CHAPTER III
Whatever doubts there be about the treasure of Tobermory, there can be none about the treasure of the Lutine, for official records prove that when she came to grief she must have carried bullion worth over £1,000,000.
H.M.S. Lutine was a frigate of thirty-two guns, one of those wooden walls of Old England of which the poet sings. Not always had she sailed under the British flag. Time was when the tricolour of France broke at her masthead and French sailors crowded her decks, but Admiral Duncan captured her and brought her home as a prize, and thereafter it was the white ensign of England that flew at her peak and a captain of the British Navy who commanded her.
In the early days of October, 1799, at which time we were warring with Holland, H.M.S. Lutine was lying at Yarmouth, while the British troops garrisoned on the island of Texel off the Dutch coast were waiting anxiously for their pay. The Lutine was commissioned to carry the £140,000 due to the troops, and, hearing that she was departing for the Continent, many merchants sought permission to ship gold and silver by her for the relief of the merchants of Hamburg, who were financially embarrassed by the wars and the ensuing depression of the money market. The permission was readily granted, and 1000 bars of gold and 500 bars of silver were taken to Yarmouth and safely shipped aboard. In the ordinary course of business, the owners of the bullion went to Lloyd’s and effected an insurance for the sum of £900,000.
On October of the year stated, the Lutine weighed anchor and sailed out of Yarmouth Roads on her voyage to Hamburg. As she bowled across the North Sea, the wind freshened and culminated that night in a terrific gale which the Lutine, gallant ship as she was, could not weather. The treacherous shoals off the Dutch coast reached out for her, and the mighty seas battered the life out of her and engulfed her. Of all aboard, but one human soul survived to tell of the wreck before he, too, succumbed from exhaustion.
The loss of the Lutine was a tremendous blow to Lloyd’s. It meant that the underwriters had to find the sum of £900,000 with which to meet the claims of the insurers. Somehow they found the money and met all claims, thus adding fresh lustre to the name of Lloyd’s and helping to raise it to the position it occupies to-day as the greatest and most powerful marine insurance association in the whole world. In return for their £900,000 the underwriters became possessed of the treasure—or rather the right to recover it! At that time, immediately after the calamity, when salvage operations naturally stood the best chance of success, the underwriters were prevented from doing anything at all owing to our war with Holland, and later on the Dutch Government made its position clear about the matter by claiming the wreck and all that was in it.
As the vessel lay, it was just possible to get to her when the sea was calm and the tides were at their lowest. It can be imagined that the Dutch fishermen made the most of their opportunities. Their government encouraged them by offering them one-third of everything they recovered, so the fishers found it profitable to leave their nets and spend their time fishing in the Lutine. Although the bulk of the treasure was beyond their reach, they managed during the next couple of years to lay their hands on a good deal of it. The Dutch Government received from the wreck treasure to the value of £56,000, and of this over £18,000 was paid to the salvors, while the rest was minted into Dutch money.
The amount of treasure which passed into the hands of the Netherlands Government during this period was not necessarily all the treasure that was taken out of the Lutine. It is possible, and indeed probable, that much of the treasure recovered was concealed by the fishermen salvors and used secretly to swell their own private hoards; but, even assuming that twice as much treasure was salved as was actually declared, there would still be a vast treasure worth over £1,000,000 remaining in the wreck.
A series of fierce storms wrought havoc with the wreck and placed her quite beyond the reach of the fishermen, who were at last forced to abandon their profitable quest. For years the wreck was the plaything of the storms, and not until Napoleon was safely imprisoned on St. Helena did any one give a thought to the treasure that lay amid the shifting sandbanks off the island of Vlieland. Then a Dutchman, going to his government, obtained a concession to salve the bullion on condition that half of what he recovered went to the government. For two or three years he fought the sea and sand to get at the treasure. No sight of gold or silver gladdened his eyes. Season after season, for eight years in all, he did his utmost to recover the fortune from the grasp of the sea, but without success. At last, weary of the incessant combat, he gave up the struggle and left the treasure to mock any other adventurer who might happen along.
The underwriters at Lloyd’s, however, were not content to see the treasure which had cost them such a huge sum of money pass into the hands of a foreign nation, and at their request the British Government began to treat with that of Holland to induce them to relinquish their title in the wreck. The ways of diplomacy are often long and tedious, and this case was no exception. Many years elapsed before an agreement was arrived at and the Dutch gave up their claims and allowed the legal title in the treasure to pass to Lloyd’s, its rightful owners.
For well over half a century the Lutine bore the brunt of the gales which afflict the Dutch coast, spending their strength on the belt of islands and the shifting sandbanks at the entrance to the Zuyder Zee. She was utterly lost amid the sands. Then came a terrific gale that blew for days, and the heaving waters washed the sand away from the wreck and made it possible to get at the treasure. For a period of five years, from 1857 to 1861, salvage men toiled away, and the result of their work was the recovery of bullion to the value of just over £40,000.
Once the salvors heaved the bell of the Lutine clear of the sea. It was brought to London and hung in the main hall at Lloyd’s in the Royal Exchange. Whenever there is any important announcement to make to the underwriters about a ship being wrecked or an overdue boat reaching port, the bell of the Lutine is sounded to call the attention of all concerned. Another time the salvors managed to bring up the rudder of the Lutine, and this was made into a chair and placed in the committee room at Lloyd’s.
For another quarter of a century the sand and sea were left in undisputed possession of the wreck, then a new expedition set out to wrest the treasure from the encompassing sands. Right valiantly the salvors fought for that fortune, but luck was against them. Now and again they managed to bring up some of the coins that were lost in the Lutine, but the amount of treasure they recovered totalled considerably less than £1000 in all. So they discontinued further attempts and returned to England.
Since then more than one expedition has gone out to try to win the remaining treasure from the wreck of the Lutine. In the year 1908 the natives of Brightlingsea were astonished by the sight of a weird object that was anchored off the mouth of the river Colne. So strange a thing they had never seen before, and they puzzled their brains for an explanation of it. The curious object which caused so much amazement was a wonderful device for recovering the treasure of the Lutine. It was a great steel tube with a little iron ladder running down the inside of it. At one end were gigantic hooks for hooking it to the side of a salvage vessel, and at the other end was a steel chamber with a series of watertight compartments and air locks.
This marvellous contrivance, which took years to construct, was designed to be sunk in an upright position down to the wreck of the Lutine. It was equipped with water ballast tanks to sink it into place, and the steel chamber was furnished with cutting edges, so that the weight would enable it gradually to cut down through the sand until it reached the wreck.
Divers were to descend the iron ladder in the inside of the tube until they reached the submerged steel chamber. Then they were to enter the air locks where the water was kept back by compressed air, and walk out into the wreck. The divers would then communicate by telephone with the engineers in the steel chamber and direct the powerful pumps that were to suck away the sand until the treasure was reached. Once the treasure was found, the divers were merely to remove it to the steel chamber, whence it could be transferred to the salvage steamer above at their leisure. Excellent as the invention seemed, it did not recover the treasure of the Lutine.
Three years later, in 1911, another expedition more powerfully equipped than any of its predecessors resumed the search which had been going on for over a century. Notwithstanding the fact that the position of the Lutine was fairly well known, the obliteration of a landmark by a violent gale made it very difficult for the salvage men to find the wreck. The divers went down and searched the seabed vainly for a single sign of the old frigate. Not a spar was to be seen, not a rib of the hulk.
Captain Gardiner, who was in charge of the treasure-seekers, was a man of resource. He realized full well what had happened. The sand of the treacherous banks had completely buried the Lutine, and before he could make the slightest attempt to salve the treasure he would have to locate her and dig her out of her grave.
The problem of finding a wreck that lay buried deep in the silt would prove too much for any ordinary man, but Captain Gardiner was equal to the occasion. Among his equipment were some of the most powerful sand-pumps in existence, pumps capable of removing nearly a thousand tons of sand an hour. Dropping the end of one of these pumps to the seabed, he began sucking up the sand at a prodigious rate, cutting a deep channel right across the area in which the wreck lay. Slowly the pumps of the salvage ship devoured the sand and at last the salvors found the wreck buried 36 feet deep under a bank. The finding of the wreck was in itself a wonderful feat.
If only the other difficulties could have been overcome as easily, the treasure by now would have been won. But all the time the divers had to contend with the most difficult set of currents in the world. A strong tide, always running, plays incredible pranks with the bottom hereabouts. The submerged sandbanks are almost like cliffs some thirty feet high, and the tide moulds them and remoulds them almost day by day. A vessel at dawn may anchor in a deep channel, and by night the tides in one of their playful moods may have poured tons and tons of sand into the channel, completely filling it and building up a sandbank on the very spot where the channel existed only a few hours previously.
It will be realized how difficult this made salvage operations. The strong currents tended to wash the sand back directly it was removed, and the salvors were faced with what seemed like an endless struggle with the sea. They did not shirk the struggle; they went on dredging whenever the weather allowed, and they fought the tides most brilliantly by dumping the sand in such a position that it deflected the current right across the wreck. Thus there was a continual flow of water over the wreck to keep the site fairly clear and prevent the sand settling.
Meanwhile, they literally sifted the bed of the sea for traces of the elusive treasure. Every ton of sand sucked up by the pumps was poured through a gigantic sieve erected over the side of the salvage steamer. The sieve was like a giant birdcage, with a small mesh, and the men who watched the sand pouring through were more than once gladdened by the sight of a coin from the Lutine.
They were weeks battling with the tides before the sand was cleared from inside the vessel and around the hull, but the day came at last when the divers went down to investigate the interior for the long-lost treasure. Every one aboard was keyed up to concert pitch. It seemed certain that the Lutine’s treasure was to be lifted at last.
But the divers found the place in a sorry state. Much of the wooden hull had, of course, been preserved by the sand, but the magazine, in which the treasure lay, had collapsed, and there was practically a solid mass of iron five or six feet deep lying on top of the bars of gold and silver. When the magazine collapsed, hundreds of cannon balls had poured all over the place and these had been rusted together by the action of the water, locking up the treasure as securely as though it had been in a steel safe.
The only hope of the salvors lay in blasting this mass of rusted cannon balls to pieces and removing them bit by bit. In no other manner could the treasure be reached. Accordingly they set about their task, and little by little blew away the first layer. It was slow, tedious work, and all the time the salvors were harassed by the thought that the autumn gales might spring up and put an end to their operations, undoing in a single night work which had taken them months to accomplish.
Day by day they continued steadily with the blasting, and they had just succeeded in blowing away the second layer of rusted cannon balls when the dreaded gales came on. Further work was impossible, and sorrowfully the salvors left that exposed spot and went to Amsterdam to lay up for the winter.
A little more time, and they might have succeeded in their quest. There is evidence that they were somewhere near the gold, for one of the pieces of rust brought up bore the impression of a gold ingot, and when this rust was treated with acid it yielded five grains of the precious metal to prove that the gold was quite close.
Ten divers and a powerful plant had been seeking the Lutine’s treasure for nine months. A small fortune had been spent on the operations. The workers removed a veritable mountain from the seabed, and they were rewarded with five grains of gold. They had shifted a million tons of sand to find five grains of gold! In this way does Fate taunt the deep-sea treasure-hunter.
The following winter the wreck was buried under 5 feet of sand by the tides, and by now she is lost once more, buried perhaps deeper than ever. The exposed position and the strong tides have kept the Lutine’s treasure safe for over a century. But whether they will keep it safe for ever, no one can say.
It is a dozen years since I fingered one of the silver coins salved from the Lutine, and wondered whether the treasure was to be recovered at last. Still the Lutine is not forgotten, and only a few months ago I received from Lloyd’s a letter from an inquirer in Vancouver who desired full details of the wreck, with a view to carrying on further salvage operations. I sent him the particulars he required, but so far I have not heard of operations being started.
For over a century wind and wave have beaten the men who sought to recover the wealth of gold and silver that went down with the Lutine on that wild October night. The fortune still lures men on to win it, and, in spite of the many disappointments, a lucky turn of the wind and tide, combined with improved salvage appliances, may yet make some future treasure-hunter a millionaire.