Olivier Levasseur
After a year of successful looting, the Hornigold party split, Levasseur partnering briefly with Samuel Bellamy[1] before deciding to try his luck on the Brazilian Coast aboard a stolen 22-gun merchant frigate named La Louise.
Levasseur escaped on a small brigantine that escorted his ship, and from there went south to São Francisco do Sul, where he robbed a boat full of cassava flour, in order to feed his surviving crew, sailing back to Cananéia.
From 1720 onwards, Levasseur launched his raids from a base on the island of Sainte-Marie, just off the coast of Madagascar, together with pirates John Taylor, Jasper Seagar,[4] and Edward England.
The pirates were able to board the vessel without firing a single broadside because the Cabo had been damaged in a storm; to avoid capsizing the crew had dumped all 72 cannons overboard, then anchored off Réunion island to undergo repairs.
(This incident would later be used by Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel Treasure Island, in which the galleon is referred to as The Viceroy of the Indies in the account given by his famed fictional character Long John Silver.)
In 1724, Levasseur sent a negotiator to the governor on the island of Bourbon (present-day Réunion) to discuss an amnesty that had been offered to all pirates in the Indian Ocean who would give up their practice.
However, the French government wanted a large part of the stolen loot back, so Levasseur decided to avoid the amnesty and settled down in secret on the Seychelles archipelago.
Several hypotheses have been put forward as to the whereabouts of the Buzzard's treasure: it is believed to be in Réunion, of course, but also in the Seychelles, Rodrigues, Madagascar, Mayotte and Sainte-Marie Island.
According to legend, when Levasseur stood on the scaffold to be hanged, he wore a necklace containing a cryptogram of 17 lines, which he threw into the crowd while exclaiming, "Find my treasure, the one who may understand it!
On the island of Rodrigues, French 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature J. M. G. Le Clézio's paternal grandfather settled down and spent twenty years digging in a gully.
His son, Seychellois history teacher John Cruise-Wilkins, is currently still seeking the treasure, concluding that after using state-of-the-art equipment, he needs "to go back to the old method, [getting] into this guy's mind, [claiming he is] ten down, two to go in his Herculean Labours.
"[7] More recently, young French researcher Emmanuel Mezino claims to have deciphered the cryptogram and precisely located the treasure, which is believed to be buried somewhere on Réunion Island.
He revealed how he had discovered ‘le cairn de La Ravine à Malheur’ on Réunion Island and spoke of a 200 m3 megalithic structure less than 1,000 m from the Crémont road, under which the treasure cache was believed to be hidden.
