TREASURE HUNT
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
The title of Edouard Stackpole's

For this year's Smuggler's Quest, treasure hunters must locate three smaller chests around the island containing keys to open the three locks of the main treasure chest, which contains a sweet, sentimental booty.

second young adult novel - about a young boy who tangles with treasure and pirates during revolutionary America - is an imperative for Nantucket families on the day after Thanksgiving, when the Egan Foundation and the Lifesaving Museum launch their second annual, all-out, cross-town treasure hunt for families: Smuggler's Quest II: You Hunt for Treasure.

Inspired by the setting and subject of Stackpole's young adult novels - "Smuggler's Luck" and "You Fight for Treasure!" - Smuggler's Quest II will require treasure hunters to use their feet, their minds and all manner of Nantucket landmarks and resources to find three small treasure boxes containing three different keys to unlock the master treasure chest, secured with three locks. Nantucketers dressed as characters from the books and from Nantucket's history will interact with treasure hunters on their way. The task will test even the cleverest of landlubbers.

(Participants need not have read the books to participate.)

"We were very pleased with the turnout for the first Smuggler's Quest - about 60 families. We were told that it was really fun and just the sort of activity that families were looking for the day after Thanksgiving," said Jean Grimmer, Executive Director of the Egan Foundation. In the last two years, the foundation's Mill Hill Press rereleased new editions of the novels by Stackpole, who was a Nantucket historian and a former director of the Peter Foulger Museum.

"Our goal this year is to get more 'Questers' out and through that activity to introduce them to Edouard A. Stackpole's books," Grimmer said. "They are fun to read - packed full of action and enough facts to get a sense of Nantucket's history during and just after the War of Independence."

Set in the tumultuous years of the American Revolution, Stackpole's books follow the exploits of a Nantucket boy, Timothy Pinkham, and his encounters with smugglers, spies and pirates on Nantucket Island, on the high seas and on the lands beyond.

And though participants certainly won't have to fight each other for the treasure (the search isn't timed, and there's plenty of booty to go around), they will have to wrestle with the riddles that permeate the clue sheets compiled by Jeremy Slavitz, Director of the Lifesaving Museum - who used movies like "Goonies" and "The Da Vinci" code as inspiration for the clues.

"The goal this year is to dress it up a little bit, make it more interactive than it was last year," Slavitz said of Smuggler's Quest. "Instead of telling people to go to places to find clues to the treasure, they start out with the treasure and then need to find clues to the keys that open it."

Slavitz and company wrote the clues based on characters from the books and the island's past. Hunters will meet at the Coffin School at 10 a.m. to get their clues from the Egan Foundation's own "Pocomo Pete."

The hunt is meant to be multi-generational. "We wrote clues for which every member of the family will

be able to contribute something," Slavitz said. "We want families to do this together." (In other words, the clues may be too difficult for kids to decipher on their own.)

The treasure inside the chest is of a nominal value - the real treasure is the memory gained by families who participate.

"There's no single winner," Slavitz said. "The goal

here is to have fun." I

When: Friday, Nov. 24, 10 a.m. Where: Coffin School, 4 Winter Street Cost: Free For more information, call Stacy Fusaro at 228- 2505 or stop by the Coffin School, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.