The Legend of the Larston Buddha

                The story of the Larston Buddha began in the late 16^th century after an English sailor named Phillip Larston parted ways with the famed privateer Martin Frobisher.  Sometime in the late 1580’s Larston started his own maritime enterprise in the East Indies as an independent privateer, a pirate.  Larston was in his early 30’s and continued his nefarious expeditions well into his late 50’s when he retired to London where he played the game of the rich and shameless and gained respect among the upper tier of London’s elite.  The 25 years or so that he was active as a pirate were spent mostly in the waters around today’s South East Asia.  Larston was a prolific pirate or so the story goes and amassed a huge fortune during his Asian adventures.  Larston was also a well known and obsessive competitor who was constantly challenging people to duels, gambling, sport, pretty much anything he could use to create a competition. After he retired from the pirate business it didn’t take him long to get bored with his mundane life of luxury on land.  So he created a challenge for ambitious explorers by engineering a treasure hunt. He kept the challenge a top drawer only competition by charging a hefty entrance fee which eliminated all the rabble. It is thought the real reason for the competition was to recruit men for a covert return to piracy or at least his ancestors like to think it was.  Larston being an upstanding citizen at the time was far too respected to be so scandalous as to get caught being a pirate.  His family reckons he did his pirate deeds on the hush hush until the day he died which could very well be true. The family is still wealthy and purchased or was granted a huge chunk of the Texas coast in the 1830's so who knows he sure as hell didn't spend it all. You have to admit it is a romantic notion to have a pirate in the gene pool and the evidence is in the documents and family history. I don't blame them for spinning the tale through the ages. It inspired me! A couple of my forefathers were hung for hog stealing which is not quite the same level of rascal as a pirate, damnit.  My clan would have been Larston's "rabble".
  The spin was that Larston claimed he had personally stashed what was, for the day, an enormous fortune somewhere in the lands south and east of Siam in the old kingdom of Lovek  which is today’s southern Laos and Cambodia.  Larston was a talented artist and wanting to make the stakes more interesting he put a personal touch on the competition by painting several paintings to award the winners. The paintings were of a Buddha and had seven clues to the treasure’s location. It was a race from the get go each competitor who won had to finance and organize their own expedition to Asia. The race started the moment the challengers were told they had won. The winners would then race to be the first to organize an expedition and meet Larston in Asia to collect their maps for the treasure hunt. To get a painting/map challengers had to make it through a gauntlet of tests both physical and mental in order to earn the right to possess one of the paintings.  Several men died while trying to qualify or again so the story goes.  Larston believed that only the strongest, most intelligent and most creative of men could earn the right to own a piece of his fortune plus he relished the idea of pitting the alphas against one another. Unfortunately Larston died in 1616 in Asia while waiting for the competitors (hmm) to arrive. He never told anyone the location of the treasure or whether the treasure actually existed. The paintings/maps vanished along with his secret, hence the legend of the Larston Buddha.
  Unfortunately there are no names of the winners in Larston's documents so tracking the Buddha’s that way is a dead end. All of Larston’s papers are in the family’s private collection and my benefactor has most of them. I looked hard for the names and found nada. The records show that he painted 12 different paintings each unique but with the same clues hidden inside the image.  For over three centuries the stories of Larston’s treasure and the paintings of his Buddha’s inspired forgers and swindlers to lay claim to an original. Seems to me if they had the original they would have or probably did get the treasure.  
                 My journey to find one of the Larston Buddha’s begins in Cambodia.  I don’t expect (neither does my benefactor) to find a fortune at the end.  I do however hope to find an original or more likely a forgery of one of Larston’s Buddha’s and purchase it for the family collection (they don't own one).  So how can I tell a Larston from the countless other paintings of Buddha’s in SE Asia?  He signed them and I have photos of his mark from his other works in the family’s collection.  This trip is essentially an art adventure.  I’ll be spending 80 days in SE Asia going from country to country, city to city, museum to museum, antique galleries, art galleries and maybe even a few private collections. I know my chances are slim but I figure I have karma on my side after my serendipitous discovery of the gold Buddha’s in Tibet.  I'll be in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and possibly Myanmar/Burma (depends on the junta) in search of Larston’s signature.
To give you an idea of Cambodia during the Larston era...King Ang Chan (1516-66), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the post-Angkorian period, moved the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek Portuguese and Spanish travelers who visited the city, located on the banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, described it as a place of fabulous wealth. The products traded there included precious stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock (including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a rare and potent medicine). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contained flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians, Malays, Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese. They were joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch.

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