Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 85

diving helmet, was unbuckled, and a mild-faced elderly gentleman confronted us. The helmet was fitted
to the head of one his of colleagues who climbed slowly down into the water and vanished.
Mr. Branch, whose appearance suggested that of a vicar with a quiet country living, gravely explained
that they had only a few more yards to go, but that it might take some time as they could only work during
the week-ends. 'But it's there all right,' he said. 'We're bound to strike it soon.'
'Strike what?'
His blue eyes opened wide. 'Why, buried treasure. There is gold down there and quite a lot of it. About
so much.' He opened his arms to their full extent. 'Possibly a statue of the Madonna in solid gold or a
chest full of pieces of eight or doubloons.'
This particular stretch of shore is well known to have been a hiding-place of the buccaneers for treas-
ure captured from the Spanish Plate Fleet which sailed from Cartagena to the home ports of Corunna or
Cadiz. It was invariably a target for the onslaught of French and English filibusters based in the Wind-
ward Islands, and, as Barbados, except for occasional Portuguese visits (or, one record suggests, for
Caribs that came to the island from time to time to celebrate a cannibal feast and then sailed away again),
was virtually uninhabited for the whole of the sixteenth century, there was no safer cache .
Mr. Branch and his friends had no chart to work on. The gold had been located by means far beyond
the scope of ordinary comprehension. Mr. Branch is one of those rare people with the gift of divining,
but he is not only a dowser for water, but for virtually any mineral matter lying below the surface of the
earth or the sea. So far so good. But he is able to divine buried substances not only by standing above
the actual stretch of ground that conceals them, but by suspending a plumbline from the fingers of his
right hand over a large-scale map. The plummet, hanging on the end of its string, begins to rotate and
draws his hand to a certain area of the map, and the cycle of the rotations gradually diminishes until the
plummet is once more still, and pointing inexorably to a certain spot. If he is in search of water he holds
between his fingers a piece of blue cloth an inch or two long; and if gold, yellow; and so on. He showed
us the different pieces of material carefully arranged between the pages of a book like pressed flowers.
He had located gold in British Guiana in this extraordinary way, though he had never been there. Pro-
spectors had dug, and the gold was there in ample quantities. 'But, of course, this method only indicates
the area roughly,' he continued. 'It depends on the scale of the map.' In the present case the map had
indicated the position of the gold within a dozen yards or so. This called for more detailed work on the
spot with the divining rod. But it didn't take long. The reactions of the rod were so violent that there was
no doubt at all. He produced this instrument—two springy lengths of metal bound together at one end
and spreading at the other into a fork. Placing the joined ends against his stomach and grasping the two
prongs, with a piece of yellow stuff held between the fingers of his right hand, he leant over the hole. The
rod dipped, and then recovered, and then dipped again, repeating the motion several times. He counted
the movements and explained that each one indicated another yard's distance between himself and the
gold below the surface. He gave us the rod in turn, placed it in position, and rested his right hand lightly
on one of ours to preserve the magic touch, and, with each of us, the mysterious pull dragged the prongs
and our hands down. There was no doubt about it. Without the touch of his hand, which exerted not the
faintest pressure, there was no reaction at all. Could he divine, we asked, anything else except minerals?
His soft eyes contemplated us for a moment. 'I can divine you.'
And he could. He asked Costa to give him something he was wearing. Costa gave him a handkerchief,
and we walked to the water's edge. We bandaged his eyes, and placed him looking out to sea. Costa
walked back a hundred yards and began to run across the beach. We told Mr. Branch to begin, and he