The Chameau Treasure by Peter N. Moogk
The Vancouver Numismatic Society
This 1724 gold louis from the Amiens mint in France came from the wreck of Le Chameau [the Camel]. This armed, naval transport vessel was carrying 83,310 livres value in gold, silver, and copper coins to pay and clothe the garrison troops in Canada, then a French colony. This ship had been ferrying goods and people between France and Canada since 1719. In 1725 Le Chameau sailed from the port of La Rochelle, bound for Quebec City. She had 316 passengers aboard. On August 27th, 1725, the ship was off course and was wrecked on rocks along the east coast of Cape Breton. There were no living survivors to explain the disaster. Early attempts to salvage the ship's cargo were unsuccessful.
Although the name "Chameau Rock" identified the general location of the shipwreck, just east of Louisbourg, no one had located the wreck's precise position before 1965. Three men formed a partnership in 1961 to recover the ship's lost treasure. The principal member was Alex Storm. He was born in 1937 in Surabaya, in the Netherlands East Indies [the future Indonesia]. His family returned to the Netherlands after Indonesia's independence. There he learned a trade and moved to Canada in the 1950s, where he was employed in salvaging metal from Atlantic Ocean shipwrecks. His cousin Frans Storm van 's Gravesande was my classmate at a Dutch boarding school. Alex shortened his surname for the convenience of Canadians. By the 1960s he was involved in the reconstruction of the Fortress of Louisbourg, where I was working as a historical researcher.
His two original partners lost interest in the recovery operation which had not succeeded. Alex carried on with two new partners without officially dissolving the first partnership. That oversight would cause trouble for him. In 1965 the new trio recovered some 8,000 coins and many artifacts from Le Chameau. The gold coins were Louis minted in 1723-1725 at mints in southwestern France. They were nicknamed "mirlitons" because the intersecting L's on the reverse were thought to resemble a flute. They were in presentable condition. The silver half and full ecus dated from 1724-25 and were identified by the four L's on the back. This was a short-lived issue. Silver does not fare well in salt water and most the silver coins were pitted and sometimes fused together in clumps. The copper coins were so corroded that they were mostly unidentifiable. The 1961 partners instituted a legal action to obtain a share of the treasure. Most of the coins, however, were awarded to Alex by the court. His persistence in exploring the cold and turbulent waters off Cape Breton had led to the discovery. Unwisely, most of the coins were consigned to one auction in 1971 run by the Parke-Bernet Galleries of New York. The gold and silver coins, hitherto, had been rare issues, but flooding the market with so many at one time depressed their value. A little over $200,000 US was realized from their sale. Had they been introduced slowly into the collectors' market, they would have fetched higher prices. In 2006 the Royal Canadian Mint honored the Chameau treasure by striking a gold, miniature replica of a French louis d'or like those recovered from the shipwreck.
It would be nice to think that this money brought happiness to Alex. It really did not, although he enjoyed the fame of being the discoverer of the Chameau's bounty. As a member of the Cape Breton Coin Club, I had obtained a blurry example of a silver ecu. Alex had held back a few premium specimens and I was hoping that he might sell me one of them. That did not happen. Companies that knew of his windfall pestered him with investment offers. When he enquired casually about a wind-powered electrical generator, the company sent him a kit right away. He felt obliged to pay for it. Such experiences made him wary and distrustful. Being a Jew who had survived life in a Japanese concentration camp, Alex's distrustfulness was a natural response. He did manage a trip to Israel and had a small bag of Israeli soil as a souvenir. His guarded nature meant that I did not obtain a complete picture of his character. I suspect that he gained almost as much from writing about the discovery of the Chameau's treasure as from the coins themselves. He died in August 2018 on Cape Breton.