Stunning haul: a look at the richest shipwreck in U.S. history
by Ken Ringle
Washington Post
Published in The Seattle Times Thursday, September 14, 1989
ABOARD THE ARCTIC EXPLORER — A team of high-tech treasure hunters, which two years ago said it had found the richest shipwreck in U.S. history, made good its claim this week with a stunning haul of gold from the ocean floor 200 miles off Charleston, S.C. The gold includes bars of various sizes plus masses of coins of a type virtually unseen since the days of the California told rush.
Rivers of still more gold coins, dripping from rotting timbers and frozen together in gleaming “waterfalls” of concretion. Are visible in television images beamed from a robot vehicle named Nemo as it moves above the wreck 1 1/2 miles below this salvage vessel.
No one aboard has seen or heard-of-anything like it.
“It’s just like a storybook treasure in a kid’s book,” said Thomas Thompson, one of the directors of the Columbus America Discovery Group that is salvaging the 132- year-old wreck. “I never dreamed it would be like this.”
Most of the coins are known to be part of a registered commercial shipment from San Francisco that was lost when the S.S. Central America foundered Sept. 12, 1857. Some 423 people died in the wreck, which was caused by a hurricane. The value of the shipment, the exact weight of which is not known, has been estimated at $28 million to $450 million at today’s bullion prices.
A major surprise, however, has been the wealth and variety of gold bars and bricks — one weighing more than 62 pounds — discovered in the wreckage.
“These appear to have belonged to passengers returning to the East after making their fortunes in California,” said Barry Schatz, another Columbus America director. If they are, their value could easily double previous estimates of the wealth of treasure aboard, Thompson said. “I get nervous about these estimates, because we don’t want to disappoint any of our backers,” Thompson said, and because beyond the actual weight of the gold recovered, “nobody really knows what this stuff would bring at auction.” But he said a consultant at Christie’s in New York has appraised just one of the thousands of gold “double eagle” coins typical of those aboard the wreck at $8,000. Given numismatic values like that, he said, a $1 billion overall figure for the Central America’s cargo “isn’t out of the realm of possibility.”
The Central America was as sensational a shipwreck in its century as the Titanic was in this one. The loss of the gold it was carrying, historians have noted, was a significant contributing factor to the Panic of 1857, one of America’s major economic depressions of the 1800s. Its deep, remote location, however, discouraged even elementary search and salvage efforts. But about five years ago a series of computer-spurred breakthroughs in ocean engineering technology made such deep- sea exploration economically feasible for those outside the government.
Onto the scene at that time sailed the Columbus America Discovery Group, a low-profile shipload of computer-happy technocrats from Columbus, Ohio. In the ocean cowboy world of treasure hunters, their success story reads like the script for “Revenge of the Nerds.”
Backed by more than 100 small investors, most of them from Columbus, Thompson, Schatz and company built or adapted much of their own equipment, bought the rest at bargain rates, and patiently and systematically set out to do what never had been done before.
Spurning the cost and complexity of manned submersibles, they planned not only to find the Central America but to excavate it with archaeological precision on the deep ocean floor using only undersea robotics.
Nemo, their 12,000-pound remotely operated exploration vehicle, looks, with its network of multicolored tubes and wires, like something put together by a 10-year-old genius using the ultimate erector set.
It has the capability of recovering items as large as a 1,000-pound anchor or as small as a dime, and is particularly mesmerizing when picking up delicate items with Its suction-cup fingers.
Nemo is driven from a control room in the bowels of this vessel, which, with its blinking monitors, glowing dials and multiple computer keyboards, could double for the cockpit of the starship Enterprise. One of Nemo’s keepers, a muscular six-footer in spectacles named John Moore, 35, of Bellingham, Washington, reads electronic schematics for amusement and favors a T-shirt emblazoned with an elaborate and obscure algebraic equation. Another, Alan Scott, 39, of Westminster, California, talks in terms of pixels and angstroms and of the expedition’s ability “to digitize video data from the wreck for computer-enhanced imaging.
By souping up millions of individual light and color fragments in various pictures of the wreck, Scott has been able. to produce three-dimensional television images of the gold-laden vessel to help the hunters judge their terrain. If that sounds a little like the photo interpretation skills used .to evaluate data from military spy satellites, Scott, a Veteran of what he calls “several black projects” at the Pentagon, acknowledges with a smile that “a number of the people we’ve been in contact with come from that community.”
For Moore, Scott, Thompson and the others, the gold appears.to be as much an excuse to develop and exercise their home-grown technology as an end in itself. Schatz says few of those aboard the ship will receive any significant portion of the treasure. That, be said, will go to the Columbus investors who so far have put-np the bargain basement $7 million the project has cost.
“It may take another year and a half before we get all the gold up,” Thompson said. “There’s a lot we can see on the surface .of the wreckage, but we can’t tell how deep it goes. We can’t just take a dredge and scoop it up because most of those coins were right out of the mint. One scratch in their luster could vastly diminish value.
Unlike Most treasure hunters, the group has had an unusual interest to incorporate into its exploration various academic studies that have nothing to do with the gold. Indeed, Robert Evans, 35, of Columbus, a project director who refers to himself as the group’s “cultural paleontologist,” seems as fascinated in the history and origin of the coins as in their value, and just as intrigued by the rusting remnants of the Central America’s steam engine.
Even this salvage ship, a 30- year-old former Canadian icebreaker built with armor plate left over from World Wai II, was purchased by the group in part, Thompson said, “because it represents what we’re all about: the interface between history and technology.”
So scholarly are these treasure hunters that they have published a book called “Story of an American Tragedy,” which details the chronology of the Central America’s sinking through the reports of those who survived.
The passengers were an intriging group, all bound east from California via the “Panama packets” that shuttled twice a month between the trans-isthmus railroad across Panama and the cities of New York and San Francisco. The Central America, a 300-foot paddle-wheel steamer, was one such ship, a luxury vessel for those wary of the long and dangerous sailing ship route around Cape Horn. In her 43 trips on the Panama-New York route, she had carried more than one-third of all the gold shipped east from California.
She had left Panama at 4 pm. Sept. 3, 1857, en route to Havana for coal and cargo, and on Sept. 8 at 9:30 a.m. left Havana on her final voyage. The following day she sailed into the fringes of a hurricane. For three days, every man among the 580 passengers bailed with buckets as the huge seas steadily overwhelmed the ship. At noon, Sept. 12, a small sailing vessel appeared, however, and Capt. William Herndon of the Central America, ordered “women and children first” from the doomed vessel. All the women and children were saved.
Herndon went down with his ship but so impressed the survivors with his calmness and ability in command that a group of citizens in Fairfax County named their new town for him, and midshipmen at Annapolis, MD., every June Week, scale a monument to his valor on the Naval Academy grounds — the only such memorial there to a Navy man who never served in a war.
The Columbus America Discovery Group began searching for the wreck in 1986, using sonar to sweep vast sections of an undersea plane known as the Blake Ridge, but it wasn’t until its final days of exploration last September that it found a gold bar and two coins.
Further problems delayed the group’s departure for sea this summer until July 20, and it wasn’t until Aug. 27 that the true measure of what they had found began to come clear. “It wasn’t so much excitement as wonder,” Schatz said of the gleaming trail of gold beneath the sea. “It was more beautiful than I would possibly ever have imagined.”