own secret haunts," it declared. Finally, it claimed that a burial mound "forty feet high and four hundred feet in circumference" near Gasparilla Island had been found to contain "ornaments of gold and silver" along with "hundreds of human skeletons", but that the bulk of the buccaneer's vast cache of buried treasure "still lies unmoved" nearby, in the vicinity of the Gasparilla Inn. Though the brochure presents its "romantic" history of Gaspar as well-established truth, it is entirely fictional. Local place names mentioned were established long before the pirate's supposed arrival, and despite lurid tales regarding the uncovering of gold and human remains, no such artifacts or any other physical evidence of Gaspar's "regal" home base, victims, or treasure has ever been found on Gasparilla Island or anywhere else in the Charlotte Harbor area. In 1949, a retired Pat Lemoyne gave a history lecture at a Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce function in which he cheerfully admitted that his biography of José Gaspar was a "cockeyed lie without a true fact in it" and that he had written the brochure in a dramatic style that "tourists like to hear". He explained that the story had been inspired by John Gómez's tall tales, which Lemoyne had heard second-hand. Lemoyne described Gómez as a "colorful" eccentric who claimed to have been a pirate in order to sell fake treasure maps to "the gullible" for a "fancy figure". Piracy in the West Indies and Its Suppression In 1923, Boston historian Francis B. C. Bradlee received a copy of the Gasparilla Inn brochure from Robert Bradley, then president of the Charlotte Harbor and Northern Railway Company. Assuming that the story of Gasparilla as described was authentic, Bradlee included many details in his book Piracy In The West Indies And Its Suppression without attempting to verify the information. His book repeated claims that a "burying ground" containing the "bleached bones" of Gaspar's many victims had recently been discovered on Gasparilla Island, that a tall "burial mound" built by a "prehistoric race" had been excavated and found to be full of gold and silver artifacts along with "hundreds of human skeletons", and that a dying John Gómez had confessed to witnessing the murder of the "Little Spanish princess" and sketched a map that led searchers to her body. However, none of these claims were true, as no treasure, murder victims, or other physical trace of Gaspar's