The General Grant's Gold: Shipwreck and Greed in the Southern Ocean

The wreck in 1866 of the General Grant in the desolate sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands is one of the world's great nautical mysteries, a story that still tantalizes and thrills. When the ship was crushed in a cave beneath a sheer cliff face, only few crew members and a handful of passengers managed to escape in a lifeboat. For more than two years they lived a hand-to-mouth existence on a nearby island before they were rescued. This story is extraordinary in itself, but soon compelling legends spread that the ship had sunk with a fabulous hoard of gold from the Victorian goldfields. For 140 years, expeditions and bounty hunters have searched for the ship and her elusive cargo. In the relentless seas of the Auckland Islands, it has been a soul-destroying endeavour. Locating the vessel has been difficult enough; finding the gold has proved impossible - unless one of those early expeditions really did find it In this book Madelene Ferguson Allen and Ken Scadden tell the full story of the voyage from Melbourne