Gold at Hell Gate

At anchor in the scummy waters of Manhattan's East River, off 130th Street, lolled the 50-ft. white yacht Josephine with a red work flag flying at her masthead. For weeks & weeks Josephine had gone undisturbed about her business until one day last month the big seagoing tug Terminal bustled up, dropped anchor, went to work. From the Josephine came indignant cries of "poacher!" The men of Terminal retorted that nobody owned the river. A Coast Guard cutter appeared, ordered the tug to keep clear of the cables on the bottom. By last week the magic word GOLD was racing up & down East River, its dingy banks were lined with spectators gawping through field glasses, and rowboats rented at a premium.

History: On Nov. 23, 1780, the 28-gun British frigate Hussar, Captain Charles M. Pole commanding, sank in the East River near treacherous Hell Gate.

Legend: Aboard the Hussar was $4,000,000 in gold destined for British troops. (A U. S. correspondent, searching through admiralty and treasury files in London, found no record of lost gold. Yet an historian of Manhattan Island--Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes--reports that the Hussar's rudder was recovered in 1811, that attempts to recover the treasure were made in 1818 and 1824, that some gold was actually brought up in 1856 by Worcester Hussar Co.)

Backers of the Terminal's search were Minor Cooper Keith, grandnephew, heir and namesake of the man who founded United Fruit Co., and a salvage company whose president, Thomas P. Connolly, had invented a new kind of diving-suit. Weighing 675 Ib. on deck, the suit has a head and body of steel, with grotesque protuberances for eyes and something that looks like a nose. Of rubber reinforced by interwoven copper strips, the arms and legs become flexible when subjected to high underwater pressure. The two parts of the suit join at the waist instead of around the neck. The diver goes down without an airhose, carries an oxygen bottle, a respirator, caustic soda to absorb carbon dioxide. Aboard the Terminal last week this fantastic diving suit was called "Eleanor."

The tall, gangling, muscular man who went down encased in ''Eleanor" is a crack deep-sea diver named Roy Robert Hansen. He worked on the S-51 and S-4 jobs when those U. S. submarines went to the bottom (TIME, Oct. 5, 1925; Dec. 26, 1927). His father, a diver called "Big Charley," was killed working in the Great Lakes, and "Big Charley's" father also lost his life diving. Roy Hansen counts on a generous cut of the Hussar's riches to retire.

The Terminal's procedure was to pay out 2,000 ft. of cable with Hansen in "Eleanor" at the end, then drag him along against the swirling tide. Though the depth was never more than 112 ft., Hansen thought it the nastiest job of his career, said he was bumped against rocks and whirled around until he was groggy. By week's end he had encountered six drowned hulks, identified none as the Hussar. But Diver Hansen appraised as practically nil the chances of the rival Josephine, whose backers remained anonymous last week. Wearing ordinary diving-suits, the Josephine's divers worked only during slack tide, 20 min. twice a day.

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