In search of the General Grant’s gold.
There was no raging storm when a lookout on the General Grant sighted Disappointment Island. The evening of Sunday, May 13, 1866 was almost completely still. There was a dense fog.
At 10.30pm, Captain William Loughlin ordered all hands to “square the yard” — set the sails so they are perpendicular to the keel — to keep the ship off land. But within an hour, the wind had fallen away to a dead calm. Without any other form of propulsion, the 1005-ton three-masted barque was at the mercy of the sea. Pushed by a strong current, she drifted, helpless, into a large cove. To the superstitious sailors, it might have felt like they were about to be swallowed by some mythical sea monster. The passengers who believed in God may have begun to pray.
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Located more than 465 kilometres south of Bluff, the land masses that make up the Auckland Islands archipelago are the eroded remains of ancient volcanoes; Disappointment Island is the plug of the northern peak, Carnley Harbour is the remains of the southern one. The largest of the islands, at 40 kilometres long by 12 kilometres wide, is Auckland Island itself.
It’s a place where humans don’t feel welcome. The isolation is crushing, and it takes time to adjust to it. Some never do. The incessant wind flattens vegetation. In places, the flat-topped hills drop 450 metres to the sea. Even on the rare “calm” days, long powerful swells rumble in from the Southern Ocean with the full force of the Pacific behind them. They crash into the cliffs and slowly carve away, widening caves and overhangs. In a storm, local sea conditions are terrifying. In 2017, a 19.4-metre wave was recorded by a buoy operated by MetOcean Solutions off Campbell Island, 270 kilometres southeast of the Auckland Islands. For context, on the Beaufort wind scale, the highest reading of 12, or hurricane force, suggests a probable wave height of 14-plus metres. “Conditions on land: Devastation”.
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Built in Maine two years before, the General Grant had set sail from Melbourne, bound for London via the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn route. As well as passengers and crew, there was a cargo of wool, skins and 2576 ounces (73 kilograms) of gold. On top of that, many of the passengers were miners returning home with their own small fortunes, hard won through brutally hard work in Victoria’s goldfields. Some were so worried about their gold being stolen or lost, they wore it like divers’ weight belts around their waists.
Although the ship and those on board were in immediate peril, Captain Loughlin decided not to launch the lifeboats that night due to the total darkness and the lack of an obvious landing place. During the night, the rising tide and increasing swell caused the main mast to hit the cove roof repeatedly, until it forced a hole through the hull. Rockfall dislodged by the mast crashed into the deck. One piece of rock went through the General Grant’s forecastle deck, and another through the starboard deck house. The passengers and crew took shelter in Loughlin’s cabin, the only place safe from the missiles.
When the boats were finally launched the next day, there was chaos. Crewman Joseph Jewell witnessed the ship’s final moments from the safety of a longboat. “The scene at this moment was one of such misery as few men ever see, and fewer still survive to tell of…. Women clinging to their children, and crazy men to their gold, were seen washing to and fro as the water invaded the upper deck of the General Grant. One poor wretch watched as his wife and two children swept by him, he made no effort to save them. The last man who got aboard the long boat nearly lost his life trying to persuade the mother to be saved without her children.”
Meanwhile, first officer Bart Brown had been able to negotiate the tricky entrance to the cove and pick up several passengers. As he was pulling back to the ship, he was shocked to see it sinking with his wife still aboard. First officer Brown described the scene: “the longboat … paddled laboriously from the General Grant, water slopping over the gunwales, seriously overloaded, with every uncoordinated movement of its human cargo diminishing any chance of survival”. Seaman Billy Sanguily found his boat caught in a cross-current or swirl. It eventually capsized. “The sea was suddenly full of struggling bodies – and the cove with the echo of desperate people crying for assistance.”
Of the 83 on board, only 15 survived: nine crew and six passengers. The captain was last seen high in the mizzen crosstrees waving a white handkerchief.
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I first heard Bill Day talk about the General Grant a few years ago at a Wānaka Search and Rescue annual general meeting. He gave an audio-visual presentation telling how, over a period of 35 years, he had spent millions of dollars searching for treasure. At that time, more than 30 expeditions had been launched the General Grant, some a shambles, some well-organised. None had succeeded.
As he spoke, Bill took us a journey to another world. It was January 1986, and he was back on board an inflatable boat after another fruitless dive. He recently retold the story to Stuff journalist Mike White, remembering how, as he sat watching a spectacular waterfall tumble from the edge of an archway, he muttered “isn’t it a pity wrecks don’t go down in places like this” to his boatman. Then fellow diver Willie Bullock surfaced with a lead weight in his hand, the kind sailing ships used to measure the water’s depth. “There’s a bit of shit down there,” Willie said. Bill dove back in.
Sitting in the audience, I could see him in my mind’s eye sliding downwards, his fins moving lazily, trying to control his excitement, and not to breathe too hard. He was thinking the mystery of the General Grant was solved. The ghosts of the drowned crew and passengers would be exorcised, as would the frustrations and disappointments of searches past.
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The survivors made it ashore at Port Ross, on the northern coast of Auckland Island. James Teer, a burly Irish goldminer, emerged as their natural leader. A talented mechanic, James was able to find a use for any object. Under his direction, the group built themselves shelter and learned to survive on natural resources and the remains of earlier settlements on the then-uninhabited island. The grew potatoes and slaughtered pigs, seals and goats. James fashioned needles from albatross bone and thread from flax, and devised a way to soften sealskin. With these materials, he and Mary Ann Jewell, the only female survivor, made shoes and clothing.
The survivors spent 18 months as castaways before they were rescued by a passing sealing ship, the brig Amherst. By then, their number had dwindled to 10. Despite having no sextant and no charts, Bart Brown, whose wife had gone down with the General Grant, had set out in a longboat with four others to try to reach New Zealand. They were never seen again. It is assumed they missed their destination completely and sailed out into the deep empty blue of the Pacific. Another passenger, David McLelland, had died of illness.
Only three months after landing back in Invercargill, James Teer headed back down to the Auckland Islands. He had lost all of his savings in the sinking, and went as a guide on the first expedition to recover the General Grant’s gold.
James identified the location of the wreck, but bad weather prevented any attempt to dive. He never returned to the site. He did, however, sell his notes and diagrams to a number of salvagers, which described the area where the ship was lost as “forming a deep indentation in the cliffs … about 300 yards wide at the mouth, then gradually slopes until it forms a large cavern underneath the cliff”. He claimed the wreck was situated south-west by south a “distance of some eight miles” from Disappointment Island. It’s a lot like someone describing a track through the bush (“travel south for 50 metres to the large beech tree, turn right and head west to the obvious rock outcrop”); not surprising, then, that in 150 years of searching, no one had come close to finding the ship using his directions.
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We waited on the edge of our seats. “We thought we had it, we really did,” Bill said. But they didn’t. We slumped, collectively.
The 1986 trip was the first of five Bill Day has made to Auckland Islands. The site they discovered revealed a deck light, cannons, pieces of a toilet and a ship’s bell, and an abundance of coins so great they nicknamed it “the half-crown wreck”. But the coins didn’t compute. They were all more than three decades too old for the General Grant. Eventually, the wreck was identified as that of the Rifleman, which was lost in 1833 enroute from Hobart to London.
Bill is someone you’d like to go on an adventure with. After growing up in Nelson, Bill went to Victoria University to train as a social worker. He didn’t become one. Instead, he got a law degree, which somehow led to stints as a fireman and running a bowling alley. But it was the sea and diving that finally became his calling. After learning to scuba dive Bill started instructing with Malcolm Blair at Divers World in Wellington. The pair also did commercial diving work, which led to starting a marine salvage company in 1981. (The trip on which they found the Rifleman was cut short when they were called home to salvage the Russian cruise ship Mikhail Lermontov in the Marlborough Sounds.)
Bill becomes animated when he talks about the Auckland Islands, clasping and unclasping his hands. “I was enchanted from day one, absolutely enchanted. I just thought it was fantastic – the wildlife, the whole thing was extraordinary. The Auckland Islands are an absolute jewel.”
Today, he is the sole owner of the salvage company Seaworks, which has had contracts around the world in the oil industry, laying cables, and doing film work. His expertise and contacts mean he has the resources to mount well-equipped, well-funded expeditions to the Auckland Islands. When he and his wife, Karen, lived in a state house in Wellington, finding gold had a certain appeal. But now, he says, “it’s definitely about the mystery, the riddle. I’m driven by the fact it hasn’t been found – and there’s got to be an answer for that.”
Bill now lives in Wānaka and has been heavily involved in Wānaka Search and Rescue, both as part of the Incident Management Team and as Chair. When I visit him at his home, with its views of Tititea / Mount Aspiring, we talk about how trying to identify the General Grant on the sea bottom is like trying to find a body wedged in a gully in the mountains. Everything blends in, scale is hard to fathom.
Bill had previously announced he’d finished searching for the General Grant, because he’d run out of ideas. “It’s really hard to see a wreck down there. Everything’s the same colour, and the bottom’s just smashed. You’re just looking for a straight line or a shape that’s not typically found in nature, like the curve of an anchor.”
But he changed his mind when new technology, in the form of pulse magnetometers, came along. Magnetometers are used in heartbeat monitors, weapon systems positioning, the sensors in anti-locking brakes, and drill guidance systems, among other things. Most important for Bill, they can be towed behind a boat and can detect ferrous metals from the remains of a ship (such as anchors, ships bells and cannons) up to 150 metres away. They also work against the background of the kind of magnetic volcanic rock found at the Auckland Islands.
Bill bought two of the torpedo shaped devices. Prior to his last trip, he had Paul Sutherland, a Wānaka electrician who was one of his expedition members, test them on Lake Dunstan near Cromwell. They were able to locate the old Lowburn Bridge. “This technology came along, and I tried to ignore it. But I thought, it’s actually going to piss me off if I don’t do this.” So, over several weeks in February this year, Bill and his team gave it one more shot. It was his fifth try. They trolled for the General Grant like a giant fish, towing the magnetometer behind their ship.
They found nothing but the known wrecks of the Rifleman and the French ship Anjou, which sank in foggy weather in 1905.
Bill Day may be the person on earth with the clearest idea of where the General Grant is not. As for where it is, he is stumped. Maybe the wreck has been covered by rockfall. Maybe it slid out of the cove and into deep water. Maybe someone has found it, but told no one. Maybe they took the gold and ran.
Bill says he has stopped searching, but there will always be an element of unfinished business. Not that that is a bad thing. Adventure, by its very definition, is uncertain. And even if all Bill has is the vision of the gold at the bottom of the sea, perhaps that will be enough. As he says, “finding gold underwater is fantastic. Iron rusts, silver goes black, but gold sparkles like the day it went in. 155 years later, it will be sitting there, still sparkling”.
ALLAN UREN
