He says Brooks bragged about his experience with previous deep-sea salvages, including a wreck near the Florida Keys called the Notre Dame de la Deliverance. He says Brooks showed potential investors pictures of gold and said he’d recover some, just like treasure hunters have from other ships. “He sold it like we were going to be multimillionaires within a year.”Īuger, a manager at a Portland staffing agency, made the biggest investment of his life-nearly $42,000-in Brooks’s company, Sea Hunters. Brooks talked about potential returns as high as 100 to 1 and “was throwing out the word ‘guaranteed,’” claims Gorham resident Gary Auger. He told potential investors he was about to salvage billions of dollars’ worth of Russian platinum lost inside the Port Nicholson when it was sunk en route to New York from Halifax. Now Brooks had set his sights on the murky ocean waters off Massachusetts. He radiated the rugged confidence of an old captain, and his treasure stories were as enticing as mermaids’ songs. He looked weathered and salty, like he’d spent a lot of time at sea. Brooks’s hair was sandy white, his eyes ocean blue. He’d spent years combing the Atlantic Ocean off Haiti and the Florida Keys looking for shipwrecks loaded with Spanish doubloons, pirate booty, silver bars, and gold bullion. And 150 miles away, in the charming town of Gorham, Maine, Greg Brooks was telling his neighbors that the ship could make them all rich.īrooks was a treasure hunter. Tangled fishing nets snagged on it here and there. Sixty-six years later, in 2008, the Port Nicholson rested on its side against the ocean floor, 700 feet below the sea, with a 40-foot torpedo hole in its hull. When the 86 survivors landed in Boston, they told the tale of a sneak attack on the high seas and of a captain and chief officer who, as the Boston Globe reported, “lived up to the highest traditions of the seas in their heroic but fruitless efforts to save a vital freighter.” A cloud of black fog rose from the froth as the smokestack’s soot hit seawater. Horrified onlookers from the escort ships watched as it sank under the waves, dragging the captain, chief officer, and two seamen down with it. But soon after they boarded again, the bulkheads popped and the 481-foot ship rose up on end. At daybreak she was still afloat, so the captain and chief officer went back to try to save her.
Two Canadian ships rescued them as the attacking Nazi submarine U-87 escaped in the dark. The crew of 85 and three passengers headed for the lifeboats. “Is she going down?” the captain asked as he reached the bridge.
An engineer, trapped on a grating, called out for help just before the rushing water rose and drowned him. Seawater flooded the engine room, where a mechanic now lay dead.
Half-clothed sailors fell from their bunks and fled to the deck. Coast Guard cutter and a British destroyer, surrounded the vessels as they headed for New York.Īt 10:25 p.m., an explosion ripped through the Port Nicholson’s starboard side. During the year, there had been hundreds of sinkings by Nazi U-boats along the coast, so a squadron of heavily armed military escorts, including a U.S. The British freighter, packed with materials valuable to the war effort, was traveling in the center of an 11-ship convoy. Port Nicholson steamed through rough waters east of Cape Cod, its lights blacked out. On the moonless night of June 15, 1942, the S.S. Greg Brooks aboard his salvage ship, the Sea Hunter.
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