Persian in Vancouver and Aussie was born at Suva. Aussie was put in one of the lifeboats when Niagara was being abandoned, but he jumped back aboard ship. A few days later, residents of Horahora, Whangarei claimed that a cat answering Aussie's description came ashore on a piece of driftwood, and that one of them had taken him in, but the cat escaped and had not been seen since. Gold salvage The UK government urgently needed the gold to be salvaged from the wreck. This had been done before. In 1917 two German mines had sunk the armed merchant cruiser off the coast of Ireland. She was carrying 3,211 gold bars, most of which were salvaged by Royal Navy divers between 1917 and 1924. The amount was more than 43 tons: five times as much as Niagara was carrying. Nor was the depth unprecedented. in 1932 an Italian salvage contractor had recovered sovereigns and silver bullion worth £1 million from the wreck of the P&O liner in the English Channel. Egypt lay at a depth of , which was even deeper than Niagara. However, the depth at which Niagara lay was a great challenge, and it was in a minefield. Minesweepers disposed of three mines after Niagara was sunk, but no-one on the Allied side of the war knew how many Orion had laid. 1941 The Royal Australian Navy dismissed the idea of trying to salvage the gold. But the Bank of England offered a fee of £27,000 plus 2.5 percent of the value of any gold recovered. A syndicate from Melbourne, Australia accepted the offer. Captain JP Williams, Captain J Herd and chief diver John Edwards Johnstone led the syndicate, which was called either the United Salvage Syndicate or United Salvage Proprietary Ltd. An engineer from Melbourne, David Isaacs, designed a diving chamber for the salvagers. A company in Castlemaine variously referred to as Thompson's Engineering and Pipe Co or Thompson's Foundry made the chamber in conditions of strict wartime secrecy. It is made of manganese bronze, has several small quartz glass portholes, is built to withstand pressure to a depth of and weighs three tonnes. It is cylindrical, with a bulbous top, and just big enough for one man to stand inside. The salvagers obtained the use of Claymore, a Northern Steamship Company coaster that had been built in 1902 and was now rusting in Auckland harbour. Her