I would like to tell you about a treasure hunt I made for my husband a few years ago and recently unearthed from the nethers of my filing cabinet. I don’t actually have a filling cabinet, but “the files stuffed between my office furniture and some storage boxes” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Anyway, I was incredibly entertained producing this treasure hunt.
The beginning
It all starts with a message you found in a bottle one stormy night. It had to have been really storm since you live no where near the ocean.
The bottle is wet. The message inside is dry.
You unfold the paper.
a letter written by a father to his son detailing the existence of an extraordinary pirate recipe which if found will grant the eater endless life and riches
Inside is a piece of parchment, yellow and soft at the edges. Most of it is covered in strange symbols, but one sentence is clear.
To whoever finds this: the treasure was never buried. It was taken.
Below that is a map.
The Journey
The letter takes you out to The West Indies. In true pirate fashion you have a second much more detailed map marked with symbols and the locations of sea serpents.
Weeks later, you sail west beneath a suspiciously black flag, following the map from island to island.
You pass Cuba under a burning sunset. You sail through the Bahamas, where the water turns so clear you can see the shadows of fish beneath the hull. You anchor off Jamaica and hear stories in the taverns about a treasure that was never found.
Everywhere you go, someone seems to know something.
A fisherman tells you the island you're looking for doesn't exist.
A woman in a port town tells you the cookbook disappeared nearly a hundred years ago.
An old sailor regales you with tales of pirates you are about to meet.
The Trove
By the time you have reached the other side of the West Indies you have amassed a pile of treasures. From one island, you bring home a chipped compass that points towards land only once a day. From another, a brass spyglass with initials scratched into the handle. There is a pouch of old coins of mysterious denomination and origin, several mysterious keys, and a pink silk bandana with a parrot embroidered in the corner.
There are also the souvenirs that make considerably less sense: a bottle of sand from an island you can't find on any map, a gold captain's button carved in the shape of a narwal (this captain was unfortunately stabbed to death by this button), a length of silver rope said to have come from the shipwreck of the riches pirate to sail the seas one hundred years ago.
And then there are the recipes.
Pirates, it turns out, spend surprisingly little time discussing treasure and a great deal of time discussing dinner.
Some recipes are simple, some recipes are strange. One simply says put everything into a pot and pray.
And, tucked between the pages of your cookbook, you discover a small piece of parchment you don't remember collecting.
It has only three words written on it:
Save some for later.
