The Maltese Falcon

The current goal is to travel to San Francisco, California.

Aktuelles ZIEL:
Der Falke möchte nach San Francisco in Kalifornien reisen. Bitte hilf ihm auf seinem Weg.

Grand Master Villiers de l'Isle d'Adam had this finger-high jeweled bird made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo and sent it to the Spanish King Charles.

He sent it in a galley commanded by a French Knight named Cormier or Corvere, a member of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. But it never reached Spain.

The famous admiral of buccaneers Khair-ed-Din Barbarossa took the Knight's galley and he took the bird. The bird went to Algiers.

More than a hundred years later it was carried away by Sir Francis Verney, the English adventurer who was with the Algerian buccaneers for a while. It's pretty certain that Sir Francis didn't have it when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He was stony broke. But there's no denying that the bird did go to Sicily.

It turned up next in the possession of a Spaniard who had been with the army that took Naples in 1734. There's nothing to show that it didn't stay in that family until at least the end of the Carlist War in 1840.

Then it appeared in Paris at just about the time that Paris was full of Carlists who had had to get out of Spain. One of them must have brought it with him, but whoever he was, it's likely he knew nothing about its real value. It had been -no doubt as a precaution during the Carlist trouble in Spain- painted or enameled over to look like nothing more than a fairly interesting black statuette.

See: "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett.