S Jonas Black

This is an informally-written, repetitive and privately published account that would have benefitted from a proofreader and editor, which originated in stories the author heard from an old man as a child.

The author describes his amateur historical sleuthing and speculations about a lost Spanish treasure supposedly left in southern British Columbia sometime before the late 18th century. Along the way, he mentions rumours of Spanish DNA in native people in the region, librarians’ unexplored remarks, reputedly but unsourced native legends and snippets from uncited books and internet sites.

The wandering account includes quite separate claims from a book by a provincial politician that Francis Drake visited the region some two centuries earlier. This appears to have no relevance whatever to his other speculations

The author seems to have a casual view of what constitutes a theory and evidence, and is touchingly optimistic about his own attempts to locate what he believes to be a ‘marker stone’ at the site of buried gold, or graves of the Spanish themselves, in West Vancouver. Nevertheless, there are interesting summaries of the known intersecting histories of first peoples and Vancouver development.… (meer)