DAVY JONES' LOCKER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 17, 21 January 1933, Page 7 (Supplement)

DAVY JONES' LOCKER.

TREASURE ON THE SEA FLOOR

SALVAGING THE EGYPT'S GOLD

BOLD ITALIAN ENTERPRISE,

Compared with fill of the vast "wealth, in the form of lost treasure which lies at the bottom of the sea, the amount' recovered so far by salvage operations is quite insignificant, although it totals many millions of dollars. Upon the floors of the oceans rest countless numbers of rotting treasure ehips with a combined and colossal fortune which no man even has dared to estimate. The greatest part of this stupendous wealth, a fortune perhaps many times as great as that of the rich Lydian king, Croesus, and doubtless containing sufficient gold to wipe out our national public debt, probably destined to lie untouched by human hands to the end of time. The seas are so deep and man's efforts to overcome the tremendous pressure of the water in those abysmal depths are so puny that it is unlikely that any great number of shipwrecks ever will be located, much less salvaged. It is only when ships are lost in comparatively shallow water that there is any hope for recovering the treasure they contain.

Yet the lure of lost treasure continues to drag men out upon the stormy seas, to face all sorts of hardships and perform most heroic deeds. Often lives are lost in this quest for treasure. And as the years go by the salvage crews go deeper and deeper into the perilous depths to hunt for gold. Off the coast of the north-western tiprtof France, braving dangerous winds and still more dangers of tides and currents, a ship's crew of salvage experts and divers today is busy at the task of recovering more than £1,000,000 of gold bullion, gold coin, and silver bars from the strongroom of the, liner Egypt, which sank in about 400 ft of water more than ten years ago.

Richest Treasure Ever Recovered,

The work they are doing would have been impossible a few years ago. Only with the latest of tools for salvage work, such as rigid steel diving suits and new developments of the grappling bucket, are they able to recapture the treasure lost with the Egypt.

Other and greater treasures are beyond the reach of even such experienced treasure hunters as those now working on the Egypt. If modern man knew how to penetrate the deepest seas and how to find the lost treasure ships after he had beaten the problems of the deep he might set about the task of salvaging a fortune of more than £20,000,T)00 which was lost a' little more than 200 years ago in the deep water at the mouth of Vigo Bay. A fleet of Spanish vessels which had left Porto Bello and Ve~a Cruz and had crossed the Atlantic saiely at that time was sunk by British and Dutch warships almost within sight of its home port. About a century ago a Turkish flotila carrying £10,000,000 was served in much the same manner at Navarino by British and Russian men-o'-war. Those were just two of innumerable cases in which vast fortunes were lost at sea.

When the Oceana went down in 1912 in 90ft of water in the English Channel, salvage crews immediately got to work and soon recovered the ship's strong box cargo of silver bars. The Skyro was lost in 1891 off the Spanish Cape Finisterre. Though that "vessel sank in 171 ft of water, more than. £10,000 in silver was saved from its wreck. H.M.s. Lutine foundered off the shoals of Holland in 1799. Lloyd's paid out £1,000,000 in insurance, and after 130 years salvage crews in the hire of the underwriters recovered from the hulk of the lost ship more than £50,000 in gold. Millions still lie in the wreck. The richest treasure ever recovered from a sunken vessel was the £7,000,000 in cash and bullion salvaged from the Laurentic, which was torpedoed and sunk in 1917 at the mouth of Lough Swilly, off the northern coast of Donegal, Ireland. The Laurentic lay in 15 fathoms of water, and divers split its hull wide open with explosives in order to get at the treasure. The great White Star liner Titanic, lost far at sea, is gone forever, like the Spanish and Turkish treasure fleets.

On the night of May 20, 1922, the steamship Egypt, of the Peninsular and Oriental Line, bound from London to Bombay, encountered a dense fog off the island of Ushant, within 22 miles of Armen lighthouse. While running at reduced speed because of the fog, the Egypt was rammed amidship on the port side by the French freighter Seine, bound for Havre. The Egypt sank within 20 minutes after the collision. The Seine, badly damaged, made Brest the next day with 29 rescued passengers of the Egypt, about 200 of that- vessel's crew, and the bodies of 20 dead. A complete scrutiny of the Egypt's passenger list and rolls of the crew later showed that 98 persons had lost lives in the disaster. At a. hearing th^

following September, Captain Andrew Collyer, master of the Egypt, was found guilty of failure to maintain discipline aboard his ship at the time of the collision. His certificate was taken away from him temporarily as a punishment. Locating the Egypt. Shortly after the loss of the Egypt it was announced in London that the vessel had carried to the bottom of the sea five tons of gold bars, 45 tons of silver, and a quantity of gold coins, of a total value of more than £1,000,000. Salvage firms throughout Europe immediately were interested. In August, 1923, the wreck of the Egypt was located six miles from the scene of the collision in 64 fathoms of .water. In May, 1920, a German salvage company was engaged tentatively to recover the Egypt's treasure, and German divers made experimental dives to determine if they could reach and explore a depth of 64 fathoms. Their experiments proved that they could not descend to that depth, and the plail was abandoned.

In 1930 a Genoese salvage firm, the Societa Anonima Ricuperi, undertook to find and recover the treasure of the Egypt. The location of the wreck, which had been determined seven years earlier, was a problem again, as the vessel either had been moved by currents or the previous calculations were in error. At any rate, the Italian salvage ships, Artiglio and Rostro, searched for many weeks before they finally found the Egypt in 66 fathoms'of water, 25 miles south-west of the island of Ushant and 30 miles off Point Du Raz. Italian divers, working in rigid steel observation shells with strong glass windows, and in communication with the salvage ships by telephones, were lowered to the wreck, going to a greater depth than ever before reached by sea divers. The wreck of the Egypt, as it lay in a jungle of seaweeds, was positively identified by the divers, and work of cutting through to the. vessel's strongroom, on the third deck, 20ft below the top deck, was begun. It was decided to cut away three decks and lift the whole of the strongroom, a chamber 24ft long, 6ft wide, and 9ft high, out bodily with chains attached to powerful derricks.

After some preliminary work it was found necessary to suspend operations, as winter was coming on. The Artiglio was assigned to an apparently easy task of blowing up the Italian munitions ship Florence, near the island of Houafc, off Brittany. On December 7, 1930, the Artiglio set off a charge under the Florence, which in turn exploded 1000 tons of T.N.T., the cargo of the sunken ship. The explosion of the T.N.T. swamped the Artiglio, and the little ship went down. Fourteen lives were lost, and seven of the ArtigKo's crew were injured. The Eostro carried on work a little longer at the wreck of the Egypt, only to have its endeavours halted by tragedy. In sinking an eightton concrete anchor beside the wreck of the Egypt, a workman was carried to his death by one of the anchor chains. On January 17, 1931, it was' announced that salvage work on the Egypt had been abandoned. Fear of Piracy. But on August 20, 1931, another Italian salvage ship left Brest for the scene of the Egypt disaster. The new ship was the Artiglio 11. By November 1 divers had cut through the main deck of the wreck. On December 2, 1931, work 'was suspended for the winter. In the spring of this year, when operations were resumed, much of the ship's structure was torn away by the aid of explosives, and on June 22, sharp-toothed grappling buckets, lowered into the vessel's strongroom, brought up a portion of the lost treasure valued at £10,000. Captain J. B. Garli, in command of the Artiglio 11., landed this part of the treasure at Plymouth, whereupon Jean Davy, a former tug captain, attempted to attach it on the ground that he had found the wreck of the Egypt.

On August 14 the Artiglio 11. landed £150,000 of gold and silver from the Egypt at Plymouth. This part of the treasure consisted of 26 boxes of gold bars, 40,000 sovereigns, and 53 bars of silver. The Artiglio 11. still is at the task of salvaging the treasure, and the 24 members of its crew are armed now, for the presence of a mysterious ship hovering about the scene of the wreck has brought with it an entirely new fear—the fear of piracy.