She lives in Hawke’s Bay and recently published her new historical fiction book, Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant.
Bill Day, of Wānaka, owns Seaworks, a shipping and salvage company with 150 employees and 18 ships, and is chairman of Wānaka Search and Rescue.
For nearly four decades, he has been searching unsuccessfully for the wreck of the gold-laden General Grant at the Auckland Islands. His fifth expedition was in early 2022.
"I really did think he would find it," Sanders laments during their conversation at the recent Queenstown Writers Festival.
When she first heard about Day, she "thought he would just be some pirate".
Day thought she had produced a great book, and appreciated the champagne.
"One thing you don’t realise is, when you’re a treasure hunter, you get every nutter in the world contacting you."
But he added she "understood that".
He took her draft and passed it around his crew.
"We read it on dark and stormy nights. It was an incredible privilege."
As soon as he read the book, he realised he had serious competition for the title of General Grant expert.
"Of course, we are different. I am a hairy-a.... diver looking for treasure and she is a sophisticated author. And she is very well researched ... There were a couple of things we fed to each other, but we have the same information and we would be the two people on the planet that have got that information ... The interesting thing is we came at it from different angles. I am trying to figure out where it is and I have views on that and Cristina is looking at it from the psychology of the people. Those different views lead to different opinions on the location," Day said.
The General Grant was a United States-made, three-masted sailing boat. It sank at the Auckland Islands in 1866, on the way from Melbourne to London with 70 passengers and 2657 ounces (73kg) of gold in the captain’s cabin. Just 15 people survived.
There are legends about the gold. In those days, people wore sovereigns in waist belts or sewed nuggets into hems to avoid taxes.
Day thinks the ship was significantly overinsured if it was just carrying the recorded 73kg of gold.
Was gold also inside the mail packages in the captain’s cabin? Was the ballast also gold? Was an extra consignment of gold transferred from another ship just before the General Grant set sail?
He thinks the wreck is about 20m deep, buried under a massive landslide.
"We know it is on the west coast (of the islands) but it is not any place you can get a ship over, so I don’t think she is coming out."
Not finding the wreck is something Sanders finds "very sad".
Perhaps the survivors just said they were wrecked on the west coast of the islands?
Day does not buy that. He is "reasonably confident" he knows exactly where, on the west coast of the islands.
But unless new technology was to be invented, he could never be sure.
He does agree the 15 castaways had 14 months to get their stories straight about the wreck and the gold. And he reckons some survivors had every reason to tell lies.
But Sanders and Day agree: none of the returnees lived a wealthy lifestyle.
Mary Ann Jewell, 22, was an English maid, returning to England from Melbourne with her new husband, Joseph Jewell, 31, a sailor and miner.
Sanders was crewing on the replica of Captain James Cook’s Endeavour when she first heard the legend of the General Grant.
"I thought of Mrs Jewell, a Victorian woman, being stuck on an island for 14 months and thought it was irresistible. I raced home, began my research and got cracking," she said.
She researched the Victorian era, shipwrecks and colonial history. She read books by Victorian women, especially George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans), who wrote about other women. And she looked up obscure medical journals for comments doctors made about women.
"The only thing they said about Mrs Jewell in the testimonies was ‘Mrs Jewell was the wife of Mr Jewell’."
"I didn’t want her to be a milksop and I also didn’t want her to be gung ho. She was a woman. She would have been taught to be modest.
"She suffered horribly, all sorts of things ... But I think she came out of it with a certain pride."
The Auckland Islands were — and still are — bleak. Mrs Jewell’s survival would have been dependent on men helping her and respecting her.
"We don’t know if she was raped ... but there were several indications that there was someone on the island harassing her," Sanders said.
The depth of the dive — about 20m — is not the challenge. It’s the conditions, the swells, the wind, the cold.
"I have dived every cave along the most dramatic coast you can ever imagine — exposed, hour after hour, five metres off the cliffs, searching, dragging a magnetometer, searching for metals, diving every day ... It is cold, miserable. That’s the guts of it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it."
The audience grill the pair on what is true and what is not.
Who was the baddie?
Neither of them really know, but Sanders and Day agree there is evidence Mrs Jewell was targetted by someone. In Sanders’ fictional rendering, sailor Bill Scott carries some of that burden.
Who was the hero? Both agree it had to be burly Irish miner James Teer, a ship passenger, who was praised on record by the survivors when they got back to New Zealand .
And what about Mr Jewell?
Sanders said she drew him as suffering from post traumatic syndrome — something Victorians would not have understood back then — because there would had to have been psychological damage.
For the record, the Jewells both got back to safety. Sanders has talked to their descendants.
Mr Jewell died in his early 40s. Mrs Jewell became the toast of small hall talk shows throughout Australia.
Audience questions return to gold.
Day bandies a value of about $20million in today’s terms.
If another party — say a bank or a descendent — made a court claim for the treasure, he was also reasonably confident the successful finder would be awarded at least 70%-80% of the find, "just because of what [they would have] gone through".
He rolls his eyes and the audience laughs.
Sanders’ next book will be about a Wellington murder in the 1850s "based on facts, rumours and gossip".
She returns to tall ship sailing on the Endeavour replica this summer.
Day’s current projects include searching for a Dragonfly aircraft that disappeared in the Mount Aspiring Park in 1962.
He has also been on the trail of James Teer’s grave, which Day says is in the historic Jackson Bay cemetery, in South Westland.
Day can not find the actual burial site, but he hopes to put up a plaque for Teer and douse it with whisky, in the best West Coast tradition.
And there is another alluring shipwreck he wants to find, somewhere south. He can not say where it is, and he will not say what he’s looking for, either.
