It was natural to ask: Why during all those years, did he not return and retrieve the treasure for himself?
Various circumstances may have prevented him, the inability from lack of means to make the journey, or what not; but certainly one would need to imagine circumstances of peculiar power that should be strong enough to keep a man with so valuable a secret in his possession so many years from taking advantage of it.
For a long while too the names given to the purported sites of the treasure _caches_ puzzled us.

Modern maps give no such places as "Dead Men's Shoes" and "Short Shrift Island," but John--who is said to be writing a learned history of the Bahamas--has been for a long time collecting old maps, prints, and documents relating to them; and at last, in a map dating back to 1763, we came upon one of the two names.
So far the veracity of Tobias was supported.

"Dead Men's Shoes" proved to be the old name for a certain cay some twenty miles long, about a day and a half's sail from Nassau, one of the long string of coral islands now known as the "Exuma Cays." But of "Short Shrift Island" we sought in vain for a trace.
Then the details for identification of the sites left something to be desired in particularity.

But that, I reasoned, rather made for Tobias's veracity than otherwise.

Were the document merely a hoax, as John continued to suspect, its author would have indulged his imagination in greater elaboration.