‘Bunch of buddies’ harvest richest ship treasure

By Judy Keen and Debbie Howlett, USA TODAY, Friday September 15, 1989

A pioneer spirit and a hint of technological genius led the crew of the Arctic Explorer to the floor of the Atlantic and the USA’s richest shipwreck.

“We became a bunch of buddies,” Barry Schatz, an expedition co-leader, said Thursday of its 21 scientists, engineers and historians.

“It’s a pretty disparate group…not the kind of group that would come together for anything except this.”

The Columbus America Discovery Group found the wreck of the SS Central America two years ago, 200 miles off the coast of Charleston, S.C.

With a personal computer and homemade program to aid the search, the crew probed the ocean floor. This week they began hauling in gold coins and ingots using Nemo, a robotic retriever designed and built by a crew member.

The gold piles look like a “waterfall,” says leader Thomas Thompson.

Adds geologist Bob Evans: “Ever since I was digging a hole in my parents’ back yard, I’ve dreamed of something like this.”

The team’s high-tech sonar and computer imaging may lead to other historic wrecks. The richest: the San Jose off Colombia, with unknown millions in gold, silver, gems.

The paddlewheel steamer Central America, carrying a gold shipment from the San Francisco mint to New York banks, sank in a Sept. 12, 1857, hurricane. “It’s like something out of James Bond,” says lawyer Harrison Smith, one of 106 investors.

Evans says the crew spent seven hours Thursday injecting a rubbery silicone compound over masses of coins to make them easier to retrieve. They’ll be brought to the surface today.

“I’m very envious,” says Norman Scott of Expeditions Unlimited of Pompano Beach, Fla. Scott tried to find the Central America in 1979. “It is a very significant find, not only because of the gold, but because this is the first recovery of intrinsic gold treasure at such depth,” 1-1/2 miles down.

Most of the investors who put up $7 million in a limited partnership are from Columbus, Ohio.

The crew, which gets 40 percent of what’s recovered, is continuing its mission for another month. The group was organized by Schatz, a former Miami Herald reporter, and Thompson, a mechanical engineer. They met 25 years ago, in the fifth grade.

Thompson met Evans during the blizzard of 1977 in Columbus: Thompson pounded on a boarded-up wall in the basement of his duplex; Evans was on the other side working in his geology lab.

“It’s kind of a romantic thing,” says Schatz of the expedition. “We’re not robbing a grave as much as we are resurrecting the memory of the great American shipwreck.”