Tintin Forums

When Sir Francis left clues to the treasure, why did he put the location of the island/sunken ship?
I can't see a point in him sending his sons to the end of the world for no real reason, when the treasure was right under their noses.

Any thoughts?

Could have been any number of reasons.

Maybe it was just an example of Hadoque humour. Maybe his sons were a rather soft and lazy bunch and Francis thought that sending them all the way to the island itself on a wild goose chase would be a good way of toughening them up.

The parchments do mention the "Eagle's +". If Francis and his sons lived together at Marlinspike then they would have gone to the chapel for prays on a daily basis. Francis would have mentioned the statue of St John, the Eagle and the Cross often enough, maybe hoping that, if his sons found the parchments, they would also take the hints and thus find the treasure.

Your first thought about deliberately wanting to send the sons off to the Caribbean is a nice idea, mct.

However, I think your second thought is more correct. I don't think Sir Francis was giving his sons the co-ordinates in order for them to travel to the actual island or shipwreck, but in order for them to pinpoint the island button on the stone globe, and thus to operate the secret opening mechanism. As you say, Sir Francis presumably hoped his sons would recognise the reference to the St John shrine in the crypt, so probably never intended them to have to go further than that. But without those specific co-ordinates for the island, the treasure would have remained hidden in the globe (unless one of them happened to jab the right island by accident).

It's not as if being able to find the actual location of the shipwreck would have seemed of much use to his sons, even if they had thought (like Tintin and Haddock) that the treasure lay there, this being a two or three centuries before the invention of underwater diving equipment.

Makes sense. Of course I realise that the coordinates pointed to the secret button, but the way he put it in the parchments felt designed to send them on a goose hunt, as the first thing that would cross anyone's mind is to go to the actual location, particularly as Sir Francis did not mention taking the treasure out of the ship before the blast.

He probably had a weird sense of humour and wanted his children to do some activity and go discover the island where he lived for a while.

Francis sure was a rich man (If not, why not take the treasure? There is no curse ;-)
Will his sons (heirs) bother about a treasure if they are rich then? Why telling them cryptic tales they don't understand?
Sending his sons to the carribean is definitly a nice idea here, but those rich and lazy guys sure won't go.

Maybe something went bad in the family. His wife divorced maybe?
He didn't want giving the money to her. So he used the ship models he sent to his boys.
But we know, it didn't work out for them. Maybe the whole familiy was in much more trouble than we've ever heard about.

Firstly, the estate would be divided in three - you'd only be getting a third of the fortune. Sir Francis appears to have been building a condition into the puzzle: if you don't cooperate, everyone loses.


They will only be rich if they can find the secret treasure stashed in the monument. Until then, if they remained lazy, they would gradually find themselves on a downward spiral.

Actually, as the treasure remained hidden, and the present-day Haddock is not a man of great means, we could assume that that is what happened: the brothers didn't cooperate, the money ran out, the estates were lost, and the family had to resort to working for a living.

As mct16 and Balthazar are saying above, setting the challenge in the manner of a riddle to be solved wasn't really a clue to the treasure under the sea, it was a test to see if the brothers had been listening to what they had presumably been told by their father.

Has a teacher never given you one of those trick tests, where you are given a long list of tasks, the first of which is to read all the instructions. This is then followed by long winded arithmetic problems, adding this, dividing that, or being given some complicated diagram to construct.

However the last instruction is to ignore all the previous instructions, barring the first, if you have now read all of them. You are told to sit back and fold your arms. The only way to get to do the last instruction is if you diligently follow the first.

I imagine that Sir Francis's scheme works in a similar fashion.

The sons will be rewarded if they have listened to what they were told at the beginning, and if they work together they can by-pass the rigamarole of a long, fruitless sea voyage.
He might also have thought that if they had the wisdom to discover the treasure in this manner, they would have the wisdom not to waste it, and use it wisely.

He may have seen an additional outcome: that if they did cooperate, but undertook the voyage, they would still be learning to cooperate and work hard as mariners, which in itself would be valuable and could have been why Haddock was still sailing on the Karaboudjan centuries later.

The question is if they were rich. It's not unknown for irresponsible children to squander their inheritance to the point that they lose everything their parents worked for.

Francis could easily have added Red Rackham's treasure to the rest of his fortune but instead he kept it hidden, probably as some kind of financial backup. However, we know that his heirs at some stage sold the castle, probably in order to pay off their debts. That would explain why their descendant has never even heard of Marlinspike when he finds Tintin there in the course of "Secret of the Unicorn" or even makes the connection until Calculus and Tintin show him the parchment in "Treasure".

Who know as what happened to his wife (he can't have been an easy man to live with!), but the fact that you need all three scrolls to get the co-ordinates means that all three brothers would have to work together to find the treasure. Maybe this was simply to ensure fairness in the inheritance, or maybe there's an implication there that his sons were prone to quarrelling or rivalry, or had fallen out, and that he was trying to bring his sons together.

That said, if his sons were actually enemies, he couldn't have relied on the first son who found the scroll not nicking the other two scrolls from his brothers' ships!

Of course his whole plan somewhat shakily relies on one or all of them actually happening to find the scroll hidden inside the mast of their ship, which none of them seems to have done! Maybe he meant to give them some extra deathbed message or clue about looking inside the mainmasts, but failed to do so. Or maybe he wrongly assumed they would have enough curiosity to take their model ships apart.

[VERY SLIGHT FILM SPOILER ALERT for next paragraph.]
I like the way that Hergé, with typical economy, doesn't fill in any of these details, and gives us no info about Sir Francis's wife, or anything other than what's needed for the basic plot of the book.
The incomplete patchiness of Haddock's knowledge about his ancestor feels more true to life than the passed-down-family-legend stuff the Spielberg film goes in for, as does the way the whole story of his ancestor comes into Haddock's life somewhat randomly in the book - with him only bothering to look properly in the old sea chest in his flat after Tintin (in what is admittedly one outrageous plot coincidence) happens to present him with a model of the same ship that's in his painting.

I once watched a cartoon along those lines: two half-brothers who have become sworn enemies. Each inherits a magical sword from their late father and, after several episodes spent fighting each other, combine the magical elements of the swords in order to defeat a common enemy - which leads their friends to speculate that that was their father's whole intention.

I remember, when watching that cartoon, thinking that maybe that was what Sir Francis Hadoque did: set his sons a common challenge in the hope that it would encourage them to become friends.

Maybe his sons weren't the ones that Sir Francis was trying to fool. He might have left clues that he thought his sons would be able to follow to the island on the globe in the cellar. *However*, any *outsider* who found the clues, like Tintin or the Bird Brothers, would assume that he meant the actual island and would go off on a wild goose chase.

(PS - I liked Spielberg's approach, as it seems to me that this is the sort of story that *would* be handed down through a family.)