Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 28, July, 1873

by Various

"Now set a guard-boat," said the Englishman, "or he will steal the line, to get another dollar for finding the smuggler again."

But the want of experts defeated the plan, after all. It was necessary to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had the necessary skill. When the American consented to lost time and defeat the cyclone threw another spoil in his way. The East like the West Indies is the brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils, like a lasso thrown wide and large, go twisting north by west. It caught a French frigate in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the coral reefs, and the hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of those seas. But she was found, and the petard, like a huge axe wielded by a giant's arms, cut into her treasure-house and rescued it. The American's expenses for a journey round the world were paid.

I have heard a sufficiently incredible story of a man submerged in a Chinese junk and under water twelve hours, yet taken out alive. A Chinese junk is the nightmare of marine architecture. It is owned in partnership by a company, but there is this difference from an ordinary charter-party. Each man owns his share or allotment of the vessel, and it is divided off into actual compartments or boxes made water-proof; and each one of these pigeon-holes the hong or merchant owns and stocks to suit himself. All open out upon the upper deck, and are battened down—sometimes with a glass skylight if used as a chamber. The structure in junk form is the thing's proper registry, since any departure from the ancient model would subject her to heavy taxation as an alien vessel.[²] It is a very effectual mode of preventing any improvement in shipbuilding among the Chinese.

One of these clumsy arks went on the rocks in a typhoon, and was covered over her deck, leaving, however, the projecting skylight on or near a level with the surface. The hong was in this cuddy-hole, frantic between personal loss and personal peril. Suddenly there was a jar and a crash, and the sea beat over her. Fortunately, the skylight was closed water-tight, but, unfortunately, some of the spars and rigging blocked up the exit, even if he had dared the venture. The bolts of the sea barred him in.

But Chinese wreckers and Chinese thieves are on the alert. Wattai, or some such queer piratical Celestial with devilish propensities, went for the spoil, settling the salvage by arithmetic of his own. The wreck was removed from the skylight, and under the water, in that dense chamber, stagnant with mephitic air, the bruised, stupefied hong was found.

As is apparent from a previous example, the tendency of the sea-sand to absorb and conceal a sunken vessel is one of those difficulties that beset the explorer. But for that the recovery of treasure would be more frequent, the profession or business more lucrative. The number of vessels sunk annually, we learn from Lloyd's statistics, is one hundred thousand tons to the English commercial marine; and out of 551 vessels lost to the royal navy, 391 were sunk. Sir Charles Lyell estimates that there might be collected in the sea more evidences of man's art and industry than exist at any one time on the surface of the earth. But while the sea preserves, it hides. An example of the kind occurred in the wreck of the Golden Gate, a California steamer heavy with bullion. It occurred during the war, and the only expert diver within reach was an expatriated rebel. He had been a man of fortune, but, venturing too rashly in the Confederacy, he lost by confiscation and perhaps persecution. However, he was the man for the insurance companies, and a treaty was concluded, allowing him sixty per cent. salvage.

The vessel had gone down in tide water. The persistent sea had rocked and rocked it, and washed the tenacious quicksands about it, and finally concealed it. The search for it was long and tedious, and once given up or nearly given up. But as the disappointed diver was preparing to ascend his foot touched something firm, which proved to be a part of the wooden frame of the ship.

But even when found the difficulties had only begun. The tenacious, elastic sand defied all tools or leverage: no petard could blast so fickle and treacherous a substance. Wit and ingenuity can devise where ordinary art or engineering has failed. The diver took a lesson from the neighboring gold-miner, whose hydrostatic pump chisels away the mountain-side to lay bare the mother quartz. Fitted with such an engine, he swept the silted sand from the deck of the prize, and dug it out of the elastic matrix after the fashion of Macduff's birth.

By a great misfortune, incipient jealousies and the eager spirit of covetousness now showed themselves. It was at first whispered, and then asseverated, that if the bullion was once recovered the rebel might whistle for his sixty per cent. salvage. It was a bitter, bad time—a time of mistrust and suspicion—and the plan of defrauding the diver was only too feasible. He would be involved in a suit with a wealthy company at a time when prejudice, if not the form of law, regarded him as having forfeited a citizen's right. It placed him in a difficult position—more difficult because he could get no safe assurance, and was evidently suspected and watched. The diver concluded that his only way to secure his sixty per cent. salvage was to take it.

So it was that, with something of the feelings of the resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver. They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and dank to throw off the black envelope of fog and cloud. The black, oleaginous water seemed to slope from the muffled oar in a gluey, shining wave, and the heavy ripple at the bow of their boat parted in a long, adhesive roll, sloping away, but not breaking into froth or glisten of electric fire. The air and the sea seemed brooding in a heavy, hopeless misery, and the strange sense of plundering, not the living, but the dead, as if the sunken vessel was a huge coffin, was upon them. With that cautious sense of superstitious dread choking their muttered whispers, they reached the spot and prepared to descend. The task of sinking through that pitchy consistence, into the intricacy of that black, coffin-like hold, among the drowned corpses, to do a deed of doubtful right, must have intensified the horror of great darkness and that sublimity of silence that in the under-sea peoples the void shadows with horrible existences and fills the concave with voices. But it was done; and with trembling eagerness the weighty ingots, the unalloyed bars, were safely shipped, loading down the boat. Then louder and louder came the dash of oars. For a few moments they felt the way with muffled stroke into the shrouding shadows. But practiced ears caught the softened roll in the rollocks, and keen eyes marked the shadowy boat in the deepening gloom. It must be the skilled oar and adroit steering that saves them now, but not far away lie the long shadows of the shelving coast and its black-bearded forest. The swing of the oars became bold, open and exciting, and angry challenges passed. But the burden of the heavy gold fought against them, like the giant's harp calling Master! Master! on the shoulders of flying Jack of the Bean-stalk. The light, trim craft of the pursuers edged upon them, and the shadow of an angry struggle in the pitchy, reeking night gloomed over them. "No, no," said the leader: "no bloodshed for the cursed stuff! Here, give me a lift;" and with a heave and plunge the massy rouleaux splashed into the water, and the boat rose lighter with an easier conscience. The sea shut close-fisted over its own, while the pursuing boat paused and eddied about it, as if held to the treasure by invisible, impalpable strands. The pursuit was abandoned, and the betrayed or treacherous diver escaped. But busy rumor reports that he returned at leisure to the spot, and that the bullion of the Golden Gate went to replenish the forfeited fortune of the bold ex-rebel. Believe as you like, good reader.