THE LURE OF GOLD

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4606, 6 October 1934, Page 5

THE LURE OF GOLD

♦ THE "GENERAL GRANT" STORY. Word has been received in Sydney (writes the special correspondent of the Melbouren Age) that an English company has been formed to recover gold hidden by pirates, one of the islands to be visited being 300 miles from Panama. But why not try and recover gold that is known to have gone to the bottom of the sea, instead of the stuff that only exists in fairy stories of the South Seas? Several ships sailed from Hobson's Bay with pirates aboard. What about trying to recover the gold from the ancient wreck of the General Grant, which was driven into a cave on the coast of New Zealand with £120,000 in gold ingots, which the pirates who had boarded the vessel planned to rob? The captain and the supercargo, getting an inkling of what was going on, distributed the gold in small lots around the vessel, and it went down in 12 fathoms of water, in small piles which would need to be collected. There have been attempts to get it. But the equipment how available is far different from what it was in those days of sailing ships. Science has come to the aid of those who seek treasure trove, and who can "smell" out pirates' hoards no matter where they may be hidden. Arawata Bill and the Gold. The story of. an old prospector's lifelong search for a cache of gold said to be worth £30,000 is told in the magazine "Touring." The gold, packed in a sea boot, was hidden somewhere in a river's mouth on the West Coast of the South Island by a party from Australia about sixty years ago. The locality is believed to be either the Arawata or the Cascade Rivers, to the north of Milford Sound, and William O'Leary, better known as Arawata Bill, is still searching for it and confident that he will eventually succeed. The secret of the cache was revealed to an old prospector by a man who had wandered, starving and exhausted, into a South Island township, and who had been hurried to hospital, where a vain effort was made to nurse him back to health. His story was that, alo'ng with another man, he had been landed from a ship which had sailed from Australia to "plant" the stolen gold. This they did, but thinking to outwit the rest of the ship's company, they hid in the bush. Finally the ship sailed, and they were abandoned in wild, inhospitable country, where the second man died. No definite information as to the whereabouts of the gold was left, but Arawata Bill is convinced it is still somewhere near the mouth of the Arawata River. He once discovered a fragment of a letter written in 187—, the last figure too indistinct to decipher, and evidently he still hopes to find the treasure. Thin, wiry, active, with the stump of a grey beard projecting defiantly from his chin, he is known over a wide area of Southland. Last year a party of trampers who were lost in the bush found refuge in his slab shed, where they managed to exist until rescued by aeroplane.