MYTHICAL MILLIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 12 July 1930, Page 7

MYTHICAL MILLIONS

PAUL KRUGER LEGEND

VAIN QUEST FOR TREASURE.

TOLL OF MURDER AND RUIN. Like that of the notorious Spanish prisoner, the. legend of the missing; Kruger millions still persists. Men continue to risk their lives in a vain quest for the mythical fortune, and afs a few weeks ago (says ’the News of the World; an adventurous party set out from Johannesburg to locate the supposed wealth, which they believe old President Kruger, preparatory to his departure for Europe in 1902, buried in some mysterious spot. )Some day a novelist will piece the whole story together, because it reads like a romance. It has caused an astonishing train of disasters and deaths by violence. At least 15 people lost their lives searching for this treasure. What is the truth?

Colonel Deneys Reitz, a member of General Slnuts’s Cabinet, claims to know the true story. It is true, he says, that when Kruger and his (Colonel Reitz’s) father left Pretoria they took £60,000. or £BO,OOO worth of bar gold. That is all, They left to found a new capital at Maehadodorp, near Delagoa Ray, but the gold was sent to France, where it was sold at Marseilles and used during the Boer War to support refugees, “In course of time,” adds Colonel Reitz, “our commandos got pushed down toward the Portuguese ’border. At one point there were truckloads of stuff unjler an armed guard. The trucks were covered with tarpaulins, and w© did not know what they contained. The story got about that there were millions of bar gold in, them. To add to the credibility of the story, wagons, also under an armed guard, were taken to these trucks, and we saw them loaded with cases’in the fitful light of lanterns, and then disappear . into file night. In fact, these, trucks contained ammunition and shells, and were being distributed by General Botha to various parts of the hush-veld for the guerilla warfare then starting. “This furtive departure aroused the rumours afresh. The story got round that the gold was sent into the ibushveld. Another version was that it was stolen or disappeared. A little schooner left Delagoa Bay about the time the President was there. She was loaded with concrete, and the story was that the gold was enbedded in the concrete. She sank in St. Lucia. Bay, and is there to this day.

SEARCH FOR SUPPOSED TREASURE.

Expeditions were sent from Durban and elsewhere to salve the missing millions. The first tradegy came when 13 Norwegians were drowned in a storm while being taken to the wreck. Some time after the Boer War ended in 1902 a man named Swart persuaded two others to go into the bush-veld where, he alleged, tlje missing gold was buried. He murdered one of his companions, and later paid the penalty of his crime on the gallows. Again, another adventurer turned up at a lonely police powt with a story of the hiding place of the gold. He took the police away with him. All of them went down with malaria. The sergeant in charge of the post was cashiered, while the plausible adventurer finished up with 'lO months

in gaol. “I askod General Botha how ho accounted for the delusion that the gold was buried'• somewhere,” says Colonel Reitz, “and he said that the delusion was due to the sending of the ammunition into the wilds. At that time there was ap Irishman, Jack Hindon, who dynamited a train carrying £60,000. He got away with the cash, but when he called a halt his two companions had disappeared with the gold. The two went on toward Ilydenburg, Ibut en route o m murdered the other and disappeared from that day.

TWO BOXES FULL OF' GOLD. “A prominent police officer in Pretoria told me another version. He had been badly wounded, and could not go on commando before the entry of the British. He was ordered by Botha to bring some ammunition. While doing so another official arrived with two boxes, which lie wanted buried. While two artillery men were lifting one of the boxes it fell, disclosing that it was full of.bar gold. That gold was buried near the cemetery, but when the official returned to get his gold, he found a grassgrown cavity.. - “Years afterwards, when the foundation of the Union Buildings were being excavated, two boxes of gold were unearthed. The finders claimed and got half the value of the treasure trove. The extraordinary thing was that the finders Avere the identical artillery men avlio buried it.

“That is the true story of Kruger’s missing millions. It had a certain substratum of truth, and it is with a certain amount of regret that I have dispelled this picturesque story.”