Welcome to the Pieces of 8 Challenge!
Some of the world’s most famous pirates have visited the North Country and left behind a large treasure chest of their richest valuables. Each of the notorious pirates then left behind a separate cache with a hint for you to find the motherload. There are 8 caches for each of the 8 pirates, plus the motherload. The pirates left a part of the coordinates for the motherload in each of their caches. They don’t need to be found in order, but they all need to be found to get the final coordinates for the motherload.
Francois l’Olonnais was born in 1630 in France and arrived in the Caribbean in the 1650s as an indentured servant. By 1660, he had completed his servitude and wandered the islands, eventually going to Haiti and becoming a privateer, preying upon Spanish ships. In 1666, l’Olonnais and a fleet of 8 ships left Tortuga, their home base, to attack Maracaibo, in what is now Venezuela, capturing a rich Spanish ship along the way. Maracaibo was thought to be impregnable at the time, but l’Olonnais approached the city from the landward side, surprising the city and taking it in just a few hours. However, most of the residents had fled and hidden their possessions in the process; but l’Olonnais solved this problem quickly by tracking down the residents and torturing them until they gave up the location of their possessions. For 2 months, l’Olonnais made his way through Maracaibo, pillaging and burning the city before turning to the neighboring town of Gibraltar and holding it hostage for ransom. His reputation for cruelty became well-known and hundreds of pirates joined l’Olonnais for his next expedition to the Central American mainland. After an encounter with the Spanish, l’Olonnais tried to escape, but ran aground off the coast of Panama. They couldn’t dislodge their ship and headed inland to find food. There, they ran into the indigenous Kuna tribe, which ambushed, killed, and ate l’Olonnais and his men in 1669.