The Mitchell Hedges buried treasure near Roatan Island

Jackson

New member
Hello,

I know Mitchell Hedges is famous for his discovery of the crystal skull in Belize but I dug for a pirate chest he found and reburied off the coast of Honduras back in 1996. I could post the whole story on here if anyone is interested. Also when you read Mitchell Hedges autobiography you can sure see where lucas stole some of his ideas for Indiana. Like when Indy rode with Pancho Villa. Mitchell Hedges does this in real life as well as many other things.


Talk to you soon
Jackson:cool: :whip:
 

Flash Dixson

New member
Jackson said:
Hello,

I know Mitchell Hedges is famous for his discovery of the crystal skull in Belize but I dug for a pirate chest he found and reburied off the coast of Honduras back in 1996. I could post the whole story on here if anyone is interested. Also when you read Mitchell Hedges autobiography you can sure see where lucas stole some of his ideas for Indiana. Like when Indy rode with Pancho Villa. Mitchell Hedges does this in real life as well as many other things.


Talk to you soon
Jackson:cool: :whip:
I hope you don't mean he stole that to put in indy 4, because young indy rides with pancho villa in the young indiana jones chronicels (thats why they put it in indy 4 because it is a reference to the tv show). Any ways I would be extremely interested, there is a possibility that I might go looking for this so please post it up. :D
 

Dust McAlan

New member
Jackson said:
Hello,

I know Mitchell Hedges is famous for his discovery of the crystal skull in Belize but I dug for a pirate chest he found and reburied off the coast of Honduras back in 1996. I could post the whole story on here if anyone is interested. Also when you read Mitchell Hedges autobiography you can sure see where lucas stole some of his ideas for Indiana. Like when Indy rode with Pancho Villa. Mitchell Hedges does this in real life as well as many other things.


Talk to you soon
Jackson:cool: :whip:
Holy crap! Mitchell Hedges buried treasures stories?! Come on, man, don't hold back! :whip:
 

Avilos

Active member
Doing some checking am F.A. Mitchell-Hedges wrote a book of his "adventures". Which events really happened to him and which are just tall tales he invented about himself is highly debatable! His own book seems to be the only record of his life. In the book he did claim to that he was kidnapped by Poncho Villa. Also that he worked with the British Secret Service.

Its clear that when he was first developing the character of Indiana Jones that George Lucas used Mitchell-Hedges as one of many inspirations. It would not surprise me if years later he used some of Mitchell-Hedges claims as the basis for some Young Indy episodes.Even the idea of Old Indy. An older man telling stories of the adventures of his youth. Stories that people don't believe.

That does not mean that Lucas ripped anyone off. It just means that Lucas does good research. He always has. He surely would have looked at the lives of real explorers.
 

Jackson

New member
Hey,

Lucas didnt steal from Hedges he just used ideas that where already out there. That is what he does all the time. The man is good at doing his homework. Anyway, here is part one about Mitchell Hedges. Part II is about my dig for the treasure. This one gives you some background.

The Lost Treasure and Ancient Secrets of Roatan Island by Daryl Friesen

Rob and I stepped off the plane at the airport in Coxon Hole on to the shores of Roatan Island, one of the bay islands in the Gulf of Honduras. We were assaulted by taxi drivers all wanting to take us to the west end, a place which we were told in broken Spanish is the place where all gringos are supposed to go.

The West End is a popular tourist district where scuba divers stay from all over the world. Roatan Island is famous these days for its amazing scuba diving, but I wasn't here for a tropical diving trip. I was here to explore Roatan's forgotten history which to me is far more interesting than the diving, even though the reefs which surround Roatan are some of the most beautiful in the entire world.

Some of the first people to ever walk the shores of Roatan - next to the Payas, more on them later - were the pirates of the Spanish main. Roatan Island has seen some pretty historical figures in it's day. The most notorious being Sir Henry Morgan, who was said to have stopped on Roatan sometime in the late 1600s with his ships loaded with untold amounts of wealth.

My first destination on Roatan was Oakridge at the far end of the Island, a town worth a visit just to marvel at it's design. Oakridge is a very ancient town built on stilts all around the bay and you have to take water taxis to get anywhere. The locals there are nothing but friendly.

I mentioned Henry Morgan to our taxi driver as he was taking us across the bay to our hotel, the Reef House, and he wouldn't stop talking about how he believed all of Henry Morgan's treasure was still to be found on the island. I believe this story to be true because of just how much treasure has already been found on the Island.

One of the first people to ever find buried treasure on Roatan was an archaeologist named Mitchell Hedges, who did a lot of exploring around the Bay Islands back in the 1920s and 30s. Mitchell Hedges lived on Roatan for seven years and he learned the island very well. He was one of the first people to ever explore the pirate ruins of Old Port Royal. Here can be seen to this day the ruins of a pirate fortress which was used by Henry Morgan along with many other notorious pirates who roamed the shores of the Island.

It is a fact that near these ruins Mitchell Hedges discovered four chests filled to the brim with gold bullion, which were reaped from the Spanish by the pirates of Roatan. As the story goes, Mitchell Hedges' friend, known as Doctor Ball, was walking around one of the nearby keys near old Port Royal with a compass in hand. Suddenly the compass started going mad, with the needle spinning around in all different directions. He signalled for Mitchell Hedges who at the time was out in his boat the Amigo just offshore. He told him about the compass's behaviour and the two of them decided that the only thing that would make the compass behave in such a way was a large amount of metal buried under the surface of the key. The two men wasted no time and started digging like mad; within minutes the two explorers had unearthed two large wooden chests loaded to the brim with golden doubloons.

They kept digging after their discovery in a fever of excitement and much to their surprise discovered two more treasure chests of equal size. They placed the chests back in the ground for later recovery and searched the rest of the island with the compass. They found nothing.

Several hours later after making the discovery word came to Mitchell Hedges from one of his crew of excavaters that his discovery had been reported to the police in Coxen Hole by one of the locals, who must have witnessed them digging up the key.

The crew member also informed Mitchell Hedges that according to the rumours the police were going to investigate the dig site tomorrow morning. With these rumours in mind Mitchell Hedges, his daughter Sammy Hedges and Doctor Ball decided that it would be best not take any chances. So wasting no time the three explorers recovered three of the four chests that night and loaded them onto the Amigo and quickly set sail across swelling seas to the town of Belize which was then the capital of British Honduras.

Mitchell Hedges anchored the Amigo 150 miles off the coast of a small key and headed into the mainland on the Amigos extra boat. He returned several hours later with some lumber from which the expedition made three new chests for their treasure and dumped the old crusty ones into the sea. They then headed back inland and booked passage on a steamer that was headed for New York, their treasure safely stored in the cargo hold of the ship with the label Maya artifacts across the sides.

When the three explorers arrived in New York Mitchell Hedges sold off his lost treasure for the sum of $6,000,000 US. He then headed back to England where he bought himself a castle in the English countryside. Here he began work on his biography, Danger My Ally. In his book there is no mention of this incident.

Besides finding pirate treasure on Roatan, Mitchell Hedges made several other discoveries which could be more important in the archaeological world then the discover of pirate treasure. One of Hedges' favourite places on the earth was the Island of Helena located at the very far end of Roatan Island. As I cruised out into the harbour on a small skiff that I had charted from the Reef House headed for the general direction of Helena I thought long and hard about these discoveries.

The only civilization to be found near Helena is a very ancient Grafuna settlement called St. Helena. Like its nearest neighbour Oakridge it is a town built on stilts. The buildings in the town are much more run down than Oakridge and the people are extremely poor. The natives there fish for a living, selling their fish for a few lempurias at the markets in Oakridge on Sunday.

On our way to the other side of Helena, we saw several local kids fishing,sitting on the end of their cayukas with their fishing line wrapped around old laundry bottles. They looked very happy; you could see a strange glow in their eyes as they cruised in their tropical paradise free from western influence. Their smiles as we passed by spoke to me of a happiness that we westerns will never understand in our world of technology and restless competition. I hope when St. Helena eventually becomes more touched by westerners that we don't rob them of this happiness but we probably will. All in the name of progress of course.

When one arrives on the island of Helena the first thing you notice are the limestone cliffs shooting out from the beautiful virgin jungle. As our boat pulled up on the shores of the island I had the feeling that I had truly found one of the last paradises on the earth.

The limestone cliffs of Helena are honeycombed with caves and its inside these caves where Mitchell Hedges believed he made one of his most important discoveries. He explored the caves off Helena with his daughter Sammy and some of the locals from Roatan. As they excavated the floors of the caves they started discovering all kinds of strange artifacts. Mitchell Hedges had never seen anything like them in all his days of archaeology. The artifacts were not Maya or Toltec, which were the only two known cultures that had been found in the area. So what culture were they from? Mitchell Hedges believed the relics he had found were from a culture which was much more ancient then the Mayas or the Toltecs. He believed they were from a culture which existed before what he calls the great earth quake. This had changed the face of the earth causing mass flooding and sinking one of the greatest civilizations known to mankind, the legendary Atlantis.

Mitchell Hedges believed that the bay islands which contain Roatan are pieces of this legendary continent which was first mentioned by Plato so long ago. He thought that the artifacts found on Helena were left by the survivors of this tragic event and indeed there is some evidence besides his discoveries to back up his claim.
 
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