Tales of the Caribbean Sea, Part 2
- Jim Watson
- Dec 5
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
THE DREADFUL SECRET OF COFFIN ISLAND
Long ago in Old San Juan there was a bookkeeper and budding pirate named Jose Almeida who fell madly in love with the wife of his boss, a very powerful man in Puerto Rico at the time. Because revealing his love for Alida, as she was called, to the husband would mean certain death, Almeida only divulged his secret to Alida herself and wisely kept quiet around his boss.
His boss, a fellow Portuguese named Igartua Sousa, was none the wiser and in fact took the young Almeida under his wing. The two became great pals.
But Jose Almeida could not contain his desires and rather than risk a cutlass across the neck decided to sign aboard a vessel called the Guipuzcoan, which performed the rather mundane service of fetching salt from the nearby Turks & Caicos islands.
Somewhere along the line, Almeida convinced the captain of the Guipuzcoan to turn pirate, a much more profitable and no doubt exciting line of work. The old skipper agreed and allowed Almeida to call all the shots for the vessel, so to speak, at least insofar as matters of piracy were concerned.
Delighted, Almeida immediately got rid of the ship’s “weak and cowardly” crew members and drummed up an assemblage of a dozen brutes and beasts that could be counted on in the heat of the battles to come. “Disloyalty is punishable by hanging!” he told his new crew. “But if you behave well, within a year you shall be rich and can stay on in any port you like!”
Their first prize was a Swedish ship, which they captured, plundered and, after locking her vanquished crew below decks, scuttled her to the bottom of the sea.
There came two more prizes in the ensuing weeks, all enriching Almeida and his men. By this time, he had decided it was time to return to Alida, his “beloved torment.”
Almeida soon learned that Igartua and Alida had moved to the island of Saint Thomas where the ageing husband had opened a small hardware store. Still unaware of Almeida’s love for Alida, Igartua heartily welcomed his fellow Portuguese back. After hearing the younger man’s tales of piracy and adventure, Igartua became so enthralled with the idea of joining him on his future pirating escapades that he died of a stroke on the spot.
Almeida was now free to wed the willing Alida, even receiving special permission from the Church to do so, since it was normally not allowed in those days for a recently widowed woman to remarry so soon.
Now that the knot was finally tied between the two, Jose Almeida could get on with his pirating life in the pursuit of a lavish lifestyle for him and his new wife. But just like her deceased husband, Alida insisted on tagging along for at least one of Jose’s pirate attacks. If her intention was to enjoy the thrill of combat, she fatally succeeded.
In the heat of battle, and unbeknownst to Jose Almeida at the time of its occurrence, a stray musket ball found its way into Alida’s heart, killing her instantly. It was only after the victory was won and the smoke cleared that Jose learned the terrible fate of his loved one.
A grief-stricken Almeida returned to Saint Thomas with the body of his bride and retained the services of that island’s most noted undertaker and embalmer. Almeida’s wish was, through the employment of the most powerful fragrances and potions available at the time, to preserve the remains of his beloved for eternity.
This being done, he took the now-preserved body and set sail for a little-visited island he knew off the southern coast of the main island of Puerto Rico. There, in a secret cave, he buried Alida after first encasing her in a glass coffin and in turn encasing the coffin in a copper box.
Over the years, Almeida made it a regular habit to revisit the body of Alida by travelling, alone, to visit her in the cave, sometimes studying her face for hours on end.
His visits did not go unnoticed. A number of his cohorts and supposed brothers-in-arms eyed these trips greedily and calculated that Almeida must be visiting the vast treasures which, they thought, he must surely have buried in that cave. They were wise, however, to bide their time and wait for the right opportunity. For should Almeida find them trespassing in his cave, the pirate captain’s fury and skills as a maritime murderer would surely mean the end of them all.
Their opportunity came at last when they learned that Almeida had been captured at Guayama off the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico. Wanted now by the English, French and Portuguese governments, he was convicted of piracy and executed by firing squad on February 14, 1832.
Free of any fear of being confronted by Almeida, or so they thought, a trio of Almeida’s surviving crew members decided the time was right to make their way to the cave and help themselves to whatever loot they could find, if there indeed was any. Almeida certainly had no more use for it.
The three interlopers—the boatswain, a cabin boy and a ship’s carpenter—made their way into the cave and promptly began digging in the spot where their treasure map (by some accounts written in human blood) told them it would be.
After much digging, they finally heard the clink of metal-on-metal. The first of the men began unearthing the new discovery, which turned out to be the copper box encasing Alida’s glass coffin.
With all hands believing this shiny box must surely contain untold quantities of gold and gems, one of the other two men jumped into the pit and bludgeoned the first man off to meet his maker. “Now we only need share the treasure amongst the two of us!,” cackled the murderer to his remaining accomplice. With the taboo now broken, the third man then followed suit, jumping into the pit and crushing the skull of the second man. “Now I need only share it with myself!” he yelled into the darkness.
The third man, now alone, moved the two fresh corpses aside and earnestly began digging out the rest of the copper box.
Free of the surrounding earth, the copper coffin door was finally opened thereby revealing not a fortune in gold, but rather the near-pristine corpse of Alida in her glass enclosure. The air suddenly thickened around the man and the overwhelming scent of roses and perfumes began filling the chamber, swirling around the man’s head.
Mesmerized and horrified all at once, the man fell into a panic and dropped the lantern in his hand, extinguishing the light and plunging him into darkness. As he looked out of the pit to find his means of escape from this terrible predicament, there stood the ghost of Almeida, a cutlass in his hand and curses and oaths upon his voice.
Now out of his mind with fear, the lone living man in the cavern leapt from the pit and began running towards what he believed to be the cave’s exit. But instead of heading for the exit he instead ran deeper into the abyss and in the darkness plunged into an unseen crevice where he either died outright from his injuries or, more likely, was trapped in the earth’s confines only to die a lingering, lonesome death.
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When the three men failed to return to their ship, their shipmates made their way to the cave and, upon seeing the aftermath of the chaos, decided to remove Alida’s glass coffin from its copper box. They then solemnly removed her from the dreary cavern and sailed her back to her home of Saint Thomas for a proper Christian burial.
Today, Coffin Island, or Isla Caja de Muertos as it is known in Spanish, still graces the horizon off the southern coast of Puerto Rico near the city of Ponce. Except for an aging dock and a handful of structures (including an operational lighthouse) not much has changed and the island retains a feeling of “wildness.”
As for the ghost of Jose Almeida, his vengeful appearance in the cave on Coffin Island was the last time he was ever seen.
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