Picture up to 208 million dollars in raw treasure: chests of jewels, gold altarpieces, and two life-size solid gold statues of the Virgin Mary. Now picture handing the key to a merchant captain and telling him to keep it safe. What happens when the guardians decide they would rather be pirates?

This episode unpacks the legend of the Treasure of Lima through colonial records and centuries of newspaper clippings. We follow the panic that loaded an empire’s fortune onto a wooden ship, the bloody mutiny that followed, the bizarre jungle escape, and the two-century obsession that has destroyed nearly everyone who chased it.

• Facing San Martin’s advance in 1820, Lima’s viceroy stripped the churches and entrusted the wealth to British captain William Thompson of the Mary Dear for transport to Mexico.
• Thompson’s crew murdered the Spanish guards and priests, threw the bodies overboard, and buried the hoard on remote Cocos Island off Costa Rica.
• Captured and sentenced to hang, Thompson and first mate Forbes escaped by promising to lead the Spanish to the gold, then vanished into the dense jungle.
• German August Gissler dug on Cocos Island for nearly 20 years, even becoming its governor, and found only six gold coins, while even gangster Bugsy Siegel searched.
• An embezzlement theory suggests the mutiny was a cover story, and conflicting accounts place the loot in different oceans, with treasure hunting now banned on the protected island.