TREASURE HUNTERS
HE doesn’t crack a whip, no serpent rears its head and, no, a 20-ton ball does not hurtle towards him inside a tomb.
But Hamilton White does have a fedora hat and something Indiana Jones could only have dreamed of... a treasure trove dating back to the 1200s.
The antiquities hunter has spent 10 years painstakingly piecing together more than 100 pieces from a collection believed to have belonged to the Knights Templar.
It includes a libation cup, a sword which bears three Templar crosses, a helmet and an Obsidian chalice.
White and his fellow hunter Carl Cookson describe the collection as the most important since the discovery of Egyptian boy king Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.
They believe the hoard – which the Nazis came painstakingly close to snaffling – could even reshape our view of the Templars.
White, 49, says: “Everybody has been looking for these for 800 years, so they’re bound to be controversial. People want to know how we’ve got them.
“The items could rewrite Templar history. They prove ceremonies certainly existed. There were rumours these mixing vessels were used to mix psychotropic drugs.
UNEARTHED
“We believe the sword belonged to the last Grand Master, from 1291.”
The Order of the Knights Templar was founded in the 12th century to protect Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land.
It was Europe’s biggest standing army since the Roman Empire but within 200 years it had disappeared.
No major Templar artefacts have been found – until now.
Self-made millionaires Hamilton and Cookson have been on a voyage of discovery to check the authenticity of their haul and chart the history behind it.
The collection was unearthed in the 1960s when treasure hunters stumbled across the items at the site of a Templars’ base in Portugal.
Not knowing what they were, the items were sold to dealers across the world.
Hamilton says: “They must not have realised the value and sold the items piece by piece.
“I’ve spent the last 10 years carefully tracking down the items and putting the hoard back together.
“It’s so valuable it’s impossible to insure. It’s hidden at a secure location. It’s a very difficult job to value something like this.
“Others have been numbers on it.
“They may be right to suggest north of £100million is an attainable figure in the art market.
“A tiny 13th century painting in France recently made over £20million. This was a single early medieval item. What I have is 100 items – and
keen to put many are far more significant than this
French find. Anyway, they aren’t for sale!”
Hamilton is speaking after four decades of collecting antiques – having started buying and selling with his pocket money at the age of eight.
In his private hoard he has mammoth tusks from Russia that are 20-30,000 years old, a Tudor mallet and a piece of Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose.
He says: “My most treasured are pieces of Celtic gold. I have Nazi memorabilia and loot,
even
Nazi bullion bars. It naturally morphed into an obsession. I’d say I have a bit of OCD.”
That obsession has been an asset as he and property millionaire Cookson – the pair met while living in Monaco – set their sights on the Templars’ cache.
White, who hails from the Midlands, was fascinated that Cookson owned a former Knights Templar property in Aubeterre, France. “It started our voyage of discovery,” he says.
Cookson – Liverpool-born but now based in Surrey – helped finance the search and joins White as they reveal the artefacts on TV.
And White reveals how close the Nazis came to finding the stash in the 1930s as they searched for the Holy Grail – the cup that Jesus