Fortune Lies In Mud Off New York City

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29001, 16 September 1959, Page 20

Fortune Lies In Mud Off New York City

[From a Reuter Correspondent]

NEW YORK. As New York officials, plagued by fiscal troubles, discuss new and heavier taxes to meet their mounting budget, about £1,700,000 in English gold is left lying around in the geographical heart of the city, apparently anyone’s for the taking. The gold, in 14 chests of stout English oak, is said to lie under about 50 feet of water and several feet of mud at the bottom of a turbulent waterway known as Heli Gate.

Hell Gate, where the swirling currents of the Harlem, Bronx and East' rivers meet to form a watery death trap for the unwary, is no misnomer. Before this waterway was charted, about one in 25 of the ships which tried to navigate its treacherous rocks and shoals ended up on the bottom. One such ship was H.M.S. Hussar, an English frigate said to be carrying the gold to pay English troops during the American Revolution. The Hussar struck Pot Rock in 1789 and went down with her crew, about 70 American prisoners, and the gold. At first the task of recovering the bullion looked simple. The tall masts of the ill-fated ship could be seen jutting out of the water and the wealth aboard appeared to be within easy reach. There were several unsuccessful attempts to raise the gold in the next half century, the best being that of a Captain Samuel Davis who, in 1823, designed a huge pair of tongs to lift the vessel from its watery grave. Davis used hoses to pump air into the hulk to lighten the load but one of the chains broke, and it fell back on to the muddy bottom. He abandoned the attempt.

Under the Mud There was continued talk of bringing the gold up, but 57 years passed before the next attempt was made. Meanwhile, currents sucked away the loose mud beneath the hulk, its mast rotted and disappeared and the hulk sank lower and lower until it was engulfed beneath four feet of mud. In 1880, a bearded smuggler who hawked contraband while praying loudly for the salvation of all, contracted with the United States Government to salvage the wreck. The smuggler, Captain Brick Thomas, sold stock in a corporation which he called “Treasure Trove, Incorporated," then set about what he assured everyone was the "work of the Lord,” with promises to give any proceeds to charity. He went out in an old boat, on ' which he had rigged a sign saying, ‘‘Keep away, Government business,” and happily pumped away at the mud until a city judge became suspicious of his intentions. In the resulting hue and cry, the Government cancelled the contract. A number of attempts to .salvage the treasure since have ended in failure, and sometimes bankruptcy, for those who tried to conquer the dangerous currents which made divers look like moths in a windtunnel.

The publicity given to Thomas’s attempt fired the imagination of a small boy who was already captivated by Jules Verne’s story, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.” That boy, Simon Lake, was to become known many years later as the “father of the submarine,” and it was with one of his early undersea craft that he spent three years, and a fortune, seeking the lost treasure of the Hussar. Bid by Submarine Lake, whose ancestors came from Wales, grew into a stocky, red-headed man obsessed with the idea of making Verne’s fantastic dream come true. He found faults in Verne’s fictional submarine, the Nautilus, and set to work to remove them. In 1894, Lake built his first submarine, an affair made of pinewood, designed to roll along the bed of the ocean, propelled by a hand-cranked propeller. Lake built many undersea craft after that, and one of the proudest moments of his life came when one such craft successfully battled against a storm and he received a

telegram of congratulations from the great French writer himself. In December, 1932, Lake demonstrated before military officials, scientists and city officials, the world’s first purely-commercial submarine—the Explorer. The craft was made to crawl along the seabed on giant cog wheels. A large rake was fitted at the bow of the vessel to scoop up clams and oysters or shear off sponges. Lake declared that it would revolutionise the pearlfishing and sponge industries and uncover vast wealth on the ocean bed. The Explorer depended for its air supply on a mother vessel on the surface, which pumped air through a tube. In this way, pressure greater than that of the water was built up in the submarine, enabling its occupants to work through open hatches while submerged in the same way as is done in diving bells. Never content with small stakes, Lake made fortunes and lost them. It is said that every modern submarine incorporates ideas based on his patents. The Germans used some of those ideas before he could protect them legally, and the Russians once asked him to build them a submarine fleet. But he rejected the offer, saying that he could not stand" the loose ways of the Russian aristocracy. It was Lake who set about working out the details of a submarine to crawl under the ice to the North Pole, a proposal made by Sir Hubert Wilkins, the British Arctic explorer. A year after the demonstration of the Explorer, Lake announced, in 1933, his intention of using the craft to search for the lost Hussar. But unable to raise backers during those depression years he had to mortgage his farm and his possessions to pay for the operation.

Suddenly, one day in 1936, on his seventieth birthday, he announced that he had found the Hussar. Triumphantly, he showed pieces of rotting teakwood from the English frigate’s hull. Lake told reporters that once he had succeeded in pumping off 12 feet of mud, the Hussar’s gold would be his.

But if he had conquered Hell Gate’s guardian currents, he had not overcome his financial problems. During those years, the newspapers had been giving more publicity to his legal fights with creditors than to his undersea adventures. As Lake’s fortune dwindled, his farm and his beloved submarine were seized to pay his debts and he had to sell by auction almost everything he owned in order to keep the family home. With 5,000,000 dollars in gold almost within his grasp, Lake was bankrupt.