Kelly Tarlton’s treasure hunt
In 1897, the steamer Tasmania sank, taking with it a collection of jewels worth about $500,000 today. It sparked a treasure hunt that is still going on, writes Jessica Long.
The sea about Poverty Bay was rough earlier that night but the weather grew worse and the wind picked up. The Tasmania was forced to track toward Napier. It was just before 9pm on July 29, 1897.
Two hours later, during second officer Nicholson’s watch below, there was a ‘‘heavy crash’’. The ship had struck a rock.
Passengers were woken by the sudden shock, hurrying on deck in their nightwear, in the face of a southeast gale.
Captain McGee made the call to abandon ship but there were not enough sailors to haul out the lifeboats, one passenger said.
They were near Table Cape, off the coast of Ma¯ hia.
Water was rushing into the ship, and a heavy sea breaking alongside but the steamer sat steadily on the rock on which it had grounded, Nicholson said.
The weather made launching the lifeboats even harder.
McGee remained on deck until there was no man, woman or child left behind. The orderly manner of it all struck him as the passengers piled into six lifeboats, he said.
‘‘There was no sign of panic; in fact, I never saw ladies and people generally behave so well. I passed oranges and biscuits down into the boats.’’
Before the last passenger left, about four metres of water covered the stoke-hole, McGee said, and the sea flowed into main deck’s saloon.
He lit a flare near a ladder and left the steamer behind, joining a boat with 20 others.
‘‘There was a very nasty sea running, and we could feel the force of it before we had gone 50 yards.’’
They bobbed close to the steamer for a couple of hours, when McGee gave the order to make for land. Tasmania ‘‘disappeared in an hour’’, newspapers reported on July 31, 1897.
Passengers watched as the single remaining masthead light plunged below the surface.
‘‘There is scarcely any hope of salvage,’’ media reports said. ‘‘If anything is to be recovered from the Tasmania, divers will have to be employed as she sank in deep water.’’
Four lifeboats and two smaller boats were launched that night but just five landed. One lost a passenger and seaman along the way. The last capsized and the sea claimed the lives of nine crew members.
There were 20 horses on board the steamer, owned by passengers from Christchurch and Palmerston North. But despite the losses, the
Tarlton recovered about 250 pieces from the Tasmania but he believed more than half the jewellery was still in the ship.
wreck of the Tasmania was ‘‘unremarkable’’ during a time of common maritime accidents, according to The New Zealand History website.
It was what was left beneath the surface that kept the Tasmania’s story alive.
In his cabin, jewellery merchant Isador Jonah Rothschild, of Wellington, had a suitcase of glittering valuables, valued at £3000 – or about $500,000 today.
Over the years, unsuccessful attempts were made to retrieve the treasure, but it wasn’t until 1973, when marine archaeologist Kelly Tarlton bought the right to salvage Rothschild’s jewels, that any progress was made.
He recovered about 250 pieces from the Tasmania but he believed more than half the jewellery was still in the ship.
His finds were put into safe keeping at his Tui Shipwreck Museum at Waitangi.
But on April 8, 2000, 23-year-old Keith Anthony McEwen, a kitchenhand at the site, stole gold sovereigns, rings, and diamond jewellery from a glass-covered vault, leaving fingerprints on the case.
McEwen was sentenced to 71⁄2-years’ jail for the theft, but refused to divulge the whereabouts of the treasure. The court was told it would be ‘‘worth more than his life’’ to do so.
In 2009, he offered clues as to its whereabouts, saying the bulk of the missing loot was in gang hands.
Police confirmed coins, thought to be part of Tarlton’s collection, were for sale on Trade Me.
Despite exhaustive efforts to recover the loot, with investigators offering rewards, making pamphlet appeals through prisons, and searching McEwen’s childhood eeling spot in a Northland stream, none of the stolen treasure has been recovered.