Grosvenor Treasure

Arthur Conan-Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, seems to have had a thing about the Grosvenors, perhaps because in his day they were the richest family in the country and therefore a byword for wealth. His story "Silver Blaze" is based upon what now appears through DNA evidence to have been a real race-horse switch involving Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, in his story "The adventure of the Noble Batchelor" his "Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral" lives at "Grosvenor Mansions", he mentions the word Grosvenor in several other Holme's stories and one of the untold stories to which he refers is "the little problem of the Grosvenor Square furniture van". Conan-Doyle has another peculiar connection in that the author himself was involved in attempts to recover the treasure cargo of the ship "Grosvenor" an East Indiaman, wrecked on 4 August 1782 on the Pondoland coast of South Africa, north of the mouth of the Umzimvubu River, and later said to contain parts of the fabled "Peacock Throne".

No doubt by Conanal Doyle's time the word "Grosvenor" was associated with fabulous wealth and as such the ship became a magnet to draw the money of investors in pursuit of a share in the supposed treasures to be found in its wreck.

The Peacock Throne
The Peacock Throne was a famous jewelled throne that was the seat of the Mughal emperors of India. It was commissioned in the early 17th century by emperor Shah Jahan (Persian: شاه جهان; "King of the World") and was located in the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audiences, or Ministers' Room) in the Red Fort of Delhi. Shah Jahan commissioned many monuments, the best known of which is the Taj Mahal in Agra, which entombs his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The new throne was not initially given the name by which it became known. It was simply known as the "Jeweled Throne" or "Ornamented Throne" (Takht-Murassa). It received its name from later historians because of the peacock statues featured on it.

According to descriptions, this famous couch was supported by tall golden legs encrusted with thousands of precious stones of exceptional size and beauty. It included emeralds, pearls, rubies and sapphires. The back of the throne was composed of pure gold with fanned tails, the feathers made up entirely of gleaming jewels, pearls and diamonds. Twelve pillars supported the baldachin, whose gold ground was barely visible beneath the thick incrustation of precious stones. It eventually disappeared, but an empty marble platform in Delhi keeps alive the mystique of this most expensive and beautiful throne ever made. Even the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), in its description of the Diwan-i-Khas, says: "Over the marble pedestal in its centre stood the famous Peacock Throne...". Unfortunately, the pedestal is actually a replacement as the original was destroyed in 1857, and it is the wrong size for a six by four foot throne.

During the invasion of 1739, Nader Shah, the emperor of Iran, defeated the Indians on 24th February at the Battle of Karnal then entered Delhi (68 miles to the south - 0n 20th March) and looted the Peacock Throne. Among the known precious stones that Nadir Shah looted were the Akbar Shah, Great Mughal, Great Table, Koh-i-Noor, and Shah diamonds, as well as the Samarian spinel and the Timur ruby. These stones were either part of the Peacock Throne or were in possession of the Mughal emperors. The Akbar Shah Diamond was said to form one of the eyes of a peacock, as did the Koh-i-Noor. The Shah diamond was described by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier as being on the side of the throne. When Nadir Shah was assassinated by his own officers on 19 June 1747, the throne disappeared, most probably being dismantled or destroyed for its valuables, in the ensuing chaos. It was replaced by the Sun Throne which does not feature any peacocks. Over time, the Sun Throne was erroneously referred to as the Peacock Throne, a term that was later appropriated by the West as a metonym for the Persian monarchy.

The Wreck of the Grosvenor
According to one version, the Peacock throne was stolen in Khorasan (east of Iran) during the battles with the Kurds in 1747. Traces of it were lost. Supporters of this version believe that the imperial throne of the Great Mughals was dismantled and sold in parts. According to another version, employees of the British East India Company transported it to the island of Ceylon, planning to transfer it to England.

The Grosvenor had set sail from Trincomalee in Ceylon on June 13th for Portsmouth. The passengers included businessmen, colonial office representatives, 3 women and 6 children and she carried a cargo of general merchandise plus coins and diamonds about £80,000 in value. This sum would be worth far more today, but it was not a colossal amount by treasure-ship standards at that time.

Observation could not be taken for many days due to foul weather and the ships charts were defective. The Grosvenor’s captain thought he was three hundred miles from land, and the mate took no notice of shouts from the men up aloft that they could see lights ahead, lights which later turned out to be bush fires on the coast of Pondoland in South Africa, about 135 miles south of where the city of Durban now stands.

When land was finally sighted it was already too late. At 4.30 a.m. on 4th August, 1782, in a rising gale, the Grosvenor ran headlong on to the rocks. She heeled over and began to float off, but was held firmly by the jagged reef that had destroyed her.

She carried 138 people. 123 of them, including a handful of passengers, men, women and children, managed to scramble ashore. They were without provisions or weapons, and their attempted trek to the Dutch settlements 250 miles to the south ended in death from starvation, exposure and the spears of hostile tribes. Only five tough sailors got through to bring news of the disaster.

The Dutch settlers sent a relief expedition to find survivors of the Grosvenor, even though Holland was at war with Britain in 1782, but none was found. Another expedition in 1790, this time to find three women survivors rumoured to be living in a Kaffir village also failed. All they found were five cannons, a few pieces of iron ballast and some porcelain.

The Treasure Hunters
The "Wreck of the Grosvenor" (1877) was a nautical novel by William Clark Russell first published in 3 volumes by Sampson Low. According to John Sutherland, it was "the most popular mid-Victorian melodrama of adventure and heroism at sea." It was Russell's best-selling and best-known novel, though at the time of its first appearance in 1877, it published anonymously and remained popular and widely read in illustrated editions well into the first half of the 20th century. The novel was published nearly a century after the actual Wreck of the Grosvenor, in 1782; coincidentally the novel has the same name but is otherwise unrelated.

Then, in 1880, an expedition sailed to the site of the actual Grosvenor wreck, spurred on by reports of gold coins being picked up in the area by a Captain Bungay. The Grosvenor’s hull was still on the rocks, and, using dynamite to help them, the salvage team, led by a man named Sidney Turner and a Lieutenant Beddoes of the Durban Volunteer Artillery, recovered some gold and silver coins and a few other valuables. They also found nine cannons lying among the rocks, and local "Kaffirs" told them of a box of treasure rumoured to have been buried on the coast by the survivors of the wreck. By the beginning of 1885 a local chief Mqikela, who had grown disaffected with the British government and wanted to develop his own harbour, concluded an agreement with Turner, in which Turner was granted 20,000 acres of land, including the coastline on which the Grosvenor had foundered. In return for this Turner was to select a suitable site for a harbour and undertake the necessary construction work. The site chosen for this new venture was at the mouth of the Mkweni River, close to the site of the Grosvenor wreck. Turner named it Port Grosvenor. As port captain and harbourmaster, Turner collected customs dues and managed the harbour and pilotage. Turner was obliged by his financial circumstances to resign himself to this situation as he, by 1884, had a family of seven children and a wife to support. Despite objections from the Cape Government the port was officially opened. The Cape Government, despite having no jurisdiction in the area, later declared Turner's concession illegal under tribal law, and he forfeited the land, his home and his position. The family moved to Port St Johns and Port Grosvenor, from its closure in 1886, faded into obscurity.

Conan Doyle
Conan-Doyle was certainly aware of Clark-Russel's book:


 * "Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves."

Thus writes Dr. Watson (according to Arthur Conan Doyle) in "The Five Orange Pips" first published in The Strand Magazine in November 1891. In his "Through the Magic Door" (1906) Conan Doyle wrote that "Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf for himself, but anyhow one could not miss out The Wreck of the Grosvenor."

The Grosvenor Bullion Syndicate Ltd (1921-1923) was set up to retrievethe treasure from the sunken Grosvenor, with the help and assistance of Conan Doyle. He himself invested in at least 1000 shares in the company. "Too Much for the Spirits" is a letter written by Arthur Conan Doyle first published in the Daily Express No. 6669 on 30 august 1921. It reads:


 * "Sir, — Mr. Stuart Cumberland's good natured banter does not really touch the spot. There is no mystery at all about the Grosvenor, and her position is known to an inch. Her deck has already been explored. The problem lies in the skill needed by submarine workers in such uneasy waters. These human and mechanical difficulties are for our own wits to solve, otherwise the human race would lose all initiative and become mere automata upon the earth. As to using an apport medium to fetch out the cargo, apport mediumship is a rare and fitful phenomenon in process of examination and definition. In thirty-six years I have only personally examined two cases, though others have been more fortunate. These higher forces are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and psychic research is engaged in defining their limitations. To make some great demand upon them and make that a test of their existence is as if in the days of the first short flutters of aeroplasms a critic had said: "Well, if you claim to fly, why don't you fly over the Atlantic. We need fuller knowledge, wider experience, and more complete control, all of which will come in lime, though its advent will not be hastened by the jokes of Mr. Stuart Cumberland."

The Grosvenor Bullion Syndicate’s prospectus even listed items like 720 gold bars and 19 boxes of precious stones, claiming that "old manuscripts" had been found in the India Office in London about these treasures. It was all pure fantasy. Doyle later wrote in his memoirs "Memories and Adventures" (1924) that he had become aware of the story of the Grosvenor treasure while in South Africa. Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900, during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). He also mentions the wreck in "Some personalia about Sherlock Holmes" an article written by Arthur Conan Doyle published in The Strand Magazine in December 1917:


 * "Buried treasures are naturally among the problems which have come to Mr. Holmes. One genuine case was accompanied by the diagram here reproduced. It refers to an Indianian which was wrecked upon the South African coast in the year 1782. If I were a younger man I should be seriously inclined to go personally and look into that matter. The ship contained a remarkable treasure, including, I believe, the old crown regalia of Delhi. It is surmised that they buried these near the coast and that this chart is a note of the spot. Each Indiaman in those days had its own semaphore code, and it is conjectured that the three marks upon the left are signals from a three-armed semaphore. Some record of their meaning might perhaps even now be found in the old papers of the India Office. The circle upon the right gives the compass bearings. The larger semicircle may be the curved edge of a reef or of a rock. The figures above are the indications how to reach the X which marks the treasure. Possibly they may give the bearings as 186 feet from the 4 upon the semicircle. The scene of the wreck is a lonely part of the country, but I shall be surprised if sooner or later someone does not seriously set to work to solve the mystery."

Note that at this point there is still no mention of the Peacock Throne - just "crown regalia". The involvement of the throne appears to date from 1921, when one C. B. A. C. Chase mentions it in an article in the periodical "Overseas".

John Bock
In 1927 a prospector named John Bock found 1,038 diamonds on the beach near the wreck and was sent to prison for his pains. He reported his find and despite the evidence of experts that the diamonds were not typically South African – in other words they almost certainly came from India via the wreck – he was given three years for having placed stones where they were not normally found. As for his diamonds, they were confiscated. Whether these came from the Grosvenor or from the pockets of a passenger who brought them ashore will never be known.

Professor Kirby
In 1945 Professor Kirby of the University of Witwatersrand flatly stated in an article that the Grosvenor was not a treasure ship. He even discovered that a forged document had been placed in a book in the British Museum to whip up public interest. In 1951 Professor Kirby wrote "A Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor", which should have finished off the myth for ever. But it is still being told, Peacock Throne and all.

Sources and Links

 * Peacock Throne: on Wikipedia;
 * South African Daily Dispatch;
 * The Peacock Throne: a blog;