Sea-Gropers

The trawlers Spray and Foam, groping the Atlantic for 750 miles off the Virginia Capes with a mile of steel cable sagging between them along the ocean floor, last week had a bite. The cable tightened, went taut, snapped. Whatever it had snared was ponderous. Repaired, the cable caught again and soon Diver Fred Neilson of Brooklyn clamped on his helmet, dropped overside like a sinker, 213 feet to the bottom. When he followed his stream of bubbles back up to the surface, he told his comrades that they had indeed found the Merida, a ship sunk 14 years ago in collision. She was lying on her starboard side, he said, still well preserved; he had been able to read her name on bows and stern.

In the sunken vessel is a strong room; in the strong room $4,000,000 in gold and silver bullion. The sea-gropers knew just where to cut through the side of the hull. Weather permitting, they planned to hoist out the 30 tons of treasure in great wicker baskets lifting a ton at a time. Two weeks they estimated the job would take them, before they sailed back to New York to enrich their backers with a 10,000% profit.

The backers, a syndicate called the Sea Hawks, organized last year and sent the Spray and Foam on a prospecting cruise. The Merida was found then, as it had been previously by other would-be salvagers, but heavy autumn seas prevented diving.

Sea Hawks: J. A. Drexel Biddle, poloist; J. Harry Alexander, President of the Turf and Field Club; W. Hayward Drayton, of the Stock Exchange; Worthington Davis, sometime Harvard footballer; Roswel C. Tripp, banker; Franklin T. Mallory, financier, husband of tennis-playing Molla Bjurstedt Mallory.