Quest for Gold : Treasures: A Tarzana man says he’s close to finding a lost Spanish mine that early records call the continent’s richest.

Some people spend their lives seeking El Dorado.

Chuck Kenworthy is a professional treasure hunter who says he has found it at least once, and maybe twice, only to have it snatched away.

The 60-year-old Tarzana resident thinks that the third time may be the charm. He believes that he is close to uncovering what early Spanish records describe as “the richest gold mine on this continent.”

“I’ve been working on this 11 years,” said Kenworthy, one of only a handful of professional treasure hunters in the United States. “I feel we’re getting close.”

He is searching somewhere in the vast Arizona desert. Not surprisingly, Kenworthy refuses to say where. He won’t say much about the search, other than laying out large color photographs of rock formations on his desk in his paneled Ventura Boulevard office.

In those rocks, he sees the images of birds, dogs and pack horses. Each has a different meaning.

“See this?” he said, pointing to a gigantic, upright rock formation. “This is a war dog. Cortez used them. It means this is the trail used to carry the gold out of the mountains.”

Kenworthy insists that the formations give directions as clear as road signs once you know how to read them.

That theory might be met with skepticism. But his Quest Exploration Corp. has a track record of finding lost treasure. In 1972, he financed an expedition in the Bahamas that discovered the wreckage of the Nuestra de la Maravilla , a Spanish ship that held a trove worth anywhere from $400,000 to $4 million, according to newspaper accounts. Kenworthy said that treasure was never collected because the government of the island nation reneged on its promise to share the proceeds.

In 1975, he and John Wayne discovered and probed a 17th-Century shipwreck off Santa Catalina Island. This time, Kenworthy said, he believes that some of the treasure may have been scooped up by another ship.

His company has participated in treasure hunts throughout the Americas, sometimes accompanied by scientists from the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.

Whether he strikes gold in Arizona or not, Kenworthy remains a committed dreamer, one of a small group of people who spend their time poring over ancient maps and checking legends of abandoned riches. One scientist at SRI praised his skills as a treasure hunter, but added that Kenworthy sometimes has a tendency to be a little “overly optimistic.”

The stationery of his company is embossed with the image of a majestic galleon lying off a desert island. A trunk filled with jewels glitters in the sun. His personalized license plate reads “QUEST.”

The quest so far has not been particularly lucrative. Although he has made discoveries worth thousands of dollars both on land and at sea, sometimes after others have failed, he admits that he has spent more on his treasure hunts than he has earned from them.

“You hear about Mel Fisher’s big find, but that took 20 years,” said Jim Williams, editor of Treasure magazine, referring to the treasure hunter whose discovery of the 17th-Century Spanish ship the Nuestra Senora de Atocha was chronicled in a television documentary. “So many never find anything.”

Kenworthy began his working life as a child actor, winning a charming-child contest in New York at the age of 10. The prize was a screen test at Warner Bros. He landed some small roles in movies and then built a career as a recordist, the person who makes sure that the sound being recorded gets on the tape. From there, he went into land development in the booming suburbs around Los Angeles.

“I did well,” he said. “So I decided to do what I always wanted to do in life: treasure hunt.”

He had met Wayne while working on “The Searchers,” so when he decided to hunt for a sunken ship off Catalina in 1974, he went to a friend of Wayne’s to see if he could rent the actor’s 137-foot former minesweeper, the Wild Goose.

Wayne decided to participate as a partner. They hired divers who had worked with Wayne on “The Green Berets” and went to work hunting for a Manila galleon that had gone down in the 17th Century after hitting submerged rocks. It was carrying gold, silver and amethyst that now would be worth millions, Kenworthy said. The divers located some artifacts, including copper plates.

Suddenly, according to Kenworthy, the Glomar Explorer showed up and anchored nearby. Owned by Howard Hughes’ Summa Corp., the Glomar was a sophisticated salvage ship used in 1974 to recover pieces of a broken-up Soviet submarine.

“We were told they were practicing for when they went out to the Russian submarine,” Kenworthy said.

He said he was later told by a former Summa employee that the ship was scooping up treasure. Kenworthy sued but nothing ever came of it and Summa representatives told California officials, according to published accounts at the time, that they were not prospecting.

That was not Kenworthy’s only treasure-hunting disappointment. He put up the money in 1972 to finance the search for the Maravilla , he said. The ship, according to historical records, was the leader of a convoy returning to Spain with treasure from Mexico and South America when it sank off the Bahamas on New Year’s Day, 1656.

A diving team recovered silver coins, bars, gold, emeralds and other artifacts before the Bahamian government chased them off and confiscated the treasure, Kenworthy said.

Although a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Kenworthy was entitled to 55% of the treasure, Kenworthy said he was never able to collect.

“It’s so common for governments to change their mind and renege” on deals with treasure hunters, said Treasure magazine’s Williams.

Kenworthy has had his share of successes, many of which he won’t discuss at length. Taking evidence of his finds out of a bank vault, he laid out a few of his trinkets in his office.

He displayed what he described as gold doubloons, pieces of eight, ancient pottery, a gold necklace from an Incan tomb and other valuables. One of the most intriguing items was a rare gold piece that he said Spaniards wore around their necks to show that they were gentlemen. One end was sharpened into the shape of a tiny scythe and was used for cleaning the teeth. The other end was a scoop for cleaning the ears. In the middle sat a delicate figure of an aristocratic Chinese lady.

While much treasure is found by accident, Kenworthy has tried to make treasure-seeking a scientific endeavor. He has contracted with SRI scientists and carts along with him magnetometers and other devices designed to pick up the presence of underground metals as well as anomaly detectors to detect unusual geologic features. Kenworthy said his biggest score would be the Arizona mine, if he can bring it in.

He said he feels that he is getting close and believes that his research into old Spanish symbols and signs has improved the odds. He said years of probing the archives of Spain, the Vatican and Mexico has enabled him to read signs that others might mistake for natural rock formations. The signs were designed to conform to specifications of the King of Spain so that anyone could read them, if they knew how.

“In real estate, three things are important,” the former developer said. “Location, location, location. In treasure hunting, there are also three things: research, research, research.”

Even while he is still pursuing the Arizona treasure, he is beginning to scale back on his quest for lost riches after 20 years as a professional treasure hunter. These days, he often serves as a consultant to other treasure hunters.

He is also planning to make public a lot of his knowledge about how to find treasure. He is not worried that revealing his secrets will increase the competition for the remaining treasures around the world. There is still plenty of loot waiting to be found, he said.

“There are so doggone many treasures.”