Le Chameau was built in Rochefort, France, in 1717, the creation of Blaise Ollivier, a young naval architect who had studied English and Dutch shipyards before designing what he envisioned as a fast, well-armed naval transport -- a type of vessel known as a flute. The ship made several successful voyages carrying passengers and supplies to New France before her final departure from La Rochelle in July 1725 under the command of Jean de Saint James. Aboard were colonial officials, military personnel, and the payroll for French troops stationed in the colonies. The Chameau was a workhorse of empire, unglamorous but essential, the kind of ship on which colonial ambitions quietly depended.

What happened on the night of August 27, 1725, can only be reconstructed from the wreckage and the absence of survivors. A storm drove Le Chameau onto rocks near what would come to be called Chameau Rock, several kilometers east of the Fortress of Louisbourg. The ship broke apart and sank. No one survived to describe the final hours -- not the officers, not the soldiers, not the passengers carrying personal fortunes to the New World. An unsuccessful salvage attempt the following year recovered nothing of value. A minister's letter dated May 14, 1726, catalogued what had been lost: "83,308 livres 11 sols 1 denier, including 27,258 livres 8 sols 9 deniers expended for clothing the troops at Quebec." Beyond the coins, the manifest included navigational instruments, foodware, and weaponry. The dead were eventually buried in a communal grave near the wreck site, their monument a simple marker on the Cape Breton coastline.

In September 1965, Alex Storm, along with Dave MacEachern and Harvey Macleod, found the missing hull of Le Chameau and the treasure it still carried. Storm brought up gold and silver coins -- Louis d'or and other denominations -- and by his own calculations, he had achieved "a nearly complete recovery of the funds shipped on the Chameau in 1725." But the discovery triggered a legal battle nearly as dramatic as the shipwreck itself. Storm had signed a partnership agreement in 1961 with associates who were supposed to help with the search. They repeatedly failed to show up. Growing impatient, Storm formed a new partnership without properly dissolving the old one. The case wound through the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, and finally the Supreme Court of Canada, which found Storm "was in clear breach of the Partnership Act" but acknowledged errors in the lower courts' reasoning. Storm ultimately received a majority of the treasure.

In December 1971, most of the recovered coins and artifacts were auctioned off, scattering Le Chameau's cargo across private collections much as the storm had scattered it across the seabed. But not everything disappeared into private hands. An exhibit about the Chameau is featured in the "Shipwreck Treasures of Nova Scotia" gallery at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, where visitors can see coins, navigational instruments, foodware, and a rare bronze swivel cannon recovered from the wreck. These artifacts tell two stories simultaneously: one about the reach and vulnerability of French colonial ambition in the early 18th century, and another about the obsessive persistence of treasure hunters in the 20th. The rocks that claimed Le Chameau still jut from the waters off Cape Breton, unmarked except on nautical charts, a few kilometers from the fortress whose garrison never received its pay.