Shipwreck site yields gold bars, thousands of coins
SS Central America: The hunt for gold:
By Kathy Lynn Gray The Columbus Dispatch • Thursday July 17, 2014 3:03 PM
Photo provided by Odyssey Marine Exploration This photo shows several gold bars of varying weights discovered at the stern of the SS Central America shipwreck by Odyssey Marine Exploration during May and June 2014. The ship sank during an 1857 hurricane, and its wreck lies 160 miles off the coast of South Carolina. Odyssey Marine Exploration was hired by a Columbus court-appointed receiver in early 2014 to complete recovery of the remains of the shipwreck.
Salvagers recovering money and artifacts from the SS Central America had brought up 45 gold bars and more than 13,000 gold and silver coins through mid-June, according to reports released today.
The haul includes 1,302 $20 double-eagle gold coins, 37 $10 eagle gold coins, and 9,053 10-cent silver coins, reports unsealed by a federal court in Virginia show.
The work is being done by a remotely operated vehicle operated by Odyssey Marine Exploration, a salvage company based in Tampa.
The Central America sank during an 1857 hurricane and nothing was recovered until the late 1980s, when a group of salvagers based in Columbus located the shipwreck and recovered some of its gold and artifacts.
>> Read more stories about the SS Central America shipwreck
Recovery began again this year after a receiver was appointed by a Franklin County Common Pleas judge; he hired Odyssey Marine to salvage the remainder of the shipwreck.
Beyond the coins and bars, the Odyssey has brought up artifacts that include a leather saddlebag, cotton garments wrapped around coins and gold nuggets or gold dust; a gold puzzle ring; and a gold chain. Nearly 50 pieces of gold jewelry have been recovered as well as a wide variety of foreign gold, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a pipe.
The gold recovered has an 1857 face value of more than $120,000, according to Odyssey Marine.
Bob Evans, Recovery Limited’s chief scientist, called the quality and variety of the coins being recovered “astonishing.” He said some date to 1823 and are “a time capsule of virtually all the coins that were used in 1857.”
Some items were left at the site while ship conservators determine how best to recover them. Those include about 60 ambrotypes, photographs on glass plates that were popular in the mid-19th century.
Odyssey’s recovery reports were sealed by a federal judge in Virginia this spring during a fight between Recovery Limited, the company run by receiver Ira Owen Kane, and former members of the original salvage effort. That effort, headed by former Battelle scientist Tommy Thompson of Columbus, was halted in 1991 by long-running state and federal lawsuits surrounding the ownership of the treasure.
Thompson became a federal fugitive in 2012 after he didn’t show up for a federal court hearing. Some of Thompson’s former associates sued this year, claiming that Recovery Limited didn’t have the right to salvage the Central America.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith ruled against them last week, paving the way for Recovery Limited to complete the salvage and to release its reports on recovered inventory from the shipwreck.
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