The treasure of Jewell Island

Three centuries of documented treasure digging; nothing ever proven found

Jewell Island lies on the outer rim of Casco Bay, Maine, about a mile long and some eight miles from downtown Portland, off Cliff Island. George Jewell came over from Saco in 1636 and was its first occupant; he stayed only a year, but the safe little fishing harbour kept his name. During the Indian outbreaks of 1678 and 1688 the island was a refuge for settlers from the mainland.

The old Portland City Guide observed drily that the name presupposes the yarns of pirates and buried treasure, and it set two of them down. In one, a Bermuda pirate ship foundered on Brown Cow Ledge and some of the crew got ashore with a great chest of gold, which they buried on the pebbly beach of Punch Bowl Cove at the island's southern end; years later, with the help of a chart, some of them came back and dug it up. The other belongs to Captain Kidd. Hounded north from Cape Cod by the ships hunting him, he found this snug harbour and put in to a small cove at the southern tip with a huge copper kettle from the galley filled with his choicest booty. To keep the secret, he sent most of his men inland to fill the water buckets at a spring and stood guard with loaded guns over the rest as they dug. The kettle went into the hole under a huge flat rock, and before sailing Kidd carved his mark on it, a compass pointing south instead of north. Treasure seekers have searched the southern swales for that stone ever since.

The island collected stranger tales. A Captain Chase lived in a house with portholes for its ground-floor windows, where ships slipped in to land crates before taking their sugar and molasses on to Portland; later owners found a secret closet between the floors full of empty rum bottles. A stranger with a treasure chart once rowed off with Chase and never came back, and years later a skeleton turned up under the barn.

The army came in 1922, buying the first few acres for what became the Jewell Island Military Reservation, and by 1943 it owned the whole island. In the Second World War it built gun batteries, among them two for 90 mm guns against motor torpedo boats and aircraft, a large concrete fire control station and an SCR-296 radar supporting Battery Steele on Peaks Island, and abandoned it all in 1946. Today the island is state-owned, with a small protected harbour, camping and walking paths, reached only by private or charter boat. The bunkers are said to be haunted by soldiers and the beaches by bootleggers.