Martin Weiberg's Sovereign Gold Robbery
The story
He was a ship's carpenter with a duplicate key, and his theft was so clean that the gold was already gone by the time anyone noticed it had ever been there.
In 1877, aboard the RMSS Avoca, Martin Weiberg stole 5,000 gold sovereigns — roughly 40 kilograms of coin. The cunning was in the cover-up. Using a duplicate key, he emptied the strongbox and then refilled it, so the weight and the seal told no tale. The theft went unnoticed until the ship reached Ceylon, by which point Weiberg had his opening and the trail had a head start.
He settled on the Tarwin River in South Gippsland, and there, in October 1878, the law caught up with him. When police searched, they found coins tucked into a hollow carpenter's plane and hidden elsewhere — the small, ingenious caches of a craftsman who knew how to hide things in his own tools. And then came the line that turned a robbery into a legend: Weiberg reportedly said he had sunk a kettle of sovereigns in the river.
That kettle is the heart of the mystery. Recovery estimates vary — roughly 400 to 1,500 coins were accounted for — which leaves an estimated 3,500 to 4,000 sovereigns still unrecovered. Some of that gap is uncertainty in the records; much of it, many believe, is gold that remains hidden somewhere in Gippsland, perhaps in the riverbed where a kettle is said to have gone down.
So the case is partly closed and partly open. The theft is documented, the arrest is documented, some coins were recovered — but thousands of sovereigns are unaccounted for, and the river has never given up the kettle.
Fact vs. legend: Weiberg's 1877 theft of 5,000 sovereigns from the RMSS Avoca using a duplicate key, his arrest on the Tarwin River in October 1878, and the recovery of coins (estimates ~400–1,500) are documented; the reported "kettle of sovereigns" sunk in the river and the ~3,500–4,000 unrecovered coins remain unfound.
Search area: No reliable public coordinates exist for this case, so it is not placed on the map.