Mist goes bananas
The crew of the Mist of Avalon has gone bananas. Or rather, gone for bananas. Hours into our 36-hour voyage from Halifax to Cape Breton, we ran out of the fruity herb, and fantasies of its chewy yellow delight have since tormented our sea-stuck minds.
Landing at Louisburg, we send reconnaissance teams into the town on a banana run. As a result, I can tell you the total public banana population of Louisburg today: four. Well, zero now, as we bought them all.
Wandering around the soggy, slightly sad, Tim-Hortons-free town, I pop into a gift shop. A tourist is arguing with two clerks about the sustainability of Louisburg. Surely, he argues, all of the seasonal work – fishing, tourism – means no one can afford to live permanently in the old town?
“There are still people here!” responds the exasperated younger shop keeper, indicating the community outside with a sweeping gesture.
I continue along the street until the Louisburg Marine Museum catches my eye. Inside is the history of failure: ships laden with treasure wrecked along the vicious coast. Beryl Markham crashed here, too, though the British aviatrix’s adventure started in the air: she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, heading west. She crashed into Cape Breton before writing her Ernest Hemmingway-backed memoir, West With the Night.
But the character that captures me is the delightfully named Alex Storm, resident adventurer. He’s found even greater treasure than my four bananas: millions of dollars in silver and gold on the ocean floor, spilled centuries before by French wrecks.
When I track him down at his Louisburg home, Storm tells me about the long, strange road that led him to Cape Breton. Born in Java, Indonesia, in 1937, his Dutch family was imprisoned in Japanese concentration camps in World War Two. After the war, they drifted to the Netherlands. Following a stint in the military, Storm immigrated to Canada in the late 1950s. Toronto couldn’t hold him, and he moved to the bright lights of Louisburg, building and then working at the fortress for 37 years.
He tells me his passion was always water-buried treasure. In 1965, he found the booty of the 1725 wreck of the Chameau. Three years later, he discovered the 1711 Feversham.
The Chameau sank under 70 feet of water, its treasure sprawling into the rocky crevices of the ocean floor. At first, it appeared Storm and his crew had found just silver coins. They kept digging and made a greater find: thousands of gold coins.
“The gold had shifted a little deeper into the crevices because of the deeper weight. They were just as shiny as the day they went down,” he smiles.
But Storm doesn’t want to talk about past glories. These days, he’s all about the Great Louisburg Treasure. This is the big-time buried jackpot he’s hunting, a lost fortune that ought to knock Oak Island out of the top spot as holder of Nova Scotia’s supreme secret stash.
“It’s a hoard of money that was hidden after the last siege here in Louisburg in 1758,” he explains. “If it was found today, it would be worth about $44 million.”
I use all of my investigative journalist skills to extract the X-marks-the-spot out of him, but he’s keeping mum. All he’ll say is that four or five tons of silver and gold went missing just before the British took over, and he’s certain it’s still in Louisburg.
“The treasury was filled to the brim,” he says, citing a historic record from the trial of the unfortunate Jean Laborde in France. After losing Louisburg, the fort’s former treasurer was convicted (wrongly, in Storm’s opinion) of stealing the money and ordered to pay it back. They took everything he had, and it still wasn’t enough.
No one has since seen the treasure. Storm’s certain it lies beneath the earth of Louisburg.
“You can understand that those kind of stories, of the unfound treasure, are more important in my mind then the ones I’ve already found,” he tells me. “I know precisely to the penny what was hidden.”
But where? That’s the mystery.
Later, sailing to Sydney, I hang from the front of the bowsprit to unfurl the jib, the ocean churning underfoot. I can’t keep my eyes off the depths: I’m sure I see glittering yellow down there.
Maybe it’s just bananas.
First published in the Chronicle-Herald Aug. 9 2009