Article from
VOL. 43 NO. 7 JULY 2002
Treasure
of the Gold Rush: Lost
. . .
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 |