DIVING UNDER SEA FOR BARS OF GOLD

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 166, 31 July 1937, Page 15

DIVING UNDER SEA FOR BARS OF GOLD

SALVAGE ADVENTURES / 1 32 Feet Below Surface

07HEN the armed liner Laurentic was sunk by a German mine off the north of Ireland in January, 1917, she was carrying over three thousand gold bars to pay for munitions manufactured in America. The Treasury wanted gold, and asked the Admiralty to salve it. Captain G. O. C. Damant was put in charge of the operatious and tells the following story of the operatious. If you steered west for about ten miles from Malin Head, the northernmost point of Ireland, and then moored your ship with certain landmarks m line you would be over the spot where . >ie liiLeeii cli>i...aud ton ann . Laurentic foundered after striking a German mine, Strain your imaginatiori a little and fancy yourself as a diver sliding down to see what remains oi' ■her on the ocean bed; what would strike you most perhaps would be how dark, how eold and how silent it is down there. The sea bed is hard, and scattered around are great • rounded boulders. They are rounded because when heavy seas are running at the surface one hundred and thifty feet above, these rocks are rolled and flung about like marbles. Close at hand looms a black mass and, clambering up, you will find yourself on a jumbled mass of steel frames and platings some two hundred yards long by fifty wide, that was the ship, but the riveted joints havo been torn adrift, the higher parts have I'olded down and i'latteiled on the lower and you cannot lell which end is which or whether the wreek is upside down, on her side, or what. Here and there the plating arches over to form caverns with a shingle floor, you cannot tell whether that floor is true sea bed or merely shingle from outside washed into a deep poeket of the bilge. It is very dark and rather tricky in those places, so keep on the crest of the serap heap as you scramble along; there is more daylight there and less chanee of getting yonr air pipe hoked up in something. With luek you inay suddeuly eome ou a sort of crater in the wreclcage where all the ironwork has been blasted riglit away down to the sea bed. It is ratber like a small eircus with the grey sandy floor of the ring surrounded by piled % tiors of jagged plating slopiug back au l upvvards like seats. The great pro-

peller shafts, broken into many pieces, bridge the space, and lots of broken chain slings, wire hawsers, bent crowbars and so on are lying about; foj this was where the gold came from, five million pounds worth of it, and somowhere around, probabfy buried ten feet deep in shingle, a few bars of gold still remain. That's how things are to-dcly. We found the wreck lying over on her port bilge in twenty-two fathoms, intact except for a pair of big fractures through her side. Within a couple of days diver Miller had forced his way through a cross passage to the strong room and broken the door off its hinges; by the dim light of his torch he could make out the bullion boxes flung into a heap in the lower angle of the space. Eough little boxes of unplaned wood, but of such enormous weight that there could be no doubt about their being the real thing. Four were hoisted to the surface in quick time, but the sea was rising so quiekiy that we were forced to slip our auchors and run for shelter without waiting for more. It blew a whole gale for ten days and when we were able to f ace the weather and get divers down again it was a bitter disappointment to find that the wreck had collapsed quite flat as though a giant steamroller had passcd over her. There was now no more room between hcr decks than there is under a double bed, and tbe divers had to wriggle and squeeze through the chinks in piteh darkness because the water inside was so laden with sediment that no eleetric light could pierce it. By blasting and tuunelling, a passage was driven to fche old strong room, but it was empty and the floor gaped in large rents through which the gold must have fallen and slid away to lower levels, now iiiaccessible. Nothing temained but to eut all

that part o.f the wreck into pieces with explosives and hoist it to the surface layer by layer, so that the gold, wherever it might be hidden, would eventually be exposed to view. After two months' work and the hoisting of many hundred tons of wreekage, the first gold bars turned up; they were still bright but bent and scored by the grinding and crushing which they had sustained between the frames and plates of the ship as she broke "up during the great gale. The boxes in which the bullion had been packed (like all other woodwork in the wreck) had by now been ground into dust ani splinters. I remember oue place down in the wreck where the edges of four or five deeks, which had settled down on top of one another, showed up like tho leaves of a book, the back or hinge of which was buried - under a pile oi debris. We .were dealing with this by seeuring a wire hawser to tho free edgo of the uppermost plate, heaving it up as though . partly opening the baok and then seudiug a diver to crawl in undCrneath with an explosive charge which he thrust as far back towards the hinge as it would go. He would then come np and after exploding the charge and breaking the hinge the plate could be torn out by further heaving on the wire rope. One afternoon a plate had been partly lifted m thh way and diver Blaehfird had wrigg'eil iu b !ow it with +h.e eha-.go in his arms when, with a sudden craclc, the "wire flew into the air and then fell slack along the deck, showing that something had paTted down below and the plate fallen like a break-baek trap with out man underneath. It makes me glow now to think of the splendid crew 1 had, how everyone instantly knew what to do and how quiekiy they did t without onc ruised voice or cluiusy mu-

take. After a few long seconds the welcome voice of Blachford came on the telephone asking for air, more air and still more. He felt that inflation of his dress would help to suppoxt the crushing weight on his back. To supply more air was only a matter of opening a valve, but ai glance at the pressurc gauge showed that if more were given there would be grave risk of bursting the dress, and so drowning him. In the meantime riggers were whipping a new coil of two-and-a-half inch wire out of the hold, someone was unreeving the old broken wire, two figures were swarming up the derrick to rdeve the new one, another diver's helmet , was being screwed on, he was over the side, someone was handing him a new set of plate slings already sbackled to the new wire and he was away, sliding down Blachford 's air pipe to the rescue. . Mr Platts himself took the winch awaiting the word from Tom Clear, the rescue diver. Presently it came up the telephone: 'All fast the wire. Heave up very steady.' Gently the strain was taken, gently the wire was surged to meet the rolling of our ship, no mistake was made, .and within nine minutes of the . plate falling Blachford was released, so little the worse that he was diving next day. By the timo that all the steelwork had been lifted, about more than half the gold had been salved. The rest had sunk deep in the sea bed and had to be dug for with the aid of a powerful jet of water punxped down from the aalvage ship Eacer which had taken the place of the old Voluhteer. With one hand the divers wonld thrust the bronze uozzle of the hose deeply into the shingle while the other hand f ollowed it up, exploring this way and that among the buried pebbles and sharp debris for the smooth edge or corner of a gold bar.

These men were working for their country, not for their own profit or anyone else's profit, and the best reWiiid of all of them, divers, riggers, firemen and officers, must be to look back on a job well 'one and to tell tbeir children how they recovered practically all that gold at trifling cost, and, best of all, how, through care and honest work, it was doue without loss of life or injury to any of their shipmates, I