Article from
VOL. 43  NO. 7     JULY  2002

Treasure of the Gold Rush:   Lost . . .

In 1857, the ill-fated U.S. steamship SS Central America never completed its voyage from the California gold fields to the east coast.  It had passed through the Isthmus of Panama and was on its way north to New York when it sank in a tremendous hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas.  

There was not enough time, nor enough lifeboats, to save all the 578 passengers and crew.  Captain William Herndon ordered “women and children first” into the boats, and after that, it was “every man for himself.”  He went down with the ship, as did 425 others.  The 38,000 pieces of mail the ship carried were also gone – imagine the stories they might have told about the hopes and dreams of the Gold Rush miners!  

But what did survive was the ship’s precious cargo of gold, three tons of it, in the form of gold ingots, gold nuggets, gold dust, and thousands of newly-minted gold coins struck by the San Francisco Mint in 1857.  And though it all survived, its exact location was unknown and unreachable, somewhere 8000 feet down in the Atlantic Ocean.  In New York, the loss of so much gold caused “The Panic of ‘57” in which banks failed, factories closed, and the entire country’s economy threatened to collapse. 

. . . and Found 

131 years later, in 1988, treasure-hunter Tommy Thompson and his team, using high-tech mini-submarines and robots like those used to find the Titanic, located the shipwreck and began salvaging the gold.  Thompson described the sight on the ocean floor as "piles of coins, heaped in towers" and "ingots everywhere, stacked like brownies."  Because it was gold, it was still perfectly preserved, even after more than a century under the sea. 

Litigation proved to be a bigger stumbling block than nature, however.  It took over a decade for the courts to divide up the profits of Thompson's venture, with 92% eventually going to his group, and 8% to insurers who had originally paid out claims after the ship's demise.  Next followed two years of complicated negotiations with banks, rare coin dealers, and auction houses to sell the treasure, now estimated to be worth more than $100 million.  Its historical value, as a relic of the triumphs and tragedies of the California Gold Rush, is priceless. 

The treasure became a spectacular traveling exhibit in 2000, viewed by more than a million people around the country.   Some of the gold coins were donated to the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Historical Society, and the New York Historical Society.  Many other items recovered from the wreckage, such as luggage, clothing, bottles, and china dishes, also went to museums. 

The rest of the gold items were sold to private buyers.  The most expensive single item, an 80-pound gold ingot, went for $8 million to a buyer described as "a Forbes 400 business executive."  Only recently has the average American had a chance to purchase some of the coins and small nuggets at "affordable" prices.  The lowest price advertised for some very tiny nuggets (one-half gram) is $229.  A more typical price is the one shown below, from the website of Austin Rare Coins, for a $20 Liberty Double Eagle gold piece minted in San Francisco in 1857.  About 5000 of these coins were recovered from the shipwreck.       

References: http://www.sscentralamerica.com, http://www.shipofgoldinfo.com, http://www.austincoins.com  

Some Gold Rush Humor 

A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.  – Mark Twain

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