SS Central America

The account

In September 1857 the steamer SS Central America was three days out of Panama, riding home to New York with fifteen tons of California gold in her hold and nearly six hundred souls aboard, the cream of the Gold Rush carrying their fortunes east. Then a hurricane caught her off the Carolinas. For days the passengers bailed by bucket chain as the sea rose, and in the end she went down with some four hundred and twenty five people and all that gold. The loss was so vast it helped tip the country into a financial panic.

She lay a mile and a half deep for a hundred and thirty years, too far down to touch, until an engineer named Tommy Thompson built a robot submersible, raised the money from a crowd of investors, and in 1988 found her. The cameras came back to a seabed carpeted in gold, bars and coins stacked like a fairy tale, and Thompson brought up a fortune, and yet only a small fraction, by some counts five percent, of what the Central America carried down.

And here the Ship of Gold curdled into something stranger. Thompson's investors saw little of the money. Lawsuits came, then a warrant, and Thompson vanished, living on the run for years before US Marshals caught him in a Florida hotel in 2015. A judge ordered him to reveal where five hundred missing gold coins had gone. He refused, and sat in a cell for more than a decade rather than say.

So the loop here is human, and it is still open. Most of the ship's gold is still down there in the dark off Charleston, and the one man alive who knows the wreck best, who could lead anyone back to it, kept his secrets through years of prison. The Ship of Gold was found and only half emptied, and the rest waits on the seabed and behind one stubborn man's silence.

Known intelligence

• A steamer carrying about 15 tons of California Gold Rush gold, the SS Central America sank in a hurricane off the Carolinas in September 1857.
• Some 425 people died; the loss of the gold helped trigger the financial Panic of 1857.
• Tommy Thompson located the wreck with a robot submersible in 1988 and recovered gold bars and coins, only a fraction of the cargo.
• Thompson later defrauded his investors, fled, and was jailed in 2015 for refusing to reveal the location of 500 missing gold coins.

Theories of the hunt

• The great majority of the gold, perhaps 95 percent, still lies on the deep seabed.
• Thompson alone holds details that could lead back to missing gold; he kept silent through prison.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The wreck lies about 160 miles off South Carolina at roughly 2,200 meters; only about 5 percent of the gold was recovered, so the bulk is still on the deep seabed, reachable only by ROV.
• Tommy Thompson's detailed search and recovery records exist but are tied up in litigation; the 500 missing gold coins and his sealed data are the human lead.
• A 2014 recovery under a court-appointed receiver brought up more gold; the receivership records define what remains.
• The 1857 manifest and insurance claims document the total gold aboard, which sets the gap between what was recovered and what is left.

The trail, in order

• September 1857: the Ship of Gold sinks off the Carolinas with 425 lives.
• 1988: Tommy Thompson finds the wreck and raises gold.
• 2014: a second expedition recovers more gold from the site.
• 2015-2026: Thompson is jailed over the missing coins and the defrauded investors.

Sources and the record

• SS Central America (Wikipedia)
• The sunken Ship of Gold (All That's Interesting)