In the early hours of Friday, 2nd April 1852, a band of villains climbed aboard the barque Nelson while moored in Hobson’s Bay and made off with over 8,000 ounces of pure gold. The heist was as simple as it was audacious and ranks among the greatest robberies in Australian history. Only a fraction of the valuable metal was ever recovered.
The 603-ton barque Nelson had sailed from London on 4 July 1851, around the same time that large quantities of alluvial gold was discovered near Mount Alexander. The barque dropped anchor in Hobson’s Bay on 11 October only for its captain, Walter Wright, to learn Victoria was in the midst of a gold rush.
The Nelson disembarked its passengers and unloaded merchandise at Williamstown then sailed across to nearby Geelong. There, she took on a cargo of 2036 bales of wool, 99 casks of tallow, and consignments of gold totalling 2083 ounces, all bound for London. By January, the barque was once again anchored off Williamstown, ready to return to England. However, somewhere along the way, most of the crew had deserted the ship to try their luck on the gold fields.
On Thursday night, 1 April, the Nelson was still anchored a short distance off the Williamstown Lighthouse, along with dozens of other ships stranded for lack of men to take them back out to sea. Captain Wright had gone ashore for the night, leaving his Chief Mate, Henry Draper, in charge. With him were Second Mate Carr Dudley, the carpenter, two seamen, a cabin boy and the cook.
Considering that some £24,000 worth of untraceable nuggets and gold dust was being stored on board, it is curious that not a single guard was assigned to watch over it. The same amount of gold today would be valued around US $18.6 million ($28 million Australian). Captain Wright had simply had it locked in the ship’s Lazarette for safekeeping.
Henry Draper, the Carr Dudley, and two officers from nearby ships spent the evening playing cards and drinking. Sometime around 11 o’clock, the card game wrapped up, and one of the visiting officers returned to his ship. Draper and Dudley, tottered off to their sleeping quarters, leaving William Davies, the Royal George’s second mate, to sleep off the evening’s entertainment on the cabin’s lounge. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew had long since retired to their berths in the forecastle.
Around 1 AM on 2 April, two boats carrying a total of 22 men rowed towards the Nelson from Sandridge (Port Melbourne), their oars muffled to mask their approach. They pulled alongside, and about nine or so men, armed with pistols and swords, climbed up a ladder conveniently left suspended over the side and made their way on deck.
Some went forward and quickly secured the two sailors and boy in the forecastle while the rest poured into the main cabin aft. The first man they roused from slumber was Carr Dudley. He woke to find a pistol pointed at his head and a demand to go get the First Mate. Draper went on deck to find several men, all dressed in black with handkerchiefs masking the lower parts of their faces and hats pulled down to cover all but their eyes. All were brandishing pistols and swords.
“We’ve come for the gold,” the ringleader told Dudley, “and the gold we’ll have.” Dudley had gone on deck dressed in his nightshirt but was allowed to return to his cabin to put on a pair of pants. While he was fumbling with his trousers, a robber, still pointing a pistol at him, warned, “we’ve not come here to be played with, so make haste.” By now, the rest of the crew had been brought to the main cabin to join Davis, who, like everyone else, had been rudely awoken with a gun to his head.
Draper was forced to unlock the lazarette, and the men began loading the 23 timber boxes containing 60 kilograms of gold into their boats. Sometime during the proceedings, one of the robber’s pistols accidentally discharged, and the bullet grazed Draper in the fleshy part of his thigh. The slightly wounded Draper, and the rest of the Nelson’s men were locked in the lazarette while the robbers collected all the ship’s firearms and two swivel guns and threw them into the sea. They then left in the boats they had come in.
There Draper and the others would have remained until such time as the captain returned to the ship. However, the cook had gone on deck just as the two suspicious boats were coming alongside the Nelson. Having no time to call a warning, he hid out of sight and remained hidden until the robbers had left. He then unlocked the lazarette, and Draper wasted no time going across to Williamstown to report the heist.
The Water Police and Harbour Master boats scoured Hobson’s Bay but to no avail. The robbers had got away. Shortly after daylight, they found one of the whaleboats pulled up on the beach at Williamstown and the other across the bay at St Kilda. Leading into the bush from the beached boat were a set of wheel ruts left in the sand by a dray. Mounted police then followed the tracks until they petered out. It seemed the robbers had got away. The Governor offered a £250 reward for information leading to a conviction and that was matched pound for pound by the Nelson’s shipping agents.
On Sunday morning, 4 April a man stumbled upon the empty gold boxes discarded a short distance from a track leading to St Kilda beach. He also found a broken rifle butt and a few other items left behind when the robbers broke open the boxes and made off with their contents. He also found gold dust and some nuggets glinting in the sand which had been spilled by the robbers in their haste. Several people reportedly scooped up the gold-laden sand and took it away before the police arrived to secure the place.
The police were at a loss as to who might have been behind the heist. There was no shortage of hard men recently attracted to Melbourne by the discovery of gold. And many felt there were easier ways to get rich than grubbing in the ground. The Geelong Advertiser, quoting “those who presume to know more than others about the affair,” claimed only nine of the 22 men who went out in the boats were in on the heist. The rest had been handsomely paid to row them out to the Nelson and dispose of the boats afterwards.
Oddly, a bag of gold dust was found on Latrobe Street, and it was thought by some to be part of the stolen haul. Around the same time, a body was washed up on St Kilda beach, and it was speculated to be one of the robbers who had fallen out with his mates. Over the next several days, nine men were detained on suspicion they had taken part in the heist. Several were later identified as former convicts from Van Diemen’s Land. And most had been found with large sums of cash and gold in their possession that they could not explain to the satisfaction of the authorities.
Three of those men were eventually found guilty of the robbery and sentenced to long periods in prison. None admitted to the crime. The only evidence against them was that they had been recognised by the Nelson’s Chief Mate, Henry Draper, or the Royal George’s Second Mate, William Davies. They claimed that during the robbery, the handkerchiefs had slipped down, revealing the men’s faces in the lantern light, which they later identified. A fourth man was also found guilty despite having a slew of witnesses who attested to him being nowhere near Hobson’s Bay at the time. He would later be released on appeal.
Rumours about who had been involved in the robbery abounded for years . It was a baffling mystery. Most of the reported 22 culprits were never caught. Those who faced court were only convicted on circumstantial evidence and the dubious testimony of two eyewitnesses. What’s more, 90 per cent of the gold was never recovered.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald thirty years later, Marcus Clarke pondered some of the many rumours circulating around the heist. It was often said that a gentleman of standing in Melbourne society had masterminded the robbery and paid thugs to steal the gold for him. Another rumour was that several men about town had benefited financially from the heist. It was also suspected that a notorious publican had fenced the gold and quickly left the colony a very wealthy man. Clarke finally concluded that after the passing of so many years the full story would never be known. Another 150 years later, that is only doubly so.
© Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2024.
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