Waiting with all the patience they could muster, the divers at length got a chance of going down to the wreck. What a change the gales had wrought! No longer did the wreck bear any resemblance to a ship. She was just a great mound of twisted metal, partially buried in the silt. Plates and wreckage lay scattered over the seabed in all directions, covering an acre or two of space. Once more the dangerous task of blowing away obstructions was resumed. Carried out as expeditiously as possible, it yet proved all too slow for those engaged on the work. At long last they managed, after prodigious efforts, to open up a path, only to find the gold as far off as ever. It was buried many feet deep in sand and mud, and to dig it out with shovels was an impossibility, for the sea would wash the sand in just as quickly as the divers shovelled it out. Forty yards above them lay the _Racer_--a floating workshop full of the most remarkable inventions that scientists and engineers could devise to assist submarine work. Aboard was a mighty 18-inch pump capable of sucking up a mountain of sand an hour. The mouth of this monster appeared from above. It was placed in position by the divers, and they watched the silt melting before it as if by magic, flowing up to the surface to be dumped a little distance away. It is no uncommon thing to find such a pump sucking up chunks of rock weighing half a hundred-weight, and even trying to remove bits of girder and plate. But such objects, like deck planks, are rather apt to stick in the bend, and then the monster chokes and has to receive the attentions of the salvors. Remarkable as was the work done by the gallant divers, the results of the season’s work were fearfully disappointing, for only seven bars of gold worth about £10,000 in all were recovered. In no wise discouraged, the treasure-hunters stole back to the old spot the following spring to try their luck again. The gales of the winter had torn great plates from the wreckage as though they were merely sheets of brown paper and dropped them yards away; the decks that had once resounded to the laughter of beautiful women were laid down flat with the seabed. Twisted and rusted iron lay for hundred of yards around. Looking for a needle in a haystack were an easy task compared with finding the treasure amid all this tangled debris.