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Kelly Tarlton's Final Treasure Hunt
"It'll be there. Absolutely" insisted veteran treasure hunter John Dearling. "You can't get it out of the reef without wrecking it … It's basically welded into that", agreed his fellow treasure hunter, Peter Pettigrew.
But as Hamish Williams was standing in front of a 4.5-meter-tall iron anchor, listening to the thumping of a concert speaker, he was having his doubts.
For the past year, Hamish and an intrepid group of allies had been trying to complete an unfinished adventure: Relocating the third anchor of the Saint Jean Baptiste, the oldest European artifact left in New Zealand.
The Anchor had last been seen at the bottom of Doubtless Bay in 1982 by underwater treasure hunter (and aquarium founder) Kelly Tarlton.
But while everyone insisted the Anchor must still be beneath the sea, nobody had seen it in 43 years.
Now, Hamish was seeing an object which exactly matched the description of that historical relic. Far from the bottom of the ocean, it was standing high and dry amid gyrating party-goers at a music festival halfway between Warkworth and Mangawhai.
Efforts to finish an adventure 250 years in the making had taken yet another bizarre twist.
The voyage of the Saint Jean Baptiste
The story of the Saint Jean Baptiste is as tragic as it is dramatic.
The name of the ship's captain, Jean-François Marie De Surville, draws a bitter chuckle from Tiger Tukariri. His Ngāti Kahu ancestors were among those who first greeted the Frenchman on his arrival over 250 years ago.
"That punk" Tiger says of De Surville. "That punk who stole our tupuna."
Captain De Surville had landed in Doubtless Bay out of desperation.
He'd never intended to sail for these shores, but with his crew dropping dead of scurvy, De Surville was forced to make for New Zealand where his men were nursed back to health by Tangata Whenua, including a local chief named Ranginui.
"He took them in, and brought them back to good health," Tiger says.
First contact with Ngāti Kahu was peaceful. The sailors were welcomed ashore with the first documented example of a Pōwhiri, and given permission to restock on supplies of water and firewood.
But on 27 December 1769, it all went wrong.
A huge storm nearly wrecked the Saint Jean Baptiste against the rugged cliffs of the Karikari Peninsula.
As the ship's bosun, Guilliam Labe recorded the near miss in his journal: "The sea was breaking over us and driving us onto the coast. To make matters worse, the vessels stayed for quite a long time without answering to her rudder, and we stared death in the face, seeing rocks along the length of the ship fit to make your hair stand on end."
Against the odds, the ship was saved, but in the process, three of its enormous iron anchors - each measuring more than 4 meters tall and weighing a tonne and a half - were lost.
In the aftermath of the storm, the peaceful relationship between Ngāti Kahu and the French sailors was fractured.
One of the ship's small boats had broken loose and washed ashore. It was claimed by members of the Iwi - who understood it to be a gift from Tangaroa.
The French interpreted this as theft, and retaliated by burning huts and fishing nets. They then seized two carved waka, and kidnapped a local rangatira. This chief, named Ranginui, had given shelter and food to French sailors stranded on shore by the storm just a day earlier.
The Saint Jean Baptiste sailed away, but neither Ranginui nor De Surville would survive the voyage to South America.
Ranginui died suffering from scurvy and lack of water. De Surville drowned after the ship's small boat capsized in heavy surf off the coast of Peru.
For centuries, the anchors sat undisturbed at the bottom of Doubtless Bay. Forgotten, silent relics of one of the earliest encounters between Europe and Aotearoa.
That was, until a man called Kelly Tarlton came along.
The treasure hunter
In the 1970s, Kelly Tarlton was world-famous in New Zealand as an underwater treasure hunter.
Kelly exhaustively researched over a thousand shipwrecks around the coast of Aotearoa, and explored hundreds of them. Together with his wife Rosemary, he founded the Kelly Tarlton Museum of Shipwrecks - housed on a converted sugar freighter named the Tui, which was parked near the Treaty grounds at Waitangi.
Over time, the museum was filled with treasures Kelly discovered - including the gold of the Elingamite, wrecked near the Three Kings Islands in 1902, and the Rothschild jewels from the Tasmania, which went down in 1897 off Māhia Peninsula.
Sadly, after Kelly's death, all this treasure was stolen, and the Tui itself was destroyed by fire in 2025.
But through the 1970s, the Shipwreck Museum generated enough cash for Kelly to fund his undersea adventures. To supplement that income, Kelly eventually decided to diversify his enterprise by building the famous aquarium in Auckland, which still bears his name.
Newspapers and magazines were full of accounts of Kelly's daring expeditions - like his gruelling voyage to to the subantarctic Auckland Islands in a fruitless search for the gold of the General Grant, and his efforts at locating the notorious Lutine, which had claimed the lives of many divers in the years since it sank off the coast of the Netherlands in 1799.
Then, of course, there was Kelly's discovery of the first anchor of the Saint Jean Baptiste in 1974.
Anyone who has visited Te Papa museum in Wellington has undoubtedly seen this anchor. It's now mounted in the foyer, where it looms over visitors, - creased and crevassed like old dry wood thanks to two centuries of underwater corrosion.
The second anchor was discovered by Northland diver Mike Bearsley, and donated to Te Ahu Museum in Kaitaia.
Kelly Tarlton located the third anchor, and had plans to recover it. But tragically, in 1985, he died in his sleep, having just shaken the hand of the 100-thousandth customer at his then brand-new aquarium the day prior.
Kelly's death at just 47 years old was a tragedy, most especially for his wife Rosemary and teenage daughters Nicole and Fiona, but also for the crew of treasure hunters he'd forged around him.
People like Dave Moran, had become deeply attached to Kelly both through his treasure hunts, and his efforts to build the aquarium.
"Kelly had it all worked out," Dave remembers. "We were going to just go wreck hunting for the rest of our lives. And then the guy that put the magic together and told the team together was gone, and no one's really replaced him."
An unfinished adventure
Broadcaster Hamish Williams first heard this story from Kelly's youngest daughter, Fiona Tarlton, sitting on the back of his yacht as they sailed past the Poor Knights Islands.
Fiona had agreed to crew for Hamish for a trip up north, but before they departed, Hamish was surprised to be passed a bouquet of flowers by Fiona's mother, Rosemary Tarlton.
Rosemary explained the flowers were to be thrown overboard at the Poor Knights Islands, where Kelly's ashes were scattered.
A few days later, as they tossed the flowers into the water, Hamish was entertained and impressed by Fiona's stories of her adventurous father. But he was equally enthralled by the idea of an incomplete adventure. An anchor left sitting at the bottom of the ocean - unseen in 40 years.
Hamish pitched the idea of completing the hunt to rediscover the third anchor, and secured RNZ's support to make a podcast about the endeavour.
But with no experience as a treasure hunter, he knew he'd need some help.
Hamish enlisted the advice and support of Kelly's old treasure hunting companions - a fascinating and accomplished set of characters, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in the maritime world.
Peter Pettigrew - Kelly's brother-in-law, who had been with him when he found the third anchor, insisted the key is a sextant, the tool De Surville himself had used to chart his position in Doubtless Bay back in 1769.
Peter insisted the reason nobody has found the anchor since Kelly is because they don't use the device.
"They don't take a sextant and they don't take, you know, the sextant readings from the journal and do what Kelly did, and you plot exactly where he says he was. And if you do that, that's where the anchor is."
As Peter explained, Kelly had used the sextant to reverse engineer De Surville's old maps, adjusted them for the movement of the magnetic pole over the past two centuries, then searched the area using a device known as a magnetometer - which can detect iron deep beneath the water.
Diving down on a signal from the magnetometer, Peter says they found the anchor almost immediately.
"Nearly speared me up the bum," Peter laughed.
Kelly had carefully noted the location of the anchor, but over the past 4 decades, the coordinates had seemingly been lost, and nobody had seen the anchor since.
Anchors and... anchor-shaped rocks
In the process of working on his podcast, Hamish found an unexpected ally via his researcher and producer, Ellie Callahan. Ellie's partner, Brendan Wade, a marine engineer, became enthralled by the idea of finding the anchor.
Brendan on his own initiative and cost installed an elaborate side scanning sonar-array on his boat, and on the very first day on the water in Doubtless Bay, they had found something. He pointed at an image from his sonar array.
"There's this massive black shadow in the shape of the [anchor's] fluke," Brendan explained. "I'm not saying that that is an anchor. But what I'm saying is that if it isn't an anchor, I haven't got a … Scooby Doo of a clue of what it is."
Brendan sent his ROV down to investigate - along with a scuba diver friend named Kelly Withers - ironically, a former employee of Kelly Tarlton's aquarium.
After days of diving on the spot identified by his sonar scan, Brendan thinks they have an answer. It's not the one they were hoping for.
"It might not be an anchor," he admits.
"If it looks like an anchor and it feels like an anchor, it doesn't always necessarily mean that it's an anchor. And in this case, we're pretty confident that it's just a rock that's shaped like an anchor."
Discouraged, the team returned home.
But, while scrolling through instagram, Kelly Withers saw something which made him jolt in his seat: An advertisement for a nautical-themed music festival called "Shipwrecked".
Centre-stage was an enormous iron anchor - just like the one the team were looking for.
Getting shipwrecked
Hamish rapidly organised a ticket to attend the Shipwrecked festival and see the anchor in person.
He drew some strange looks from other festival-goers as he walked up to the anchor in the middle of the dance floor and whipped out a tape measure.
To Hamish's astonishment, the dimensions exactly matched what Kelly had recorded for the third anchor.
But the early excitement was quenched by conversations with museum curators and metal experts. It turned out the measurements alone weren't enough to determine the identity of the anchor, nor would a chemical analysis of the metal it was made from. Basically, all anchors of the Saint Jean Baptiste's vintage were of a similar size and composition.
The anchor's owner, Eric Morrow, explained that he had purchased the anchor in the 1990s and had no idea where it came from originally
"I found in a scrapyard" Morrow explains. "It was Pacific Metals in those days, and they didn't know what to do with it. They were going to melt down, though. And I just happened to be there that day. So I offered them double scrap price for it."
Morrow had heard many theories about his anchor over the years, including that it was the third anchor of the Saint Jean Baptiste. It seemed a strong possibility, especially with multiple searches of Doubtless Bay coming up empty.
Hamish brought the Tarlton family to take a look at Morrow's anchor, as well as two of Kelly's former treasure- hunting companions: Dave Moran and Keith Gordon, head of the New Zealand Underwater Heritage Group.
Dave walked up to inspect the anchor more closely. Damage to one of its flukes had caught his eye.
"This here is really rough. I mean, one thing of that Kelly things said was that it had a fluke sticking into the reef."
Kelly Tarlton's old photos of the anchor show it with one fluke deeply embedded in a rocky reef. The marks Dave Moran is pointing to might be a sign of that.
Dave also notes the anchor has a significant bend in it.
"I've never seen one of those anchors bent like that," he says. "That would have taken tonnes, you know, to bend it."
David Moran theorises the bend might have been caused either by the enormous mass of the Saint Jean Baptiste pulling on the anchor's cable - or maybe been damaged when it was recovered from the ocean floor.
But Keith Gordon was more skeptical. Together he and Dave decided it was worth one more trip to Doubtless Bay - just to eliminate any possibility the anchor might still be down there.
"We want to go up and have another crack at it," Dave said.
The hunt continues
Hamish, Fiona, Brendan, Dave and Keith - as well as local Doubtless Bay diver Whetu Rutene - made their way out to the coordinates they'd determined most likely for the anchor.
This time they had a new weapon: Keith's magnetometer - a more modern version of the tool Kelly Tarlton had used to find the anchor four decades earlier.
Hamish was 90 percent convinced at this stage that the anchor at the Shipwrecked festival was, in fact, the third anchor. But he was happy to spend a day out on the water with Kelly's friends and family.
However, it turned out this treasure hunt had a final twist.
A loud beep came from the magnetometer, and a spike flicked across the screen.
"Oooo we've already got a big hit!" exclaimed Keith Gordon.
Scanning the same spot repeatedly, the magnetometer continued to detect a large anomaly on the sea floor - exactly what you'd expect for a 4.5 meter long anchor.
Dave Moran, 82, didn't need any more excuses. Flipping backwards into water, his air regulator gripped between his teeth, he descended 30 meters to the bottom.
After a few tense minutes, the octogenarian scuba diver resurfaced. "I didn't see anything" he yelled across to a disappointed crew.
The next day, Dave and Whetu made two more dives on the same spot. Both turn up nothing.
"It won't give up it's soul easy," Dave remarked to Whetu.
But the treasure hunters aren't discouraged. They're already planning their next expedition with more advanced diving gear, hoping to catch a glimpse of the anchor they are convinced remains at the bottom of Doubtless Bay.
"It's been a big adventure" grins Keith Gordon, "and it keeps us old people young".
So how does this adventure end? Is this magnetometer signal truly the third De Surville anchor? If so, where did the anchor at the Shipwrecked festival come from?
For now, these questions remain unanswered, and the hunt continues…
To hear the full dramatic story of Kelly Tarlton's final treasure hunt, be sure to follow and listen on your favourite podcasting app.
