairly safe to assume that 

 he had not heard of the hoard. Probably the fame 

 of Cocos, until the time of Keating's discovery of 





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