WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 91, 14 October 1922, Page 12

WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR

ATTEMPT TO RECOVER

TREASURE.

It was on 13th June, 1872, that the Grosvenor, a fine, well-armed ship belonging to the East India Company, leftCeylon with 150 passengers and crew on beard, 'and with a store of gold and jewels among her cargo, says the "Daily Mail." Six months later, on 4th" December, five men dragged themselves into Sweilendam, in Cape Colony, after suffering by sea and by land hardships and perils which are almost beyond, the pov,-er of the. imagination to picture. A few weeks later eleven other men who had been in the vesse! were found.

The , remaining 134 were never seen again, and their end remains one of the grim tragedies which mark the story of man's gradual conquest of the nieans of journeying to. and fro .upon the earth. . It was early in the morning of . 4th August that the Grosvenor drove ashore. A heavy sea was running, and very swiftly the strong ship, teak-built though she was, began to break up. A, raft was hurriedly constructed, but was dashed to pieces directly it was launched. A line was carried ashore, by which some of those on board contrived to reach, the land. Later a portion of the. ship in which most of the passengers were huddled was washed to the shore, but in the meantime fourteen had been drowned.

Joy at escape from the perils of the sea turned very quickly to dismay at realisation of the perils of the land. There they were, all those people, with women among them, in the midst of a wild country, with no arms worth considering, with tribes of savages all about them, with little food and no clothes but the sodden garments they wore, hundreds of miles from any hope of safe-

ty. There began a long, terrible journey toward? the Cape Settlement. _ What that jo*jrney must have been is very, very dimly revealed in the statement of the survivors, which is kept in the Government archives at Capetown. Natives were encountered who robbed the women of all-.'their, trinkets, and kept a hostile watch along every weary mile of the route. Frequent great rivers compelled the building of a succession' of rafts. And for food : "We came across a dead whale [the journey in the beginning was made along the coas|] which we were very glad of, as our rations were beginning to give out. Next day we found a dead seal, which we supped on." . . Day by day the company grew smaller. ' Some died -along the way; others had to-bereft behind as they were too weak to ''travel. any more. 'What the fats of those women and Tmen, abandoned in that desolate and hostile land, must have been one scarcely dare to picture/One hundred and sixteen days after the wreck, after having tramped fully 800 miles, the first na.rtv of survivors reached a farm on the Zwartkops River, and came at'long last.to safety. But the lone milre of their pilgrimage hold still the secret of the graves of their 'companions. '" ' •■•■'•■■ An attempt, is now being made, by tunnelljn.se under the.sea, to recover the gold and precious stones, valued at two million sterling, from the Grosvehor, ■wrecked almost a century and a- half aeo. The treasure ship lies deen beneath drift-sand, near what has long been known as Port Grosvenor.