First items from the largest sunken treasure in modern history go up for auction

Archaeologists have announced that the cargo recovered from the SS Central America represents one of the most lucrative finds in 150 years. Some of the newly uncovered more than 3,000 gold coins, silver coins and gold dust from the California Gold Rush will be offered at auction.

I wrote about the SS Central America here five years ago. Back then, the whole world was following the case of Tommy Gregory Thompson, who first discovered the ship in 1988 with a homemade underwater robot. But Thompson defaulted on the investors' money and, after years on the run, was eventually arrested and tried. You can read the full history from the sinking of the steamer in 1857 to the aforementioned case here: https: //www.lovecpokladu.cz/home/nejhledanejsi-hledac-pokladu-tommy-g-thompson-zatcen-tuny-zlata-z-19-stoleti-stale-cekaji-na-vyzvedn-6529?_fid=j364

In the meantime, there have been some changes. Just a quick recap of the sequence of events:
9/11/1857- The SS Central America was wrecked off the coast of Carolina. 425 passengers and crew members died, and (not only) gold worth $8,000,000 at the time (about $550 million today - about 12,281,857,500 crowns) sank. The consequences shook the economy of the time, and the first modern global economic crisis came.
11.9.1988 a robotic remote-controlled rover recovered a small (relative to the total cargo) portion of the gold from the sunken ship - estimated to be worth about $100-150 million at the time. The largest gold ingot, weighing 36 kilograms, was auctioned off for $8 million and became the most valuable ingot of the time.
In 1996, a court decision was reached, with 19 insurance companies taking sides, claiming the discovered treasure because they fully covered the loss in the 19th century. The court only partially upheld them, Thompson was to be left with 92% of the gold.
In2005 and 2006 Thompson was sued by investors and later by some members of the original 1988 crew to whom Thompson owed money.
In 2012 Thompson "disappeared", hiding from the authorities, he lasted 3 years.
In March 2014, Odyssey Marine Exploration obtained a permit to conduct an archaeological salvage survey of the remaining portions of the treasure and the ship. This was a very interesting chance; the original expedition recovered "only 5 percent" of the cargo from the bottom.
In 2015, Thompson was arrested.
2018 - Thompson promises to compensate by selling about 500 coins from the treasure, but later said he now has no access to them - he doesn't remember where they should be stored. Later that year, a jury awarded the investors $19.4 million in damages. Archaeologist Bob Evans reports that the treasure from the people is truly spectacular and unprecedented.
September 13, 2020The first public auction of newly restored items from the SS Central Americawill take place. It will likely go for millions of dollars for individual coins.

Within the US, this is the largest lost treasure in history. Archaeologist Bob Evans, who obtained a permit in 2014 to retrieve and salvage the remaining treasure and wreckage from the ship, discovered a total of 3,100 gold coins, 45 gold bars and more than 36 kilograms of gold dust in 2015. He was the lead archaeologist back in 1988 as a member of the team that found the wreck. In 2018, he was convinced that a unique historical heritage and treasure of immense value lay before them:

"This is something that hundreds of years from now people will still be talking about, reading about, looking back and collecting these objects. Now we're looking under the dirt and rust, cleaning these objects and these fabrics and seeing the treasure as it looked in 1857. The variety and quality of the coins that have been recovered is just amazing. Of course, there are the spectacular $20 Double Eagle coins" that we found in the 1980s and 1990s, but the large number of other types makes the current ones very different from previous finds. The coins date from 1823 to 1857 and represent an amazing variety of markings and mintages; virtually a time capsule of all the coins that were in use in 1857."

A representative of the California Gold Marketing Group, Mr. Dwight Manley, let it be known that virtually every single coin with this history and in this quality can be sold for $1 million. "There are no other ships that have sunk that have been examined like this, so it's really a once-in-a-lifetime situation."

All of the PCGS-certified treasure coins going up for auction will be housed in special cases containing five ounces (about 142 grams) of gold dust recovered during the last rescue mission in 2014. "This gold dust was originally mined during the California Gold Rush and lay untouched in packets for more than 160 years," Manley said. "When it was retrieved from the SS Central America, it was still sealed in the miners' original bags - bags made of deerskin, other leather or canvas."

The silver coins, along with the gold dust recovered in 2014 from the wreck of the SS Central America, will be offered for the first time at a public auction hosted by Ira & Larry Goldberg Auctioneers. The auction will take place on September 13 and 14 and will also be available online.

Roman Nemec
Sources: coinworld.com, express.co.uk, marineinsight.com

141 grams of gold with a hand-signed certificate for each of the SSCA silver coins being auctioned

1856-S-Lberty-Seated-dime-PCGS

rare gold jewelry from SSCA ship

one of the piles of gold coins at the shipwreck

gold bars of various weights and sizes

gold dust from a leather package from the SSCA ship