I’ve been busy behind the scenes, creating a press release for the Gold Beyond Your Dreams Mauritian Pirate Treasure Kickstarter proposal, ready to hand off to the Press Association before very long.
Back on Kickstarter, the project also now has its first (potential) “Executive Producer” backer slot filled, which I have to say was a very pleasant surprise indeed: I only hope I can get to Mauritius to increase its NPV yet further. 😉
Lined up next I have three posts on the Nageon de l’Estang family (including lots of unexpected and fascinating stuff); much more on the interlinear transcription of the papers; some surprises to do with the Missing Corsair; a bibliography; a reconstructed history of the Nageon de l’Estang papers; and plenty more besides.
It’s been a long (and trying) road to get this far already, but I really appreciate the support I’ve had from Cipher Mysteries readers: fingers crossed we’ll get to the end line with a good result.
The Pirate Treasure Crowdfunding Press Release
Pirate Treasure – can crowdfunding help to solve the great Mauritian mystery?
For more than two hundred years, the mystery surrounding ‘Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’ has confounded treasure hunters and historians alike. His papers claim to describe the location of “doubloons, gold in coins and ingots to the value of thirty million, and a copper box filled with diamonds” hidden beneath a cliff near a river in Mauritius.
Now a British historian blogger is using Kickstarter to try to crowdfund research into this long-standing historical mystery. Surbiton-based Nick Pelling is raising money to make a documentary about the papers – and by doing so, hopes to finally solve its many puzzles and tell its secret history.
Countless people – individuals, groups, and even clandestine private companies – have spent decades criss-crossing Mauritius in their search for Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure cache, each trying to track down the ‘pirate marks’ he described having carved into the rock: but with no success at all.
Historians are just as bemused, because there is no evidence that this ‘Bernardin’ ever existed, or that anything mentioned in the papers is even true. Yet definitive historical disproof (i.e. that these papers formed part of a hoax or deception) has been as elusive for historians as pirate treasure proof has been for the treasure hunters.
For Nick Pelling, the point of making this documentary is to take a bold step into the wide-open space between these two opposite positions. “After chipping patiently away at the edges for years“, he adds, “I find myself in the situation where a single dramatic – and very public – move can genuinely act as a catalyst to reveal the much larger story. And so I feel compelled to act, to put myself on the line to get to that bigger picture.”
He sees documentary not just as something that can ‘document’ what is already well known, but as an active research tool that can help reveal new truth. And so the kind of film he is aiming to make will be quite unlike typical mainstream historical documentaries, a genre he describes as having become “far too safe to be genuinely interesting“.
What will he uncover in Mauritius? He doesn’t yet know: but if anyone out there stands a fighting chance of finally bringing Nageon’s secret history to the surface, it is surely him.