GREAT TREASURE HUNT ON SHIFTING SEA BED

Taranaki Daily News, 6 October 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

GREAT TREASURE HUNT ON SHIFTING SEA BED

Lutine Salvage' Divers Must Go. About Work Warily

pOLD seeking is usually a difflcult and dangerous task. Off the Isle of Terschelling, Holland, where the treasure ship Lutine lies fathoms deep under water and in sand, it is also a delicate one. The Lutine, an English frigate, sank with the loss of 270 lives in 1799 near Terschelling, off the mouth of the Zyder Zee, when carrying treasure worth £1,250,000 from the Bank of England to save Hamburg bankers in a time of distress. The interval has been marked by strenuous salvage attempts. Up. to 1856 £lOO,OOO in specie had been recovered, but more than a £1,000,000 sterling remains to. be accounted for. , , The delicacy of the task of recovering the treasure was made clear to me when I arrived at the-point of operations, crossing the Channel in perfect sailing weather (says a special correspondent of an exchange). A slight ripple on. the surface did not disturb the worst, “sailors” in a 70-tOn yacht, and yet 18ft down the movement of the water was so’ strong that , any work by divers, or by the: suction pumps on the lighters above the wreck, was impossible. ' ■ The experienced eye sees at from the breakers on the ad* jacent shore whether the waves are working upwards, and so worse below the surface than on it, or the reverse. The workers, ever, are seldom content to take the decision of ' those on shore, and go most days to find out for themselves if it possible to sink their ments and bring up anything that may have broken loose. Many of these loose fragments, coins, nails, ballast “loaves”-that is, pieces of iron weighing anything from 20 to 2001 b-a cannon stiff loaded with two 4m balls and a quantity of shrapnel, a.watch, a compass, the famous bell now c at Lloyd’s, are of interest, and some of them of some slight value to the underwriters. The chief object of the search, x however, is a mass of gold, chiefly in bars, which by now have in all probability become welded into .a solid lump. In any case it is an object (or objects) not much more than a cubic yard in size and weighing something like a ton. When this is laid bare the hoisting of it to the surface will, given

suitable weather, and with modern implements, be a simple matter. Meanwhile a number of things are necessary. The first is the clearing of the wreck of enormous masses of sand, which accumulate with every tide. ’ . One has only to see the many sandbanks in the neighbourhood and to walk along the shores of the islands of Terschelling and Vlieland, be- : tween which the wreck lies, to realise something of this. .. - . There are also many quicksands at • the bottom of the sea, and it is no doubt the strong suction which holds the wrecks fast in their place. Once the ship is reached and kept more or less clear of sand, the difficulty is to get inside it, so as to reach the strong room. Most of the gangways are filled with sand or with broken .pieces of wreck, so that the divers must force their way through by breaking down doors and digging open the decks. With suction pumps like enormous carpet sweepers at work, they have to go about warily. ’As they.break this or that piece loose, they fix it on a clamp, which is hoisted on to one of the attendant lighters. When the bulk of the. gold is found, a different system will probably be applied. This sys- , tem is a modern version of the old “diving bell,” and in this particular case is being employed through the invention of a Dutch engineer, M. Frans Beckers. The new model, outwardly considerably different from its predecessor, but inwardly but slightly altered, is in Terschelling Harbour awaiting the caff to haul up the treasure* How long this is likely to be few people will venture to say. The presented holders of the licence from Lloyd’s to work on the wreck are hopeful that it will be before their concession lapses at the end of this And there are pessimists who are convinced that the gold has long since been washed away or sunk to an unreachable depth in. the sand. After seeing the conditions and the various objects already brought up to the surface, as well as most of the men employed, I should be disposed to support the hopes of the people doing the work. But, as one of them said to me, “Nature robbed men of this treasure, and unless Nature works with us we shall not get it back.