The Lost Pirate Treasure of Salmon Brook
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Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me. Yar, matey. Yar. So, Jeff, why are we dressed like pirates? Because, matey, we're looking for pirate treasure. Yo-ho! Okay, okay. But we're deep in the woods of East Granby, Connecticut. We're almost 50 miles from the ocean as the crow flies. No, you're right. I get it. And when you think about pirates and pirate treasure, you don't think of East Granby, Connecticut, located in northern Connecticut.

No, I don't think of northern Connecticut when it comes to pirates, and the only water nearby is this stream. Now, that would be Salmon Stream, and that's why we're here. We're only about 12 miles from Hartford. Hartford is, of course, the capital, and it's located where it is because it sits on the Connecticut River. And Hartford is about how far a large sailing ship can make it up the Connecticut River from Long Island Sound before the waters get too shallow. Okay, that makes sense. So a smaller ship, like a sloop, could head even further north.

Now, the Connecticut River is only about nine miles to our east. Anyway, in the year 1665, Dutch pirate David Martine plundered a ship called Neptune with a mega fortune in its hold. And there's some evidence to support he brought the treasure and hid it somewhere nearby where we're standing today. And they say that treasure has never been found.

Hello, I'm Jeff Belanger. Welcome to episode 402 of the New England Legends podcast. And I'm Ray Ogier. Thank you for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. Did you know that most of our story leads come from you? This one did. Thank you to Tim Casey from the Suffield Historical Society for the lead. If you've got a wicked strange tale you think we should check out, please reach out to us anytime through our website. So Ray and I are working on something new and would like your help.

If you've had a strange encounter in New England, maybe you've seen a ghost, a UFO, a strange creature, or something truly unexplainable, we'd love to hear about it. Please send us an email about it through our website. We might like to interview you. We'll go searching for the lost treasure of the pirate David Martine right after this word from our sponsor.

Pirate treasure in East Granby, Connecticut. Wouldn't that be something? It would live up to every childhood dream I've ever had involving digging for treasure in my backyard. Except my backyard wasn't East Granby. But it could have been. Exactly, right? Now how much treasure are we talking? So they say today it would be worth over $300 million. $300 million? $300 million. Do you know what this means? What?

We're going to be rich. Obviously. Do you have a map or something so we know where to dig? Well, not exactly. Well, how do we know where the right spot is then? Because back in 1956, following clues, a local treasure hunter named Anthony Ruches found some strange markings on rocks nearby the fork in the salmon stream, and that led him to believe it was some kind of code from the pirate David Martine's crew, and that maybe his treasure was hidden nearby. And where's that rock now? Can we see it?

Well, no. Okay. So the rock seems to be missing, either stolen or hidden away years ago by treasure hunters who didn't want to leave any other clues behind. Still, this is a pretty spot in the woods by Salmon Stream. There are small waterfalls as the stream trickles downhill.

Here's a little more background on East Granby. It was first settled by Europeans in 1664. We've actually been near here before when we covered the story of Old Newgate Prison, which was originally the first incorporated copper mine in America. Oh yeah, that's right. So people have been used to digging in the grounds for valuable metals for a long time in these parts. Good point. So to find out where the treasure may be located, let's head back to the year 1665.

It's October of 1665 and we're sailing aboard a ship captained by the Dutch pirate David Martine. Yo-ho! Yo-ho! Martine is a privateer. He's been raiding Spanish strongholds in New Spain, not far from the Caribbean. Martine has been a privateer for the last four years. He was commissioned by the Jamaican governor to pillage and plunder any Spanish ships and treasure he may find. And business has been good.

Years ago, Martine had taken in with French pirates on the Caribbean island of Tortuga, where he began to make a name for himself. There, he earned enough money to buy his own ship, and that's when he met up with another pirate named Robert Caldwell, who used to sail with the famous pirate Henry Morgan. Now, the problem is Morgan cheated Caldwell out of some plunder, which is why Caldwell was in the market for a new ship and captain.

As you can imagine, the event made Caldwell pretty sour on Captain Morgan. Right now, Captain Martin has his sights set on another prize. Sailing ahead of us is a Spanish ship called Neptune. Word has it the famous Santa Barbara treasure sits in her hold, and Martin intends to find out for sure. Oh, Martin just ordered a cannon shot across the bow of the Neptune. We're closing in fast.

That cannon was even closer to Neptune. The Neptune knows she can't outrun Martine. She's lowering her sails. Captain Martine and his crew board the Neptune and immediately take to executing all of the officers. The rest of the crew surrenders and offers to pledge their loyalty to Captain Martine. Caldwell is checking below decks. Let's take a look.

Whoa. There we go. That's a lot. Wow. So it's the Santa Barbara treasure. There's $20 million in gold, silver, doubloons, and jewelry all aboard the ship's hold. You could literally swim in that. And now it all belongs to Captain Martine and his crew.

Martine decides he'll stay aboard the Neptune and keep this ship for himself. The battle is barely over when another ship sails up from the horizon. Is that? Yeah, I think it's Captain Morgan. It is. That's his ship. Morgan heard the cannon fire in the distance and followed it. Now, once his ship is within calling distance, Captain Morgan calls over to Martine that he's been in pursuit of the Neptune, and Martine should turn over the ship and plunder to him. As you can imagine, Martine refuses.

Angry and dejected, Morgan sails away. Captain Martin sets his course for the island of Tortuga to stash his incredible treasure.

As Martine arrives in Tartuga, he soon learns that Captain Morgan has double-crossed him. He bent the air of the governor of Jamaica that Captain Martine is a threat to these waters. Morgan is given the blessing to hunt him down. Captain Martine knows he and his crew, and most importantly his treasure, are no longer safe. So Martine and Caldwell gather a small crew of loyalists and slip out of Tartuga, heading north aboard Neptune. For days they sail north up the coast of the Americas.

After finding a big sound, they circle inside until they find a mouth of a river. They follow the river north until they can go no further. Captain Martine spots a cove in the river where there's a small English settlement called Windsor. For months, Martine and his crew work to clear the grounds and build houses on land they call Big Hill so they can send for their wives and children to settle in this new world.

By the time the wives and children arrive in Windsor, the locals are getting too uncomfortable with the idea of pirates living nearby. So the people of Windsor tell Martine and his crew that they need to leave. So Martine doesn't need any extra trouble. Plus, he's outnumbered. And if the locals cry pirates to the regional governors, this won't end well. Martine believes it's his best move to quietly move on and find someplace else to live.

So Martin, his men, and their families pack up everything they can and head about eight miles northwest to a place near a fork in a pretty brook that will offer plenty of fresh water. The group builds shelters, they stash their 20 million dollars in treasure, and get to planning their next move. And that brings us back to today. So from here we lose the treasure trail. Just a reminder that 20 million in the 1660s would be worth over 300 million today.

We assume with unimaginable wealth like that, Martine would not have left it behind. And there's no record of a settlement near Salmon Brook that lasted long enough to get noticed. There's that. Again, we're not talking about a little treasure. If you had $300 million, you wouldn't leave that behind either. No, I definitely wouldn't. So why do we suspect that it might be buried here? So I found this Hartford Current newspaper article from 1966. The article describes how Anthony Ruches— Who we mentioned at the beginning. Right, that guy—

So the article says he grew up in the area and was obsessed with the idea of buried treasure. Now at first he was looking for Revolutionary War money that was going to pay French soldiers. He'd heard that the pay might have been stolen or captured and buried nearby.

But then a friend of his helped with research and told him about the Santa Barbara treasure, how there could be a connection with this region. So beginning in 1951, Ruches spent a bunch of money on metal detecting equipment and spent all of his weekends searching for any clues. He found crossed bones. And then he found a skull near some stones with strange markings etched in them. The markings pointed west, so he searched west. He eventually found what he called treasure stones near the fork in Salmon Brook here in East Granby.

He couldn't make out the symbols on the rocks, so he sent them to the Treasure Trove Club of New York. They told Ruches that the English pirate Robert Caldwell likely etched the map instructions on these stones. Ruches pieced the rest of the story together and believed the treasure could be buried as much as 20 feet deep somewhere around here.

Ruchus spent the rest of his days searching. All right, so there's a bunch of ifs here. There are. This isn't the first pirate treasure we've chased. No, not at all. We've discussed how pirates did indeed bury treasure when they were on the run, but the point isn't to bury it 20 feet down. Right. The point is to stash it and return as soon as possible to retrieve it once the heat dies down. That's the plan, right.

Ruchus went broke trying to find this treasure. He searched for 15 years. He camped out here. He used a metal detector. He dug in various places hoping to find any artifact that might tie to the time of pirates, but he struck out. So another theory is that Martine had a settlement here, but it was wiped out during the King Philip's War around 1676.

Only a few would have known where the treasure was buried. If they were killed suddenly, the treasure location would have gone to the grave with them. Yet here we are standing in the same spot, wondering if maybe everyone missed something. Maybe there's an absolute fortune buried out here because maybe Captain Martine had to hightail it out of this region. Or his people died who knew where to dig. There's always treasure in the story, but I'd still like to dig just in case. ♪

Okay, but if you find anything, you're buying the first round. I'll buy all the rounds. Shoot. And that's a deal. So considering our likelihood of finding the lost treasure is pretty low, we'd love it if you'd become one of our Patreon patrons. It's just three bucks per month. And for that, you get early ad-free access to a treasure trove of all of our past episodes, new episodes, plus bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. To sign up, just head to patreon.com slash New England Legends. It's only three bucks a month and we'd appreciate it.

And to see some pictures related to this week's story, click on the link in our episode description or go to our website and click on episode 402. I feel like this is one of the great mysteries of New England, the fact that we have pirates. We had pirates. Yeah. Pirate ships. And the coast was very active way back in the day. Yeah. But we tend to think about inland stuff, ghosts and Bigfoots and sea serpents. I love when we do these stories about the sea. Yeah.

Imagine like you grew up in East Granby as a kid. We've talked about this many times before. Just grabbing a shovel and digging in your yard. You're like, there could be treasure right here. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, I guess there could. But anywhere in New England, it's a possibility. Of course. You could find something. I do want to say, if you Google the David Martine treasure stones, you'll see images of rocks that look like they're painted and etched.

with perfect modern English, all caps. It says like David Martine, Neptune treasure, like whatever. Two things, which is how we know it was fake, is that that's not how people wrote in the 1600s. Oh yeah, it was more cursive, right? Well, but it's almost, you almost couldn't, even if they wrote it on paper and you read words from the 1660s today in English, it's,

And by the way, he was Dutch. Right? Right. But let's say, pretend you read English English from the 1660s. It would be very difficult for you to make it out today. It would not be...

anywhere near the grammar you're used to. Second of all, Ruchis specifically said... If it said, like, oh, the treasure's right near here, then he would have said, well, I found it. He said it was just symbols. Symbols and things that he had to get deciphered by someone else. The images you see online...

you could decipher it. It's very plain English. Yeah. So those are fake. Um, they're not real, but someone Crayola wasn't invented till like the late 18th or something. Yeah. I don't think they use spray paint. Yeah. Right. So, so anyway, but when you see those, you'd be like, Oh, someone has these rocks, but this story is compelling enough. Um,

That, you know, there's a whole group of treasure hunters out there. We've done lost treasure stories before, and we've received emails from some of these treasure hunters. And they're like, hey, do you happen to know, like, where roughly? We did the story of the—there was a governor on the run during the Revolutionary War. He was—I think he was going from, like, New Hampshire down to the coast to try to get out with his treasure. And at one point he had to stop and bury what he had.

And it was worth quite a bit historically and value, you know, and the straight value of it. And we got emails from treasure hunters that are just like, so do you, did you find something that I missed? You know what I mean? Yeah. Because I swear I'll go dig it up and give you nothing. If we found something that they missed, we would have the treasure. If we found something that you missed, we wouldn't put it in a podcast. Right. We'd be like, hey, Ray, so anyway, we're going to dig first. Yeah.

And if we find it, oh, imagine the podcast. Right. We'll get the episode ready. We'll make national news and then drop the episode. Yeah. That would be the plan. Eat your heart out, Geraldo Rivera. Yeah, right. Remember when he did the Jimmy Hoffa thing and there was nothing in the tomb? If you're hearing this now, we didn't find it. We didn't. We didn't find it. But if you lived in East Granby and you were a kid and you were near enough that fork, I mean, if it were like 12-year-old Jeff, every Saturday I'd be like, hey, mom, I'm

Taking the shovel and just randomly digging up everywhere. And it's not unheard of to bury something more inland, right? They would travel a little far in just so it's not so obvious. You don't want the ocean to wash it away. Right. The ocean. Right. Yeah. Um,

Yeah. Takes everything. But we can't stress enough, when pirates were hiding, and they did, they hid caches of treasures wherever, and they had maps, and the skull and crossbones, quite often, it was like you would take one of the ship's crew and be like, hey, you do the digging. And they're like, all right, I dug it. All right, put the treasure in. Cool. All right, now rebury it. Yep. Bang. Bang.

All right? I can't have you knowing where it is. Right. So I'll just arrange your bones here so I know where it is. You're the guy that's asked to bury the treasure, just running the other direction. Yeah. I'm not feeling well today, sir. Yeah, no. Let Scotty do it. Yeah, you're the red shirt on Star Trek, right? Yeah, I was thinking the same exact thing. First guy that goes down to check out the uninhabited planet. Right, right. He's dying. You're done. You're toast. Hello, character four with no name.

So yeah. I've never seen that guy before. Crewman six, grab your red shirt and a shovel. We need you to dig. Yeah. You're a goner. And they must know at some point. They're like, oh, this, you can't have me knowing where the money is. Right. But 20 feet down with hand shovels would take you a long, long time. We've talked about that before too. Yeah. It's not easy digging a hole. You didn't have the backhoe. Right. So, so there's that. And then there's also, again, I can't stress enough that

you're on the run. So you want to get it hidden enough that no one happens upon it, but not so much that you can't come get it sort of quickly, right? That's the point of buried treasure is that we know where it is, Ray. We have the map.

Six months from now, we're coming back. Grab a lunch. We'll have it by sundown. We'll be out of there with our riches. You can't find it. It's already dug up. You go to the nearest house. There's a kid with a shovel. Yeah. Have you seen? No, I haven't. Is that a Rolex? You look pretty young for a Rolex. So, yeah. So that's sort of how that went. However, we love this idea of...

that this fortune, 300 million, you know? Now, you know, I'm sure they spent some. They gave some away. They hid some elsewhere. Yeah. But there's got to be like a mother load somewhere. Something. I mean, if it's worth 300 million now, even if it's not all buried. Right. It's at least 100 million. So this Ruchis guy who, you know,

passed away long ago, became obsessed with this idea that even if it was the King Philip's War, so like if three people knew where the treasure was and they were all wiped out in a raid, well then the location's lost, but it can't be far from there. So where is it? And if you found it, I mean, imagine. Also, I know this, the article I read in the Hartford Courant, I guess Connecticut has a law or they were talking about a law where 25% goes to the state

in these cases. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like if you found, England, I think England has a law where, I think they keep it. Like if you found, if you found like a Roman shield on your farm, there's something where like, you know. It's an artifact. It's a piece of history. Yeah. Imagine like this, talk about, I mean, getting taxed enough. Your tax, your estate is literally taxing junk in the ground that could be on your property that you own. Right? And you'd be like, yeah, I started digging for putting in a flower garden and

found doubloons. And like, yep, we'll take that. This belongs in a museum. Listen, Indy. Mr. Jones. No way. This belongs in our coffers. We could turn those doubloons into something. But yeah, no, I love, love, love these pirate stories. And the notion that Hartford is where it is. Yeah. Because it's just logical sense. Like big ships would sail up and go, ooh, we probably shouldn't go too much further. Right. Stop here. Let's just make a port here. It's way inland, totally safe from any sea storms. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, this is how far we can get, well-protected and easy transport up and down the river. So let's put a lot of insurance companies here in Hartford because, you know, that's what they could absolutely use. Maybe that's it, right? Someone in Hartford found the treasure and said, well, I'm rich. I'll just start insurance companies. Oh, there you go. Yeah. They invested. And now they're richer. Richer. Yeah.

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