Gold on Cocos

Into Los Angeles' sunlit harbor one day last week wallowed the 156-foot three-masted schooner Metha Nelson, her once-trim hull battered, her rigging tattered, her Diesel auxiliary wheezing, her worn-out crew grumbling. Waiting on shore among reporters who thought they might get a story was a deputy U. S. marshal with a handful of subpoenas. The reporters got a whopper from Captain Robert B. Hoffmann, who had plenty to say: "A Hollywood treasure hunt--fooey! The whole thing was nuts from the very beginning." He soon was testifying before a grand jury and telling his story to the press:

Last September, Marino Bello, once stepfather of the late Jean Harlow, had asked him to outfit and man his vessel so that Bello and friends--notably Countess Dorothy di Frasso, a nurse named Evelyn Husby, and Richard E. Fulley, a cousin of Anthony Eden--could hunt for gold on Cocos Island, some 300 miles southwest of Costa Rica. Hoffmann signed on a crew consisting of three able-bodied seamen, a few waterfront hangers-on, some fine-looking NYA boys from Long Beach, some men who said they were engineers. In quick succession the Metha Nelson rammed another vessel, caromed off a breakwater, burned out a bearing. Bello did not mind; everything, he said, was going to be all right. Then tempers (except Bello's) began to burn out. Two Jewish members of the crew reminded the German captain that the Metha Nelson was a ship, not a Nazi concentration camp. He tossed them in the brig. Shore police at various ports of call tossed the rest of the crew in jail for getting drunk. Captain Hoffmann got them out. At sea the crew talked mutiny. In Guatemala the two Jews quit the ship. Bello did not mind. He asked the Captain to marry him to Nurse Husby.

They reached Cocos. Only vestiges of life on the barren island were so many picks and shovels left by previous treasure hunters, that "it looked like an abandoned WPA project." With Countess di Frasso offering suggestions, the crew "dug hell out of that island," but they found only rocks. Bello did not mind; they would go fishing, he said.

On the return trip Boatswain Rolf Barrman, armed with a gun and a bottle, terrorized the crew for three drunken days. The Countess asked Captain Hoffmann as a favor to her to shoot one Ben ("Bugsy") Siegal, who she feared had evil intentions. When a seaman named Bonelli misbehaved, Hoffmann shackled him to the anchor chain. Last straw: a gale blew away most of the rigging. An Italian motorship towed them to port.

Such was Captain Hoffmann's story. "A nice, pleasant trip," said Bello, "except for the storms."

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