By BC Cook
For Variety
“ALL the locals know the story. Anyone who can dive has been out there. It sits only thirty five miles from the mainland and there is a good chance you can find gold. Well, no none I know ever found any. That ship went down with hundreds of millions of dollars in gold coins and only a fraction of it has ever been recovered. That’s what I heard.”
The story of the SS Elingamite is a great example of a legend growing all out of proportion of the facts. So let us start with those. The Elingamite was built in 1887 in England. A trusty passenger steamer, she worked the waters around Australia for years, a regular on the Sydney to Auckland run. She was a good-sized vessel for the time: at 2500 tons she was over 300 feet long. In 1902 she made her way across the Tasman Sea along the north coast of New Zealand, carrying almost two hundred passengers and crew and 52 boxes of coins estimated at several million dollars for New Zealand banks.
Then disaster struck. Elingamite ran into fog and the captain made the usual adjustments according to his charts, but the ship grounded on an island and foundered. Although the vessel sank in just under twenty minutes, the people on board managed to take to the life boats and get away. One boat got lost and was never heard from again, but the rest reached shore safely.
A court of inquiry investigated the sinking and ruled that the accident was caused by negligence on the part of the captain, a case of poor seamanship. He was stripped of his Master’s license and disgraced. However, eight years later officials in the Australian navy found that the island group where the vessel sank was improperly charted. The islands, known as Three Kings, were a mile further south and fifteen hundred yards further east than were shown on the navigation charts. A new inquiry concluded that if the maps been accurate the disaster would never have taken place. The captain was cleared of any wrongdoing and was restored to position.
Stories of the Elingamite wreck grew over the years. Rumors around New Zealand held that there was much more gold on board than originally indicated. Locals told stories of hundreds of millions’ worth lying on the bottom. The site became a favorite of divers and treasure hunters. Even Kelly Tarlton could not resist and led several operations to the wreck. Tarlton is most famous for developing the clear underwater tubes that visitors walk through in large aquariums.
Divers still visit the site, and occasionally someone recovers an artifact or gold coin, but it has been picked clean. The wreck itself is a mess, having been blown apart by treasure hunters using explosives to get at the loot. But the legends remain, and divers will continue to visit the site for years to come.
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
