Robert MacKinnon - Treasure Hunter: Diving for Gold on North Americas Death Coast

Diving for Gold on
North Americas Death Coast

Robert MacKinnon
with Dallas Murphy

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Copyright 2012 by 3071776 Nova Scotia Limited.

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First edition: June 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacKinnon, Robert, 1950

Treasure hunter : diving for gold on North Americas death coast /
Robert MacKinnon with Dallas Murphy. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-58096-7

1. Treasure troves. 2. Deep diving. 3. Shipwrecks. I. Title.

G525.M2216 2012

622.190916344dc23

2012000974

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

This book is dedicated to the thousands of sailors,
men, women, and children who lost their lives in shipwrecks
along the shores of Nova Scotia; at Sable Island, Scatarie Island,
and St. Paul Island; and in the territorial sea of Nova Scotia.

It had been an excruciating crossing. Almost from the moment the ship Astraea cleared the outer harbor reaches of Limerick, Ireland, heading for Quebec, she had battled strong headwinds and an unrelenting string of slashing North Atlantic gales. She carried 251 Irish refugees from oppression and famine, people who had packed their meager possessions on their backs, bid good-bye to friends and relatives whom they knew they would never see again, then walked from all over Ireland to Limerick, where they boarded the ship Astraea, bound for a better life in North America. Most were packed for the duration into the hold (steerage), where circumstances even on easy crossings were atrocious; on this long, foul crossing they must have resembled gulag conditions.

When the end of their voyage was near, the Cape Breton coast would have been in sight, except for the fog, the rain, and the dark. The captain set up his approach through Cabot Strait between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, the only viable entrance into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Cabot Strait is 90 miles across at its narrowest point. That sounds like a lot of sea room, and its plenty under decent conditions. But after a rough month without a recent position fix, in fog and rain, its like threading the eye of a needle with ship killers on either hand.

Around midnight on May 7, 1834, the Astraea struck Little Lorraine Head just five miles north of Louisbourg Harbor and quickly sank. Out of the 251 immigrants and about 20 crewmen, 3 people survived. Residents of the nearby village of Little Lorraine gathered bodies from the beach and in the surf for two days and gave them a decent burial. It was all the passengers would ever get from their new life in North America, burial in a rocky patch of ground near the wreck site.

The Astraea is only one of thousands of shipwrecks that line the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where in some places wrecks are piled three deep. If the sheer number of wrecks is the defining criterion, then this is the deadliest coast in the Western Hemisphere. I know that from the historical record, but far more vividly from firsthand underwater exposure.

I am a treasure hunter. For over 40 years, I have been diving along the Cape Breton coast in search of treasure in the form of gold and silver coins, and bullion, and in the form of everyday cultural artifacts, the lost book and record of our past. Ive never wanted to be anything but a treasure hunter since before the age of literacy. And the process of discovery and recovery is as exciting to me now as when I was seventeen.

However, at this writing, as the onshore winds of winter give way to spring and the summer dive season to follow, I am converting my 42-foot workboat from a diving platform to a lobster boat. I like the lobstermans life, but Id much prefer to be preparing to excavate the HMS Leonidas, Le Chameau, the HMS Feversham, and especially the HMS Fantome fleet. But Im not allowed. By order of the Nova Scotia government, no one is allowed to recover treasure from these waters. Instead, the treasures, some of which I discovered and those from hundreds of yet-unknown wrecks, are to be left on the sea bottom, where they will inevitably be dispersed, destroyed, or simply swept away by the currents and the ice. Government officials, some of whom are competent marine archaeologists and surely know better, call this in-situ preservation. These people have used this obvious contradiction in terms to drive commercial treasure hunters from the water, despite the resulting loss to their own cultural history.