A long, keen search revealed what had once been the strong-room. Great metal plates were piled over it, necessitating blasting operations once more. The divers toiled until the plates were cut and dragged away. Then incredible quantities of silt had to be eaten away by the sand-pump, the divers watching closely and coming on a bar from time to time. By the end of August, 1922, gold worth £150,000 had been secured, and early one morning H.M.S. _Wrestler_ might have been seen slipping into Liverpool. Directly she moored beside the quay, case after case was landed from her and placed in a motor-lorry. Those cases--a dozen in all--were full of gold which had been recovered from the _Laurentic_, and each case represented a small fortune. All through the season of 1923 the divers carried on, searching amid that chaos of rusted iron for the gold and silver bars, wresting them one by one from their hiding-places on the seabed. For seven seasons they have fought the ocean for that mighty fortune of over £5,000,000 and their heroic efforts have led to the recovery of £4,750,000. Considering the depth in which the _Laurentic_ sank, and the perils and difficulties besetting the workers, the results are beyond compare. Never before has there been a treasure-hunt of such magnitude, and how long this will last no one can say. A big fortune of £250,000 still lies hidden just off the coast of the Irish Free State, and, if the British Navy fails to recover it for the British Treasury, it will be for the simple reason that its recovery is humanly impossible. For every £100 won back from the depths, the divers have received an award of 2s. 6d., so altogether they have shared among themselves the sum of £5,937 a sum that has been well and truly earned. It says much for the efficiency of the British Navy when it is known that the whole of this perilous treasure-hunt has been carried out without a single accident to any of the divers engaged. Many rumours have arisen of wonderful machines being used to locate the treasure, of instruments with the power to divine the presence of gold, of scientists standing on the deck of the salvage vessel watching, with bated breath, a needle oscillate round a dial until it has indicated that the diver far below is in the vicinity of the precious metal. These rumours, however, have no foundation in fact, for the treasure has been recovered solely by straightforward diving. The estimates of the treasure sunk have also varied from £3,000,000 to £8,000,000, but the figures given here have been furnished me specially by the Admiralty, and they are therefore strictly accurate. CHAPTER VII British salvage experts have performed extraordinary feats; the American Navy has produced divers excelling even our own; but it has been left to the Italians to accomplish the seemingly impossible. As a sheer feat of salvage, the raising of the _Leonardo da Vinci_ remains unsurpassed.