Sunken ships off Cape Breton Island
Editor’s note:
Atlantic Canada's history is intrinsically tied to maritime life, and with that comes the tragedies of ships lost at sea. The Saltwire Network will take you on a journey of folklore and history as we weave the tales of some of those vessels lost beneath the depths long ago.
When payday rolls around, most of us go online to make sure the money has gone into our bank accounts before we start spending.
But more than 200 years ago, British troops stationed near Louisbourg wouldn’t have received their wages until the HMS Tilbury arrived. The three-masted 60-gun sailing ship was the pay ship of Admiral Edward Bowcowen’s fleet attacking the fortress town in 1758. On September 24 1758, a hurricane sunk the ship at Tilbury Rock, 1.7 miles east northeast of St. Espirit.
In addition to 280 lives lost, the money disappeared too, a fact no doubt disappointing to the waiting troops. But while the troops went without their wages, today, you can find coins from the HMS Tilbury on ebay, thanks to treasure hunters. The HMS Tilbury was found in 1986, along with cannon, musket balls, and that long-lost money, 16 gold coins as well as 430 silver ones.
HMS Tilbury was not the only fabled treasure ship to sink off Louisbourg. It wasn’t even the most lucrative. The waters near the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site are as rich as the grounds of the fortress town for archeological treasures. The HMS Tilbury is just one of at least 77 ships wrecked off or near the coast of the site.
Among the most famous is the legendary Le Chameau, a French pay ship. It sunk on August 2, 1725, when it ran into Chameau Rock 15 miles northeast of the coast of Louisbourg during a gale resulting in 316 lives lost. Another was the HMS Feversham which went down in 1711. It ran into Scaterie Island, leaving 102 dead.
TREASURE ISLAND
Treasure was found in the chilly waters off Louisbourg back in 1965 by Alex Storm and his partners Harvey Macleod and David Maceachern.
Storm’s son Jason, now 52 and living in Ottawa, wasn’t even born when Le Chameau’s treasure was unearthed. But he does remember hearing the stories surrounding his father’s discoveries.
“They had to keep it a secret because it was becoming known there was treasure in this area. There was treasure trove licences they could get from the authorities, but as soon as you found something, others would descend on the area and pretty soon you would have a chaos scene,” said Storm in a phone interview from Ottawa. “So they had to keep it secret - they brought it ashore to a local pier and they would hide it in their buckets because there was always a fisherman there asking how the fishing was. And they would just say, ‘oh no, it’s good.’ So they would sneak it past them. They worried about the silver though because silver smelled like rotten eggs because it was in the saltwater for so long - they were afraid the silver might give them away because of the sulphuric smell.”
No one could be told until all the treasure was brought ashore so in the meantime they had to hide it at Storm’s family home - under the bed of their uncle, who was living at the home.
“He didn’t even realize it was there,” says Jason Storm. “They made arrangements with the bank to hold it in their safe and in fact, I think the bank had to upgrade their safe because of the size of the haul.”
When they had recovered everything, they released the news and the Cape Breton Post published the story on April 5, 1966.
“Once they recovered pretty much everything, they made the news that they had made a find and all hell broke loose. The phone was ringing off the hook, interviews, Macleans, Time magazine, you name it. It became like a big thing because it was a big find. They didn’t expect to find the gold there, but there was gold there as well.”
The idea of major treasure off the coast of Cape Breton became an international sensation. But while it was initially good news to Storm and his partners, it soon turned sour. A former partner filed an injunction and the case went to the courts. Eventually, the case was settled in Storm’s favour, but legal fees ate up most of the money, at the time thought to be worth $700,000. The treasure coins were auctioned off in New York in 1971, with many going to French buyers and thus repatriated to France.
MAN BEHIND DISCOVERIES
Alex Storm spent most of his life researching and looking for shipwrecks. Born in Jakarta, Java, he emigrated to Canada from the Netherlands when he was in his late 20s, seeking life in a more stable country. First landing in Ontario, he soon moved to the Maritimes and settled near Louisbourg.
“He earned a living by salvage, so he was always into diving and undersea exploration and so he would go down to recover metals and things like that,” says Jason Storm. “He’d sell it and make a pretty good penny off it. Then he started noticing things like cannon and things like that … it’s a very historic area, and that put him on to the possibility of finding shipwrecks that might have coins and things like this as well.”
Storm spent much of his time doing extensive research before any diving. He was a meticulous person who kept good records and later worked at Fortress Louisbourg as a material research specialist and historian. Although he never liked being called a treasure hunter, he maintained his interest in finding shipwrecks for his entire life.
“He didn’t look at himself like that. It wasn’t about the money, per se, it was more the discovery of the treasure,” says Jason Storm. “He spent a lot of time on the historical aspect of these wrecks, trying to figure out what happened, what happened after and the historical context of this kind of thing. And he found bringing it up and making it available for others is probably the best thing. Then’s it’s out in the open and people can see the stuff.”
DEALING WITH GREED
Storm was also involved in the discovery of the HMS Feversham, another treasure ship, but that too led to some more awkward moments, this time with the government.
“One of the issues he had with the Feversham treasure was the government wanted the treasure for itself and he didn’t really agree with that,” says Jason Storm. “At one point, he said, listen, if you guys are going to be like that, I’m going to dump this right back in the water. And it wasn’t long after that that they came to their senses, I guess. And they actually negotiated with him about a split that was more reasonable.”
Alex Storm died in 2018, at the age of 80, receiving a lengthy obituary in the New York Times for his historic discoveries. The younger Storm says his father never lost his interest in shipwrecks or treasure - even the landbased kind.
“He never stopped,” says Jason Storm. “He had a theory on the Louisbourg treasure which has not been found yet. Louisbourg fell to the British in 1745 and later in 1758 but in 1758, they did have a treasury but there has been no accounting of what happened to it. There’s been a lot of theories on it and that treasure could still be out there. Not a shipwreck but more likely hidden somewhere - he did a lot of research. Today’s estimates would put it in the $40 million range. He was working on that in the later years of his life. “