In 1808, a shrewd and evidently a “highly-calculating” Yankee took the trouble to express the loss suffered by the United States in consequence of the then embargo, in a form very nicely designed to go straight home to the businesses and bosoms of his compatriots. The sum amounted to forty-eight millions of dollars, which, said the ingenious arithmetician, at seventeen dollars to the pound weight, would weigh two millions eight hundred and twenty-three pounds avoirdupois; and it would require to carry it one thousand two hundred and sixty waggons, allowing each waggon to carry one ton; and the distance the waggons would occupy, allowing each waggon seventy-two feet, would be seventeen miles. Forty-eight millions of dollars, placed edge to edge in a straight line, would extend over a space of one thousand one hundred and thirty-four miles. “The above sum,” added the computator, “would be sufficient to furnish one hundred and twenty-one sail of the line, completely equipped for a twelve months’ cruise.” So much for the length, weight, and worth of an embargo in 1808.

Now, what sort of result, I wonder, would come of a calculation of the weight, and the length, and the waggon-filling capacity of all the money—in hard cash, in bars, and ingots—which will have been carried into and out of this kingdom by ships flying the mercantile ensign between January 1 and December 31 of this present year? I sometimes fancy that it needs a shipwreck and a great foundering of specie to make the “average” public realize the prodigious treasure which is at all hours of the day and night, year after year, and year after year growing vaster in bulk and in value, afloat under the colours flown by the ships of the British merchant service. Let any one, during any six consecutive days, take note of the published records of the bullion movements, and he would be astounded by the results. “The Bokhara has arrived at Plymouth, from China, with £42,450 in gold.” “The Khedive has taken £81,598 in specie for the East, and the Peshawur £65,600.” “The Pekin has brought £50,012 in specie.” “The Sutlej, £16,110 from Bombay.” “The Galicia, from Valparaiso, £80,000 in silver.” “The Iberia, from Australia, £58,000 in gold.” “The Elbe, from the River Plate, £93,379 in specie.” “The Kaisar-i-Hind, £46,000 in bar silver, and £15,000 in bar gold.” “The Eider, from New York, with £5920 in specie.” “The Trave, from New York, £7941.” “The Carthage, with 50,000 sovereigns from Melbourne.” “The Ruapehu, from Wellington (N.Z.), with £10,000.” And so on, and so on, day after day, month after month. Think of a year of figures to which the contribution of a single day may mean as much as half a million! But supplement this huge floating pile of gold and silver with the value of the cargoes, with the produce of the east and west and south, the tea, the silks, the cotton, the tobacco—the hundreds and thousands of packages for which the despairing cataloguist can find no better name than “sundries.” Where be the old galleons, the old plate-ships, the monstrous castellated egg-shells, with their millions of pieces of eight,^[50] alongside the Aladdin-like metal holds, stored with the mintage of the four corners of the earth, which, in these days, the propeller is steadily threshing through the billows of all the world’s seas?

Yet my veneration for the past would make me very earnestly distinguish. It is the number in our time that makes the wonder; the thought of several hundreds of great ocean steamers—English, French, Italian, Dutch—all afloat at once, heading along the thirty-two points, every one of them carrying a fortune, small or great—£10,000 or £100,000—in money, among the other commodities which form her freight; it is the fancy of this aggregate wealth as compared with the cargoes of the treasure ships of other times which gives to the sea-borne specie of this age its prodigious numerical significance. But, ship for ship, our grandsires beat us. You never hear in our time of a single steamer carrying the load of gold, silver, plate, and treasure that was heaped into the hold of the butter-box of the last and earlier centuries. Let me cite an instance or two.

On February 28, 1769, there arrived at Lisbon a ship-of-war, named the Mother of God, from Rio Janeiro, having made the voyage in one hundred and twenty days. She had on board nine millions of crusades in gold, two millions and a half of crusades in diamonds, and about a hundred thousand “crowns tournois” in piastres, making in the whole twenty-nine millions and fifty thousand livres tournois. So much for a single ship. In 1774 two Spanish ships from Vera Cruz and the Havannah arrived with twenty-two millions of crowns, exclusive of merchandize valued roundly at twenty-seven millions of crowns. Such examples could be multiplied. Of the cargo of an English Indiaman in 1771, one item alone—a diamond in the rough—was valued at £100,000, “coming to be manufactured here on account of one of the Asiatic Nabobs,” and on the private freight of this vessel I read that policies of insurance were opened at Lloyd’s Coffee House at a high premium, so costly were her contents and so doubtful her safe arrival.^[51]

In those early days of extraordinary long voyages, clumsy ships, and of a navigation rendered not a little insecure by the blunders or the conjectures of the chart-makers, we should expect to meet with a great number of costly disasters, the more since it was the custom to commit to a single hold the treasure that would in this day be distributed among eight or ten great and powerful steamers. Yet this sort of shipwreck is not nearly so frequently occurring in marine annals as one would suppose. When it happens it takes an historical significance much more profound than that which attaches to loss of life. The memory of the foundering of £200,000 of silver and gold will survive the drowning of a thousand souls in a coup. The muse of history has much in her of the philosophy of the cynic who declared that a man will forget his wife, his children, yea, and his country; but he will never forget the person who borrowed £5 from him and forgot to repay it. There was La Lutine, for instance. When some time ago there was talk of a proposal to recover the money that went down in her, everybody, somehow or other, seemed to remember the loss of such a ship, though it happened above eighty years ago. But suppose it had been the Buckinghamshire or the Windsor Castle?

Yet, as a costly shipwreck, La Lutine deserves a reference. She was a thirty-two gun vessel, commanded by Captain Skynner, and she went ashore on the bank of the Fly Island Passage on the night of October 9, 1799. At first she was reputed to have had £600,000 sterling in specie on board. This was afterwards contradicted by a statement that “the return from the Bullion Office makes the whole amount about £140,000 sterling.” “If,” I find in a contemporary account, “the wreck of the unfortunate Lutine should be discovered, there may be reason to hope for the recovery of the bullion on board of her. In the reign of James II. some English adventurers fitted out a vessel to search for and weigh up the cargo of a rich Spanish ship which had been lost on the coast of South America. They succeeded, and brought home £300,000, which had been forty-four years at the bottom of the sea. Captain Phipps, who commanded, had £20,000 for his share, and the Duke of Albemarle £90,000. A medal was struck in honour of this event in 1687.”^[52]

There was a very costly wreck in 1767. She was a Dutch East Indiaman, and foundered in a storm within three leagues of the Texel, taking down all hands but six, and £500,000. But it was not necessary that a vessel should have so much as an ounce of precious metal in her to be a rich ship. One of the costliest cargoes ever carried was found in 1764 in the galleon Santissima Trinidad; for she had on board the vast collection of foreign curiosities formed by Governor Pigot and shipped at Madras, consisting of wild beasts, serpents, and so forth. There was a great loss in 1773. The Dons again! You would say that the price of four such Armadas as that of 1588 went down in the last century alone in the shape of gold, silver, and plate. She was the annual register ship, as the term then was, and had in her five hundred thousand piastres and ten thousand ounces of gold on account of the king, and twice that sum on the merchants’ account, making her a very rich ship. She foundered during the passage, and no man escaped to tell how and when. In the same year the Dutch lost the Antonietta, an Indiaman, and with her sank £700,000 sterling, besides jewels of great value.

In 1871 a Scotchman, named Johnston, patented a treasure safe for ships. His proposal was that the safe should be suspended at the ship’s davits, ready at an instant’s notice to be lowered into the sea. He contrived that the safe should detach itself in the event of a sudden calamity, and float off to be picked up by some passing ship, or washed ashore. The idea was ingenious; but it is not every captain who would relish the thought of an unsinkable chest full of gold and jewels hanging at his davits ready to the hand of the first daring Jack who should depend upon a black night and the navigable qualities of the chest to come safely off with a few hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet what pickings the deep would have offered—would still offer—if the money and jewels carried by ships were stowed in contrivances which floated after the vessel was gone! The mind is oppressed by the splendid possibilities the fancy suggests. Here we have something beyond the dreams of avarice. Where might not such chests be sought with large promise of dazzling discovery? The ocean is a miser. Like some old woman found dead of starvation, with guineas and bank-notes stitched away in her rags, is the sea in her beggarly art of concealing treasure among the squalid weediness of her shores. “Some time ago,” says an old report, “on the arrival of the Two Sisters, Captain O’Neale, of Bristol, at Dominica, a chest containing upwards of £40,000 in Portugal gold fell overboard as they were putting it into a boat, and was lost in ten fathoms of water.” They had nothing but Dr. Halley’s diving-bell in those times, and the money lies at this hour where it sank, only deeper perhaps, and very much out of sight. How such a disaster would be dealt with now may be known by reference to the comparatively recent recovery of some hundred thousand pounds off the Grand Canary from the hold of a steamer sunk, if my memory is correct, in about thirty fathoms of water.

There was a curious kind of smuggling practised aboard the old ships, and there is reason to believe that in many instances the actual value of the treasure in foundered vessels was never declared. An example is given of a Spanish register ship falling into the hands of the British. Certain discoveries determined the captors not to sell her, but to break her up themselves, believing that by so doing they might find valuables artfully concealed. The duty on gold was high, and to evade it many of the bars of that metal had been thinly coated with pewter and denominated “fine pewter” in the invoice, by order of the Spanish merchants. The particulars of the freight are worth giving, as illustrative of the cargoes of that age (1793) and of the great value entrusted to a single ship. There were six hundred and ninety-four cases of silver, each containing three thousand dollars; thirty-three cases of gold, besides plate and jewels of the value of £500,000; seventy-two hundred of redwood; sixteen cases of silver in bars; two thousand two hundred and sixty-two quintals of bark of different weights; two thousand two hundred and forty quintals of cocoa; four thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven cases of pepper; a great number of cases of lead, wool, sugar, medical roots, gum of cocoa, together with hides, skins, barrels of honey, and eleven cases of the various productions of Peru. “This cargo,” says the account, “has been two years in collecting from different parts of the coast, and is without exception the richest that ever was trusted on board of any single ship. It is impossible to form a just estimate of its value, but it is certainly not overrated when it is stated as twelve or thirteen hundred thousand pounds. Think of the costly wreck such a vessel as this would have made! and certainly, so far as her freighters were concerned, she was as good as foundered when she was captured.”

The following illustration of the old methods of concealing treasure I find in a little sea-book published anonymously in 1834: “I once went, with others, on board a prize we had taken to make the usual search. After rummaging the sail-room, I got into the store-room, where I saw a case filled with bran, and thrusting my hand among it, for I thought it might prove a hiding-place, I found something hard wrapped up in a piece of blue cloth. Not having leisure to examine it at the moment, I slipped it into the pocket of my jacket, and was coming away, when I trod upon something, and looking down at the place, saw a potatoe that I had crushed with an English guinea peeping from its hiding place. I picked up all I could and jumped into the boat.... The murphies yielded me about thirty guineas; and when I undid the parcel there came from its swaddling clothes a most beautiful gold watch set round with diamonds.”

Great in its way was that treasure of seven million five hundred thousand dollars and the value of a million and a half in cochineal and other effects which five men-of-war, under the command of Rear-Admiral Don Adrian Caudron Cantin, brought to Cadiz in 1775, and the one thousand five hundred octaves of gold, two hundred thousand crusades of silver, and the eighty serons of cochineal which, in the same year, were brought by a ship to Lisbon from the Brazils. In more modern times the costliness of shipwreck is to be found in the destruction of the fabric and her cargo rather than in the loss of the treasure on board. Whatever may have been the worth of a galleon, as a ship, there need be no scruple in concluding that when brand-new her value would be but that of a toy in comparison with such ocean mail boats as now convey specie and “valuables.” The sinking of an Atlantic, Indian, or Australian liner—even with a clean hold—would represent an immense treasure if told in dollars, ducats, or piastres; and when you add the cargo of such a craft along with the passengers’ luggage, which must often include a quantity of jewellery expressing many thousands of pounds alone, some astonishing figures would be the result. As a matter of fact, our later shipwrecks do not point to the same heavy losses in specie and articles manufactured out of the precious metals as were sustained in former times. The destruction or capture of a single ship in the last and in preceding centuries would frequently signify the sinking of a million to a million and a half of pounds sterling in chests of pieces of eight, in ingots and bars, and in religious decorations, and this without reference to the cargo, the value of which may be inferred when we hear of tea selling at two guineas a pound.^[53]

The Royal Charter is the most notable modern instance of the wreck of a “treasure” ship that I can just now call to mind. She left Australia with £350,000 in her. Of this sum, says Charles Dickens in his chapter on this dreadful shipwreck in the “Uncommercial Traveller,” £300,000 worth were recovered. At the time of the novelist’s visit to the spot where she had driven ashore, “the great bulk of the remainder,” writes he, “was surely and steadily coming up. Some loss of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at first sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and wide over the beach like sea shells, but most other golden treasure would be found. So tremendous had the force of the sea been when it broke the ship that it had beaten one great ingot of gold deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron work, in which also several loose sovereigns, that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they had been forced there.” This is a curiosity of disaster, but mightily suggestive of the sea’s miserly trick of concealing her plunder. Meanwhile, how much gold and silver, minted and otherwise, is annually afloat? How many millions are yearly borne over the deep to and from India, America, Australia, China, and South Africa, by English steamers alone? There should be no difficulty in making the calculation, which, when arrived at, must surely yield a fine idea of the treasure over which the red flag flies, and an excellent notion of the trust that is reposed in the British shipmaster, and of the high and sterling qualities which go to the fulfilment of it.