Post by jericho on Oct 18, 2008 20:01:22 GMT 10
TREASURE TROVE
IF THE Sydney town watchmen had been doing their job properly on the night of September 14, 1828, they might have heard a muffled clink of iron on stone as they patrolled George Street. No doubt the sound, had they heard it, would have puzzled those lazy guardians of the law, for it must have seemed to come from under the rutted dirt track that served as a street in early Sydney.
In fact it came from a large drain that went under the street beside the premises of the Bank of Australia. This concern had opened almost two years before in opposition to the Bank of New South Wales and was still known as the New Bank. The echoes of heavy blows that reached the street were caused by a gang of robbers breaking into the banks strong-room.
They had attacked it from the drain, which ran close to the foundations of the bank and one of the openings of which was on the other side of the street. They drove a tunnel through the bricks lining the drain into the 9 ft. thick wall of the strong-room and at length made a hole big enough to admit a man's body.
Inside the strong-room were 40 boxes, each holding 100 pounds worth of silver coins, perhaps the ornate half-crowns and shillings of George IV, still bright from the Tower Mint. With them were two boxes holding 1,500 Spanish dollars and a third box of 2,000 sovereigns.
This rich prize was overlooked by the robbers who carried off the dollars, seven boxes of silver coins and between ;10,000 and 12,000 pounds in banknote’s. That same night they are said to have carried the boxes across the Harbor on a skiff and buried them by the Grey light of dawn, not far from the water's edge in one of. the tiny bays of the North Shore. There, as far as is known, it still lies-a modest little treasure of 1,500 Spanish dollars and 700 pounds in Georgian silver coins-but certainly one that any numismatist would be delighted to share.
The broad face of Australia, like every other country where mankind has saved and stolen, is dotted with caches of buried treasure. There is no safer hiding place than the face of the earth and none so secret, except the depths of the sea. But now and then, sometimes by plan, but more often by accident, both the land and the sea give up their secrets. To the man in the street the resulting discovery is just so many dollars' worth of gold or silver, but to the historian and the numismatist the value is far greater.
It has happened before that a farmer's plough has turned up a holey dollar in the rich acres beside the Hawkesbury River. As a coin it does not look much-no more than a few cents' worth of tarnished silver-but a collector may value it at anything up to 900 of our modern dollars.
However, because it is a silver coin, this holey dollar is treasure trove and as such should be reported to the authorities so that an inquiry can be held into its ownership. In England this would mean a Coroner's inquest, but both law and custom are not quite so clear-cut in Australia.
Case law on treasure trove was quoted by an English judge in 1903 in these words: "Treasure trove is where any gold or silver in coin, plate or bullion, is found concealed in a house, or in the earth, or other private place, the owner thereof being unknown, in which case the treasures belong to the King or his grantee, having the franchise of treasure trove; but if he that laid it be known or afterwards discovered, the owner and not the King is entitled to it; this prerogative right only applying in the absence of an owner to claim the property.
"If the owner, instead of hiding the treasure, casually lost it, or purposely parted with it, in such a manner that it is evident he intended to abandon the property altogether, and did not propose to resume it on another occasion, as if he threw it on the ground, or other public place, or in the sea, the first finder is entitled to the property, as against every one but the owner, and the King's prerogative does not in this respect obtain. So that it is the hiding and not the abandonment of the property that entitles the King to it."
In the days that this law was established, it was the intrinsic value of coins or other valuables that mattered most. In fact, antiquarian or numismatic values hardly existed. Nowadays, on the other hand, these values are usually the most significant, being sometimes a hundred times
or more greater than the value of the metal. In these circumstances the temptation to say nothing about a discovery is alluring, although according to English law and presumably Australian also, this would be a criminal offence.
This law of treasure trove stemmed from the greed of medieval English kings and makes little sense in modern conditions. In view of this, the system of administering the law was altered in England in 1931 so that finders received the full market value of their discovery provided it was reported promptly.
In England the proper authority is the Coroner for the district in which the find was made. The Coroner inquires "of any treasure that is found" and "who were the finders" under the provisions of the Coroners Act of 1887. Coins of copper, bronze or any metal other than gold or silver are not treasure trove and finds need not be reported to the Coroner.
The official attitude to treasure trove in Australia varies from State to State and has never been officially clarified, presumably because this is a young country and discoveries of treasure to date have been small. However, there have been a few precedents. Let us examine a couple of recent ones:
In 1950 two brothers, aged seven and eight, found a tin containing 83 sovereigns in the wall of a ruined building at Kilmore, 37 miles from Melbourne. They threw the coins away at first because they thought they were "Chinese halfpennies" but later showed a couple to their father. He recognized the coins as sovereigns and gathered up the others.
The father asked his solicitor what should be done with the coins. The solicitor advised him to hand them over to the police and make a claim for treasure trove. He did this and the Crown Solicitor's Department suggested that each boy should be given a reward of 10 pounds. The father's solicitor, and people in Kilmore and other places protested loudly enough to change the official mind. The full intrinsic value of the coins, nearly 300 pounds, was eventually paid to the children. This was all that could be paid officially, but it was not over-generous considering that the numismatic value of the coins would have been at least twice that figure.
Officialdom in New South Wales is even less generous than in Victoria. The finder of treasure trove there receives only a third of the intrinsic value of the coins. After a 1958 find at Narrandera, one of the authors took up this question with the authorities. He asked for the English system to be applied and payment for the coins assessed on their numismatic value, but was unsuccessful.
At Narrandera, a country town of New South Wales, a youth Fossicking around the site of an old Chinese garden had found 35 sovereigns, dated between 1887 and 1897. He reported his find to the local police who later turned up another sovereign and a half-sovereign on the site.
On another occasion since then 98 sovereigns and 122 half-sovereigns -intrinsic value about 550 pounds came to light in Victoria. The coins were in a rusty tin unearthed by workmen digging a trench at Hampton, Melbourne, in October, 1962. The latest date on the coins was 1914. What payment, if any, was made to the finders is not known.
The authors of this book contend that an interpretation of the law of treasure trove that reeks of feudal oppression has no place in Australia. We should be leading and not lagging behind Britain in this respect. Treasure trove is often of great historic as well as numismatic interest and anything less than fair treatment is no encouragement to the finders to do their duty as citizens and report discoveries.
Without doubt a good deal of treasure trove does exist in Australia, much of it robbers' loot buried or hidden in caves. Stories of these hoards and caches were taken with a pinch of salt until the finding of the Gilt Dragon off the coast of Western Australia silenced the scoffers.
There is a germ of truth in every bush yam and folk tale, distorted and swollen beyond recognition maybe, but existing nevertheless. Even the wildest of Australia's tales of treasure has some basis in fact, if only we could peel off all the fiction. This is the legend of the Relampago Hoard, said to be hidden in the recesses of a cave at Swan Bay, near Oueenscliff, Victoria.
The Relampago was the ship of a pirate called Benito Bonita who committed murder and mayhem on the high seas at the start of last century. So much is fact. But the story goes that Benito put into Port Phillip when chased by a British man o'war. After hiding his loot, he blew up the cave entrance, keeping as a reference a map tattooed on the back of one of his crew.
All this appears to be fancy. Not one jot of documentary evidence exists to show that Benito Bonita was ever nearer to Australia than Easter Island. Yet a number of people around Queenscliff are sure that a great treasure exists in that secret cave and some of them have spent hundreds of pounds trying to discover it.
A fable, perhaps. A tall tale grown taller with the passage of time. But no more strange than the story of the Mahogany Ship of Warmambool, found in 1836 half-buried in sandhills about six miles from the town.
Sometime after 1880 the wreck vanished, presumably swallowed by the sand, although by then many people had seen it none of them, unfortunately, expert enough to identify the vessel. But its position, more than 300 yards from high water mark and about 30 ft. above sea level, indicates the wreck had lain there at least 200 years and its crew were probably the first Europeans to see Australia.
Equally strange, in another way, is the story of the silver dinner service that Frank Jardine, of Somerset, Cape York, had made from a mass of Spanish dollars found on the Barrier Reef. A lugger of Jardine's pearling fleet had been driven into a coral-fringed lagoon and one of the creek, breaking a way out, split the coins from the coral in which they were embedded.
The mass, mostly silver, but also containing a few gold coins, weighed 921 lb. The latest date that could be read was 1833. Jardine's share, after rewarding the lugger crew, was worth more than $A7,400 Many similar coins, relics of the days when Spanish dollars were the currency of the whole Pacific, have been picked up along the islands and beaches of the Queensland coast. In his Coins and Currency of Australia, Coleman P. Hyman tells of collecting Spanish dollars found among wreckage on a North Queensland reef.
On Woodlark Island in the 1860s a native girl's necklace of coins led to the discovery of 500 trade dollars among the timbers of a wreck. Golden Spanish doubloons have turned up on Thursday Island, from an Asiatic pirates' hoard reputed to be buried on Booby Island, 25 miles to the west.
Plenty of ships sailing the Coral Sea were ripe for plundering. In 1804 a British privateer brought a Dutch prize into Sydney with 20,000 Spanish dollars aboard. A few years later 2,000 guineas sent from England to pay the New South Wales garrison were stolen from a ship in Sydney Harbor and are said to be buried somewhere along the shore of Great Sirius Cove.
Sydney has its own treasure island-Scotland Island, out in Pittwater, with the tale of a three-legged pot full of holey dollars buried there around 1817 by two robbers who drifted down the Hawkesbury in a boat.
Bushrangers' hoards are still supposed to await lucky finders in several places. When he was caught Captain Melville boasted that he had hidden his booty so well that it would never be found. Since then treasure-seekers have searched the caves of Victoria's Grampian Mountains without success. The Bungonia Caves, 25 miles from Goulburn, are said to hold Ben Hall's spoil and Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward) is reputed to have left coins and jewels worth 20,000 pounds in a cave of the Moonbi Ranges.
Frank Gardiner boasted that he scorned to take silver and had hidden 3,000 pounds in gold at Mary's Mount. At his trial, Gardiner was said to have stolen ;21,000 pounds of which 13,694 pounds came from the robbery of a gold escort at Eugowra Rocks in June, 1862. Apart from raw gold, this sum included 700 pounds in cash and notes of the Oriental Bank and 3,000 pounds in cash and notes of the Commercial Banking Company.
Another bushranger offered to show police where he had buried a hoard of sovereigns under a dead tree on the slopes of Mount Tennant. in what is now Australian Capital Territory but they hanged him instead. A cache of stolen sovereigns is supposed to be hidden somewhere around Tullaree, Victoria, and a fortune in Spanish dollars, looted from a bank on the Philippine island of Luzon is somewhere on the northwest coast of Western Australia.
More treasure trove is said to be buried near Ballina on the New South Wales coast. The story goes that this was landed in 1914 by the German steamer Sedlitz and may include some of the rare German New Guinea gold coins.
But the seas have yielded more coins to Australian collectors than the land. This is no surprise considering there are estimated to be more than 3,000 wrecks strewn around Australia's coasts. The law of treasure trove does not apply to coins taken from wrecks. In this case, the man in charge is the Receiver of Wrecks, an official appointed by the government in each State. Control exercised by these officials in the past has been mild, probably because no large sum of money has been involved until recently.
The first recorded salvage of numismatic interest came from the wreck of the clipper Dunbar, sunk off Sydney's South Head in August, 1857. Among the cargo was a consignment of Hanks & Lloyd penny and halfpenny tokens. Referring to the Dunbar in 1893, Hyman notes that "when a portion of the cargo was recovered, it was discovered that a number of these tokens and some coffin-handles, which had been included in the cargo, had become agglomerated by the action of the salt water."
The recovery of more relics in 1910 was marked by the striking of a medallet.
But it was not until the post-war improvement in skin-diving techniques that the main bulk of the tokens were recovered three or four years ago. However, the Dunbar was also reputed to be carrying 5,000 sovereigns and the authors have seen silver and gold coins of George 111, George IV, William IV and Victoria, including a beautiful 1855 Sydney Mint sovereign, said to have come from the wreck.
Wrecks of at least a score of old sailing ships litter Sydney Harbor, but so far only half of them have been located. James Murrell, sole survivor of the barque Peruvian, ripped apart on the Bellona Reef in the Coral Sea in 1846, said the vessel carried F-10,000 in gold and silver as trading money. The brigantine Maria, wrecked on Baudin Rocks, near Cape Jaffa, South Australia, in June, 1840, is supposed to have had 4,000 sovereigns on board.
These are only a few of the better authenticated wreck stories, but every trading vessel carried money, usually gold or silver and often foreign, so that every wreck is likely to hold something of interest.
IF THE Sydney town watchmen had been doing their job properly on the night of September 14, 1828, they might have heard a muffled clink of iron on stone as they patrolled George Street. No doubt the sound, had they heard it, would have puzzled those lazy guardians of the law, for it must have seemed to come from under the rutted dirt track that served as a street in early Sydney.
In fact it came from a large drain that went under the street beside the premises of the Bank of Australia. This concern had opened almost two years before in opposition to the Bank of New South Wales and was still known as the New Bank. The echoes of heavy blows that reached the street were caused by a gang of robbers breaking into the banks strong-room.
They had attacked it from the drain, which ran close to the foundations of the bank and one of the openings of which was on the other side of the street. They drove a tunnel through the bricks lining the drain into the 9 ft. thick wall of the strong-room and at length made a hole big enough to admit a man's body.
Inside the strong-room were 40 boxes, each holding 100 pounds worth of silver coins, perhaps the ornate half-crowns and shillings of George IV, still bright from the Tower Mint. With them were two boxes holding 1,500 Spanish dollars and a third box of 2,000 sovereigns.
This rich prize was overlooked by the robbers who carried off the dollars, seven boxes of silver coins and between ;10,000 and 12,000 pounds in banknote’s. That same night they are said to have carried the boxes across the Harbor on a skiff and buried them by the Grey light of dawn, not far from the water's edge in one of. the tiny bays of the North Shore. There, as far as is known, it still lies-a modest little treasure of 1,500 Spanish dollars and 700 pounds in Georgian silver coins-but certainly one that any numismatist would be delighted to share.
The broad face of Australia, like every other country where mankind has saved and stolen, is dotted with caches of buried treasure. There is no safer hiding place than the face of the earth and none so secret, except the depths of the sea. But now and then, sometimes by plan, but more often by accident, both the land and the sea give up their secrets. To the man in the street the resulting discovery is just so many dollars' worth of gold or silver, but to the historian and the numismatist the value is far greater.
It has happened before that a farmer's plough has turned up a holey dollar in the rich acres beside the Hawkesbury River. As a coin it does not look much-no more than a few cents' worth of tarnished silver-but a collector may value it at anything up to 900 of our modern dollars.
However, because it is a silver coin, this holey dollar is treasure trove and as such should be reported to the authorities so that an inquiry can be held into its ownership. In England this would mean a Coroner's inquest, but both law and custom are not quite so clear-cut in Australia.
Case law on treasure trove was quoted by an English judge in 1903 in these words: "Treasure trove is where any gold or silver in coin, plate or bullion, is found concealed in a house, or in the earth, or other private place, the owner thereof being unknown, in which case the treasures belong to the King or his grantee, having the franchise of treasure trove; but if he that laid it be known or afterwards discovered, the owner and not the King is entitled to it; this prerogative right only applying in the absence of an owner to claim the property.
"If the owner, instead of hiding the treasure, casually lost it, or purposely parted with it, in such a manner that it is evident he intended to abandon the property altogether, and did not propose to resume it on another occasion, as if he threw it on the ground, or other public place, or in the sea, the first finder is entitled to the property, as against every one but the owner, and the King's prerogative does not in this respect obtain. So that it is the hiding and not the abandonment of the property that entitles the King to it."
In the days that this law was established, it was the intrinsic value of coins or other valuables that mattered most. In fact, antiquarian or numismatic values hardly existed. Nowadays, on the other hand, these values are usually the most significant, being sometimes a hundred times
or more greater than the value of the metal. In these circumstances the temptation to say nothing about a discovery is alluring, although according to English law and presumably Australian also, this would be a criminal offence.
This law of treasure trove stemmed from the greed of medieval English kings and makes little sense in modern conditions. In view of this, the system of administering the law was altered in England in 1931 so that finders received the full market value of their discovery provided it was reported promptly.
In England the proper authority is the Coroner for the district in which the find was made. The Coroner inquires "of any treasure that is found" and "who were the finders" under the provisions of the Coroners Act of 1887. Coins of copper, bronze or any metal other than gold or silver are not treasure trove and finds need not be reported to the Coroner.
The official attitude to treasure trove in Australia varies from State to State and has never been officially clarified, presumably because this is a young country and discoveries of treasure to date have been small. However, there have been a few precedents. Let us examine a couple of recent ones:
In 1950 two brothers, aged seven and eight, found a tin containing 83 sovereigns in the wall of a ruined building at Kilmore, 37 miles from Melbourne. They threw the coins away at first because they thought they were "Chinese halfpennies" but later showed a couple to their father. He recognized the coins as sovereigns and gathered up the others.
The father asked his solicitor what should be done with the coins. The solicitor advised him to hand them over to the police and make a claim for treasure trove. He did this and the Crown Solicitor's Department suggested that each boy should be given a reward of 10 pounds. The father's solicitor, and people in Kilmore and other places protested loudly enough to change the official mind. The full intrinsic value of the coins, nearly 300 pounds, was eventually paid to the children. This was all that could be paid officially, but it was not over-generous considering that the numismatic value of the coins would have been at least twice that figure.
Officialdom in New South Wales is even less generous than in Victoria. The finder of treasure trove there receives only a third of the intrinsic value of the coins. After a 1958 find at Narrandera, one of the authors took up this question with the authorities. He asked for the English system to be applied and payment for the coins assessed on their numismatic value, but was unsuccessful.
At Narrandera, a country town of New South Wales, a youth Fossicking around the site of an old Chinese garden had found 35 sovereigns, dated between 1887 and 1897. He reported his find to the local police who later turned up another sovereign and a half-sovereign on the site.
On another occasion since then 98 sovereigns and 122 half-sovereigns -intrinsic value about 550 pounds came to light in Victoria. The coins were in a rusty tin unearthed by workmen digging a trench at Hampton, Melbourne, in October, 1962. The latest date on the coins was 1914. What payment, if any, was made to the finders is not known.
The authors of this book contend that an interpretation of the law of treasure trove that reeks of feudal oppression has no place in Australia. We should be leading and not lagging behind Britain in this respect. Treasure trove is often of great historic as well as numismatic interest and anything less than fair treatment is no encouragement to the finders to do their duty as citizens and report discoveries.
Without doubt a good deal of treasure trove does exist in Australia, much of it robbers' loot buried or hidden in caves. Stories of these hoards and caches were taken with a pinch of salt until the finding of the Gilt Dragon off the coast of Western Australia silenced the scoffers.
There is a germ of truth in every bush yam and folk tale, distorted and swollen beyond recognition maybe, but existing nevertheless. Even the wildest of Australia's tales of treasure has some basis in fact, if only we could peel off all the fiction. This is the legend of the Relampago Hoard, said to be hidden in the recesses of a cave at Swan Bay, near Oueenscliff, Victoria.
The Relampago was the ship of a pirate called Benito Bonita who committed murder and mayhem on the high seas at the start of last century. So much is fact. But the story goes that Benito put into Port Phillip when chased by a British man o'war. After hiding his loot, he blew up the cave entrance, keeping as a reference a map tattooed on the back of one of his crew.
All this appears to be fancy. Not one jot of documentary evidence exists to show that Benito Bonita was ever nearer to Australia than Easter Island. Yet a number of people around Queenscliff are sure that a great treasure exists in that secret cave and some of them have spent hundreds of pounds trying to discover it.
A fable, perhaps. A tall tale grown taller with the passage of time. But no more strange than the story of the Mahogany Ship of Warmambool, found in 1836 half-buried in sandhills about six miles from the town.
Sometime after 1880 the wreck vanished, presumably swallowed by the sand, although by then many people had seen it none of them, unfortunately, expert enough to identify the vessel. But its position, more than 300 yards from high water mark and about 30 ft. above sea level, indicates the wreck had lain there at least 200 years and its crew were probably the first Europeans to see Australia.
Equally strange, in another way, is the story of the silver dinner service that Frank Jardine, of Somerset, Cape York, had made from a mass of Spanish dollars found on the Barrier Reef. A lugger of Jardine's pearling fleet had been driven into a coral-fringed lagoon and one of the creek, breaking a way out, split the coins from the coral in which they were embedded.
The mass, mostly silver, but also containing a few gold coins, weighed 921 lb. The latest date that could be read was 1833. Jardine's share, after rewarding the lugger crew, was worth more than $A7,400 Many similar coins, relics of the days when Spanish dollars were the currency of the whole Pacific, have been picked up along the islands and beaches of the Queensland coast. In his Coins and Currency of Australia, Coleman P. Hyman tells of collecting Spanish dollars found among wreckage on a North Queensland reef.
On Woodlark Island in the 1860s a native girl's necklace of coins led to the discovery of 500 trade dollars among the timbers of a wreck. Golden Spanish doubloons have turned up on Thursday Island, from an Asiatic pirates' hoard reputed to be buried on Booby Island, 25 miles to the west.
Plenty of ships sailing the Coral Sea were ripe for plundering. In 1804 a British privateer brought a Dutch prize into Sydney with 20,000 Spanish dollars aboard. A few years later 2,000 guineas sent from England to pay the New South Wales garrison were stolen from a ship in Sydney Harbor and are said to be buried somewhere along the shore of Great Sirius Cove.
Sydney has its own treasure island-Scotland Island, out in Pittwater, with the tale of a three-legged pot full of holey dollars buried there around 1817 by two robbers who drifted down the Hawkesbury in a boat.
Bushrangers' hoards are still supposed to await lucky finders in several places. When he was caught Captain Melville boasted that he had hidden his booty so well that it would never be found. Since then treasure-seekers have searched the caves of Victoria's Grampian Mountains without success. The Bungonia Caves, 25 miles from Goulburn, are said to hold Ben Hall's spoil and Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward) is reputed to have left coins and jewels worth 20,000 pounds in a cave of the Moonbi Ranges.
Frank Gardiner boasted that he scorned to take silver and had hidden 3,000 pounds in gold at Mary's Mount. At his trial, Gardiner was said to have stolen ;21,000 pounds of which 13,694 pounds came from the robbery of a gold escort at Eugowra Rocks in June, 1862. Apart from raw gold, this sum included 700 pounds in cash and notes of the Oriental Bank and 3,000 pounds in cash and notes of the Commercial Banking Company.
Another bushranger offered to show police where he had buried a hoard of sovereigns under a dead tree on the slopes of Mount Tennant. in what is now Australian Capital Territory but they hanged him instead. A cache of stolen sovereigns is supposed to be hidden somewhere around Tullaree, Victoria, and a fortune in Spanish dollars, looted from a bank on the Philippine island of Luzon is somewhere on the northwest coast of Western Australia.
More treasure trove is said to be buried near Ballina on the New South Wales coast. The story goes that this was landed in 1914 by the German steamer Sedlitz and may include some of the rare German New Guinea gold coins.
But the seas have yielded more coins to Australian collectors than the land. This is no surprise considering there are estimated to be more than 3,000 wrecks strewn around Australia's coasts. The law of treasure trove does not apply to coins taken from wrecks. In this case, the man in charge is the Receiver of Wrecks, an official appointed by the government in each State. Control exercised by these officials in the past has been mild, probably because no large sum of money has been involved until recently.
The first recorded salvage of numismatic interest came from the wreck of the clipper Dunbar, sunk off Sydney's South Head in August, 1857. Among the cargo was a consignment of Hanks & Lloyd penny and halfpenny tokens. Referring to the Dunbar in 1893, Hyman notes that "when a portion of the cargo was recovered, it was discovered that a number of these tokens and some coffin-handles, which had been included in the cargo, had become agglomerated by the action of the salt water."
The recovery of more relics in 1910 was marked by the striking of a medallet.
But it was not until the post-war improvement in skin-diving techniques that the main bulk of the tokens were recovered three or four years ago. However, the Dunbar was also reputed to be carrying 5,000 sovereigns and the authors have seen silver and gold coins of George 111, George IV, William IV and Victoria, including a beautiful 1855 Sydney Mint sovereign, said to have come from the wreck.
Wrecks of at least a score of old sailing ships litter Sydney Harbor, but so far only half of them have been located. James Murrell, sole survivor of the barque Peruvian, ripped apart on the Bellona Reef in the Coral Sea in 1846, said the vessel carried F-10,000 in gold and silver as trading money. The brigantine Maria, wrecked on Baudin Rocks, near Cape Jaffa, South Australia, in June, 1840, is supposed to have had 4,000 sovereigns on board.
These are only a few of the better authenticated wreck stories, but every trading vessel carried money, usually gold or silver and often foreign, so that every wreck is likely to hold something of interest.
