The tumultuous journey of the SS Central America and its gold

April 4, 2020 9:38 PM

On September 3, 1857, the SS Central America left the port of Colón, Panama, en route to New York City with fifteen tons of gold that were prospected in California. The steamship, 425 of its passengers, and more than 20% of Wall Street’s gold reserves at the time, didn't make it, nearly tanked the U.S. economy (David Meyer Creations) as one of the factors in the Panic of 1857 (Library of Congress). 131 years later and 1.3 miles down, treasure hunters found the remains (YouTube, 25 minutes of digitized VHS footage). Numerous people and companies were vying for their share of the gold. The Curse of the Ship of Gold -- How a brilliant scientist went from discovering a mother lode of treasure at the bottom of the sea to fleeing from authorities with suitcases full of cash. (Narratively)

A treasure hunter found 3 tons of sunken gold — and can’t leave jail until he says where it is (Washington Post, 2016) [previously]

Tommy G. Thompson was once one of the greatest treasure hunters of his time: A dark-bearded diver who hauled a trove of gold from the Atlantic Ocean in 1988 — dubbed the richest find in U.S. history.
[...]
Many tried to find it, but none succeeded until a young, shipwreck-obsessed engineer from Columbus, Ohio, built an underwater robot called “Nemo” to pinpoint the Central America, then dive 8,000 feet under the sea and surface the loot.

“A man as personable as he was brilliant, Thompson recruited more than 160 investors to fund his expedition,” Columbus Monthly noted in a profile (2014). He “spent years studying the ship’s fateful voyage … and developing the technology to plunge deeper in the ocean than anyone had before to retrieve its treasure.”
[...]
In his late 30s, during the height of his fame, Thompson said little in public and tended to play down his role in the discovery.

“This gold is part of the largest treasure trove in American history,” he told reporters in 1989. “But the history of the S.S. Central America is also a rich part of our nation’s cultural treasury.”

He added: “It’s a celebration of American ideals: free enterprise and hard work.”

But before long, some of Thompson’s bankrollers began painting a very different picture of the man.

Two of the expedition’s biggest investors took him to court in the 2000s, accusing him of selling nearly all the gold and keeping the profits to himself.

When a federal judge ordered Thompson to appear in 2012, he didn’t show. An arrest warrant was issued, but the man who found a long-lost shipwreck had disappeared.

In 2014, work was re-started with new explorers.

Odyssey Recovers SS Central America Shipwreck Treasures (Maritime Executive, 2014)

Odyssey Marine Exploration, a pioneer in the field of deep-ocean exploration, has now announced operational reports and inventories of items recovered from the SS Central America shipwreck.

These items were initially filed under seal in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division. Chief U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith has allowed the reports to be unsealed and made available to the public.

Odyssey has been working since April 2014 under contract to Ira Owen Kane, the receiver for Recovery Limited Partnership (RLP). RLP is the court-appointed salvor-in-possession of the SS Central America shipwreck.

More on the history of the SS Central America, and Paul Gilkes and Bob Evans dive deep into the SS Central America curation (15 minute video from Coin World).

Timeline: Treasure hunter Tommy Thompson and the SS Central America (The Columbus Dispatch, updated Dec. 3, 2018), with the last update being that the jury found that Tommy Thompson cheated investors in treasure hunt (The Columbus Dispatch, Nov. 28, 2018). The jurors awarded a combined $19.4 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiffs — $3.2 million to the Dispatch Printing Company and $16.2 million to a court-appointed receiver who represents other investors — after a three-and-a-half-week trial in Common Pleas Court.

posted by filthy light thief (6 comments total)

A shipwreck, the lost crew, sunken treasure, Wall Street panic, civil war, an unscrupulous treasure hunter— this post has everything!
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:02 AM on April 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

Every one of these finds seems to turn into a gigantic, unending and all-consuming legal squabble. It's too bad the treasure hunters can't just be employees of the biggest insurance company in their area, and then let the company handle the inevitable torrent of lawsuits. The WHOI people who found the $17B San Jose ship treasure in Colombian waters seem to have been tight with the Colombian navy, so maybe that will take some of the pressure off of them.
posted by Seaweed Shark at 10:22 AM on April 5, 2020

The next town over from me was originally a nameless collection of homes and shops, until 1858 when it got a post office. And if they had a post office, they needed a name. So the locals got together to come up with a name for their emerging town, and as it happened, one of the attendees was a traveler (whose name apparently is not recorded) who happened to be passing through and was one of the survivors of the Central America. He spoke glowingly of the heroism of the ship's Captain who struggled so bravely to save as many people as he could before finally tossing his watch to a sailor in a nearby lifeboat with instructions to deliver it to his wife, and then going down with the ship. The locals were quite impressed and agreed that his courage and sacrifice represented the ideals they wanted their new town to symbolize. And so the town of Herndon, Virginia, got its name from Captain William Lewis Herndon of the Central America.
posted by Naberius at 10:22 AM on April 5, 2020 [13 favorites]

I came across this book about the shipwreck & recovery, Ship Of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea, not long after it was published in 1998. For a long time it was one of my favorite nonfiction deep dive (haha) subjects, and I enjoyed the audio book version too. It was a pleasure to recommend the book, it was such a fantastic saga. Since the internet in the 2000's, when I did a "I wonder what ever happened to..." I've been disgusted at yet another brilliant inventive mind who bends it towards...hoarding. I mean, he sold his shares in his own company for 57 million clams!! WTF did he need a couple million more in coins for?
posted by winesong at 11:39 AM on April 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Another recommendation for the book: Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (Amazon link). I checked that book out of the library and enjoyed it. For a quick overview of the shipwreck finding process, check out "Mathematical Treasure Hunting". It's a 23-page journal article (full PDF available at the link) by Dr. Lawrence D. Stone, about how he used computers and math in 1985 to narrow down the search area. It's very readable by the layperson.
posted by Monochrome at 4:56 PM on April 5, 2020

Great post. Just the shipwreck and the consequences of its loss or the saga of its finding are truly interesting on their own, but to have them combined makes it even more fascinating.
posted by blue shadows at 11:38 PM on April 5, 2020