Going on a Tray-zure Hunt

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, August 20, 2004

Ay, I told my mates – that trayzure – I mean treasure - is out there somewhere, and I intends to find it if I have to travel the seven seas to find it!

Twas back in '98 when I found my Fortune, and seein' as how old Davy Jones is set to come calling any day now, I suppose there's no harm in telling you the story of how I tracked down a Queen's ransom in Swiss bank accounts. Not that I would ever board a boat, you understand. I'm more of what you'd call a landlubbin' pirate. I search through oceans of data looking for treasure.

And 'twas once when I managed to get hold of the laptop belonging to old Captain Bligh. Bligh was a monster, of course, but he was a rich monster. I found the laptop in an old seafaring shop up in Maine one day. I knew it was Bligh's because it had his mark – an etching of a captain feeding some canned mushrooms to his sailors. This was the one, I knew – who else but someone as chintzy as Bligh would make his crew eat canned mushrooms? - and it was where I was going to discover where Captain Bligh's treasure, his Fortune, was hidden.

Well, of course he had a treasure! You didn’t think he sailed all the way to the South Seas just to shlep back breadfruit, did you? In fact, he had a ton of money left over after his voyages, considering how little he spent on his crew. But once I heard it told among old sailors – I think it was at the Starbucks near the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Brooklyn, actually – that Bligh had made his big money in Tahitian gold. "If only we could find the clues to where the treasure was buried," said one of the conversationalists. "I hear tell he had millions stored away! He discovered a wad of gold in Tahiti, hauled it secretly back to London, then got on-line with a Swiss banker, who bought the gold and deposited the money into a super secret bank account. The information is on Bligh's personal laptop, and they say that laptop is still out there somewhere, but I've searched the world and not found hide nor hair of it."

So finding the laptop was the key to finding the treasure. Somehow, somewhere on that computer was the secret link to old Bligh's fortune. So imagine my excitement when I turned on the machine and saw the startup screen. "Heer lyes the Keye to a Fortune. If Thou Art seeing this, Knowe that the Ghoste of Bligh Liveth Heer, and If you follow the Clues, You Will Find my Fortune."

Well, he obviously wasn't a candidate for a spelling bee, but it was clear that Bligh had hidden the clues to a king's ransom - maybe even King Kamehameha's! Bligh passed through Hawaii as well, of course, and he and Cook managed to finagle a fortune out of the Hawaiian royalty. Book 'em, Dano!

But where would a set of clues be? Well, from what I knew of Bligh, he was a true seafaring man – if he were around today, he'd probably be a walking cliché, in fact, with the wig and the pegleg and all. So he certainly would have taken the traditional pirate's way of leaving clues – by peppering the area with notes telling bounty hunters to take ten paces to the right and start digging.

So to examining notes I set about. I looked in all the obvious places for them – Notepad, Lotus Notes, About this Notebook – but no dice. And that computer was a slow blower, too; I suppose the technology was a bit less in those days than it is today. I searched and searched – but 'twas no use. I was about to make that machine walk the plank – and that's when I saw it.

"It" was a program called WireNote – another note program, but a much more versatile one that the usual stickies and reminder programs. WireNote lets you set up to do notes and reminders, and lets you link them to specific files or programs, so that you get the note you need when you are working on a particular project or file. You can easily move the notes from one application to another, and send notes to other users over a local network using WireNote's messaging function, where you can attach the note to a specific file on a remote computer. And, you can check your pop e-mail on up to 100 accounts, downloading headers without opening up an e-mail program. It also has an anti-spam filter to prevent downloading of junk mail, and can also ferret out instant messages you don’t want to read from people you aren't interested in hearing from (I imagine Bligh had a whole bunch of his crew on his Do Not Disturb list!)

A useful program, overall, but not a typical one in the Windows fleet – but it was free, so I figured that Bligh probably liked and used it, as it appealed to his sense of frugality. So I right-clicked on the program's contextual menu and found a note – with the title "Treasure Information Here."

Shiver me timbers! I had struck gold! But no, Bligh was going to make me work for this prize. The note said: "So you thought you've found my treasure dear; not quite, though it's not too far, so don't fear. Look in a program that has you writing on a tear. And no, those stories were wrong – I was NOT queer!"

Useful information, but a little more than I needed. But now I had to figure out what program let's me "write on a tear." Microsoft Word was a little too obvious, but I figured Bligh had used most of his creative brain power coming up with that poem, so he might just put it in such an obvious place.

So to the menu I went, and I opened Word. And lo and behold, another WireNote appeared – a note that Bligh had obviously attached to the program! And this note, too, had a clue: "You're a step closer to what you seek. Now's not the time to be meek! Look for an engraving of a boat – otherwise, I'll come back from beyond and personally show you that dead men do not float!"

An engraving, eh? It could only mean one thing: An artistic rendering, perhaps in Photoshop, of the HMS Bounty. Bingo! On the Photoshop menu I saw listed as the last used file "Bounty.bmp." Could this be it?

Almost. The picture referred me to a couple of other notes attached to files and programs, and had me use WireNote to download an e-mail message (his mailbox had not been checked for some time, and there were a lot of backlogged e-mails from all sorts of unsavory characters). Finally, I found myself somewhere deep in C:/Windows/System32 – and face to face with the final note.

"Your heart's desire you have found," the note read. "And you have stood your ground. Now is the time for you to claim your Fortune. Treat her right,

and to loneliness you will become immune. She was a faithful companion, saved me from many a rat. Now she is yours, my Fortune, my cat."

What? All this for a stupid cat? No way; I was about to chuck the laptop and the Captain's "treasure" – until I read the last line of the note, promising eternal hauntings, bad luck, and general mischief-making on the part of Bligh, who said he would come back from the afterlife if the person who discovered Fortune did not take her in and treat her as one of the family. Now I'm a WireNote user too – I've got a series of notes scattered around my computer reminding me to buy cat food on a regular basis. If nothing else, this experience has solved a historical dilemma – why was old Breadfruit Bligh so chintzy on the provisions? Now I know – he had to feed Fortune. This cat really can eat! Arrhhh!

Download WireNote from http://www.wiredplane.com/wirenote/info.shtml. Free, for all Windows systems

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