GOLD RECOVERED.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 175, 25 June 1932, Page 7

GOLD RECOVERED.

BULLION IN SUNKEN LINER.. PARIS, June 24. The salvage ship Artigho has raised several tons of the sunken P. and O. liner Egypt’s treasure. Her storage room is filled. The ship is going to England to deliver the bullion to the underwriters. Nearly £500,000 worth of gold lias already been recovered.

One of the greatest steps forward in thel fecienee of deep-sea salvaging has been taken by the expedition which has worked to secure the Egypt’s treasure. To-day’s message marks definite success to a plan whereby explosives and acetylene torches were employed to cut through four steel decks and raise 50 tons of gold and silver from a depth of over 400 ft, in a part of the Atlantic where the current is particularly strong. The 8000-ton P. and 0. liner Egypt, when rammed amidships by a small French icebreaker, the Seine, in a fog 25 miles off the island of Ushant, in May, 1922, sank in 20 minutes, with the loss of nearly 100 lives. She was carrying gold worth £839,000, and silver worth £250,000, ns payment for a loan issued from the British Government to the Egyptian Treasury.

The Italian attempt to raise the treasure met with much inclement weather, but the ealvagors worked throughout the summer, and before the winter storms forced the temporary abandonment early in 1931, they had actually removed the roof of the bullion room. During the summer the Artiglio, together with 14 of her men, including some of the finest diving experts in the world, were lost in an explosion of another sunken liner off Quiberon. The Artiglio 11. was fitted out, and it is this (vessel which has succeeded in the task.