LONG-LOST GOLD

Southland Times, Issue 21194, 22 September 1930, Page 8

LONG-LOST GOLD

EXPEDITION’S QUEST

WRECK OF GENERAL GRANT . RECALLED PARTY LEAVING BLUFF IN NOVEMBER Gold valued at £10,500, and possibly over £1,000,000, lies in 15 fathoms of water in a cave on the Auckland Islands. It has been there since the sailing-ship General Grant was wrecked in 1866, on her ill-fated voyage from Melbourne to England. In November an expedition will sail from Bluff for the Auckland Islands in an attempt to salvage this treasure. Others have tried on several occasions, but sea and tempest have defeated them, and lives have beeit lost. Mr C. R. Ackerley, of Auckland, a young man of 28 years of age, has charge of the arrangements and is organizing the expedition. For the first time an attempt will be made from the land to obtain the hidden gold. A Melbourne- syndicate is financing Mr Ackerley’s expedition. His personal share of the gold, if it is salvaged, will be 15 per cent. This practically amounts to a fortune if success attends this well-organ-ized attempt. Making Plans. To an Auckland Sun representative Mr Ackerley told the story of how his imagination was stirred by thoughts of the buried treasure, and how, as the years passed, he conceived his plans for reclaiming it from the rock-bound and almost inaccessible coast. As a young man he went to sea. One day, on the Fort Victor, he found a copy of an Australian magazine, Life, which is no longer published. It made mention of this lost gold. He talked it over with a companion, and together they schemed of this fortune to be obtained from its watery vault. Various methods were discussed, and at last they thought of plans whereby the salvaging could be done from the land. Four or five attempts had been made previously, all of them from the sea and all unsuccessful. Lives have. been lost in these futile attempts, but the lure of gold in such enormous quantities still has the fascination it possessed in the old days of the gold fever. Sydney Jones, Mr Ackerley’s companion, returned to Australia, and since then the two have lost touch. However, Mr Ackerley continued with his scheme, which has taken years to evolve. Some time ago he approached a Melbourne syndicate which holds the rights for salvage from the New Zealand Government. He detailed his scheme to the Melbourne people and they agreed that it was possible. For some months Mr Ackerley has been quietly making his arrangements. Seven men, including divers, will sail from Bluff in November. The expedition will be complete in every way. A camp will be established at one end of the island and sufficient food supplies will be taken to last for the summer months, the only time when it is possible to work on the Auckland Islands. Wreck of General Grant. Hie General Grant, on which the treasure was carried, was a well-known sailing vessel. In 1886 she sailed from Melbourne with a big cargo of gold, and crew and passengers numbering 60. Only 16 of them were saved when tne vessel was wrecked. When the ship sailed from Melbourne her manifests showed that she carried gold valued at £10,500 and nine tons of spelter. This spelter contains a certain amount of gold, but it requires an elaborate chemical process to separate it. According to Mr Ackerley no spelter was produced in Australia until several years later, and it is thought that this ore was really gold being carried under another name. However if the spelter were really gold it means that in addition to the £lO,500 there is nearly another £1,000,000 worth on the sea bed off the Aucklands. No bank records are available to-day regarding the General Grant’s cargo, as they were all destroyed in a big fire in Melbourne. In the decade prior to the wreck of the General Grant £100,000,000 worth of gold was exported from Victoria alone, and in the next decade incluoing the year in which the vessel was lost, only £5,000,000 worth ot Victorian gold was coined at the Sydney mint. This leads the expedition to think that the spelter mentioned on the ship’s manifest was really gold. The wreck of the General Grant was a ghastly tragedy. When seven days out from Melbourne the vessel ran into a thick blanket of fog and a dead calm. It was impossible to see anything. On the afternoon of the seventh day the look-out man sighted land on the port bow. The captain decided that this must be Auckland Island, but it was Disappointment Island. He changed the ship’s course for Cape Horn. Two hours afterward he was becalmed again and then, through the blanket of fog, loomed the towering cliffs of the main island. During the night the vessel drifted until just after midnight she struck the cliffs bow on. The vessel rebounded and went -out a short distance and then struck the clifls again stern on. The spanker boom was smashed and the man at tho wheel was seriously injured. Then, on the tide, the General Grant slipped into a corner of the cliffs bow first. Here she was imprisoned, with cliffs towering from 500 to 600 ft. above her.

The vessel and her unfortunate passengers were trapped in a cave in the cliffs. As the tide rose, it crushed the broken masts against the top of the cave. The pressure of the masts against the rocky roof and the upward movement of the tide opened the seams of the vessel and just before dawn she went down into the icy depths. Only 16 of the 60 souls on board were saved. Sixteen months later, after untold hardships on the grim and forbidding island, they were saved by a New Zealand Government relief steamer. Fruitless Expeditions. A year after, the survivors were taken from the island an expedition set out from Lyttelton. These men worked from the sea; but the heavy swell and heavy seas defeated them. Some time later another expedition set out with a diver. They found the cave, but while the diver was down searching for gold a huge swell rolled in and upset the boat, drowning every man. The three men who had been left on the expedition’s schooner, some distance away, had to take the vessel back to New Zealand.

Mr Ackerley, for his 28 years, has had an adventurous life. He has fished off the coast of Newfoundland and for some time he was attached to the Western Cable Service doing repairs. It was here that he first thought of using strong cables with which to do the salvage work from the land. These will be used to negotiate the high cliffs above the cave, where the buried treasure lies.

The Auckland Islands are about 200 miles to the south-west of Stewart Island, and in the winter months it is bitterly cold there. Heavy seas and gales make the coastline almost inaccessible, but during the summer the seas are calmer.

Mr Ackerley had just returned J o Auckland from Invercargill, where he had made arrangements for the transport of the party and its gear and provisions.