Shipwreck With $450 Million in Gold Believed Found

A partnership of low-profile treasure hunters has laid claim to what they believe is one of America’s most historic shipwrecks, a paddle-wheel steamer sunk in 1857 with about $450 million in gold coins from the California Gold Rush.

The broken wreck of the Central America, a U.S. Mail steamship that went down in a hurricane with a loss of 428 lives, lies in 8,000 feet of water just within the 200-mile continental limit off the South Carolina coast, the Columbus America Discovery Group says.

The limited partnership, based in Columbus, Ohio, claims to have found the wreck last summer. It made public its discovery after suing successfully in U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Va., last week for jurisdiction over its claim.

Wreck Being Filmed

Thomas G. Thompson, 35, founder and principal director of Columbus America, said the partnership’s chartered 220-foot salvage vessel Nicor Navigator has been on the site since May 25 filming the wreck with underwater cameras.

He said the group plans a salvage effort next year, which he said would be accomplished entirely by undersea robotics operated from ships on the surface, rather than manned submersibles.

It will be, he said, a significant departure from the undersea technology employed so far in the exploration of any shipwreck, including that of the Titanic.

The sinking of the Central America was nearly as famous in the 19th Century as that of the Titanic is in the 20th.

The golden age of American sail, which began with the fast clipper ships in 1848, reached its apogee in the Gold Rush years as the square-riggers raced around Cape Horn from New York to San Francisco in as little as 90 days.

Railroad Line

But completion of the railroad across Panama in 1855 spelled the death of the clipper ships. More and more passengers and shippers chose to avoid the hazardous Cape Horn passage under sail for the steady route by steam packet down the coasts to the isthmus and across by rail.

The Central America had completed 43 such voyages between New York and Panama when it left the isthmus in September, 1857, carrying a regular monthly shipment of gold from the new San Francisco mint to the banks of New York.

Some historians say its failure to arrive prevented the banks from staving off the Panic of 1857, which was one of the major economic depressions of the 19th Century.

The gold was a government shipment valued at $1,219,189 in 1857 dollars, when gold was valued at roughly 90 cents an ounce. Gold closed at $448.10 an ounce on Friday.

Records show 103 crew members and 478 passengers--many of them homebound prospectors carrying their own gold--were aboard the Central America when it left Havana after a brief stop Sept. 8, 1857, and headed north for New York. Three days later it steamed into a hurricane and began to take on water.

Women, Children Saved

As rising water extinguished the boiler fires and power to the pumps, the passengers bailed with buckets for 30 hours--buying enough time for all 31 women and 29 children, and 39 of the male passengers and crewmen to be safely transferred by boat to a nearby sailing vessel, contemporary newspaper accounts said.

But the steamer sank shortly after dark Sept. 12. Fifty-four men were later rescued from the water by other passing ships, but 428 passengers and crewmen were lost.

Thompson, a mechanical engineer from Ohio State University who had worked as a research scientist on ocean mining projects, said he first learned of the disaster in 1977 after researching shipwrecks as a hobby.

He said he became convinced that the accelerating advances in undersea technology would make recovery of deep ocean wrecks possible some time in the 1980s.

The catalytic event, he said, was the development in 1985 of a computer-based imaging system that permits ocean searchers to view on a video screen the profile of objects detected by a towed apparatus that bounces sound waves off the ocean floor.