Official and “Secret” Gold (from pages 156-159 of “Ship of Gold”)
“Her gold shipment was documented: With gold valued at $20 an ounce in 1857, the publicly reported commercial shipment totaled between $1.21 and $1.6 million. Although many of the Central America’s records, including her cargo manifest, had been destroyed in the great San Francisco fire of 1906, some accounts estimated that the gold carried by the passengers at least equaled the commercial shipment. And the Department of the Army recently had confirmed a story approaching myth that had circulated for years: that the Central America carried an official secret shipment of gold destined to shore up the faltering northern industrial economy. The letter, dated April 2, 1971, acknowledged that the information about the shipment had been declassified, and it verified that secreted in her hold the Central America had also carried 600 50-pound bar boxes, or another thirty thousand pounds of gold.”
“It was the worst disaster in American shipping and several pundits of the day attributed the Panic of 1857 largely to the loss of gold shipment aboard the steamer. Passengers and crew on the SS Central America hailed from all 31 states in the young union and many foreign countries. The telegraph only recently had sprouted up and down the East Coast, so that news of the arrival of the first survivors in Savannah shot straight up the wires all the way to Boston and over to New Orleans…. For the first time, reporters relied heavily on the accounts of women. For weeks, dozens of newspapers ran vivid front-page accounts in the survivors’ own words, the articles sometimes filling the page and several more pages inside. As survivors returned to their hometowns and as official bodies inquired into the sinking, the story lived for months in over 200 newspapers.”
Bob Evans, the Chief Scientist for the discovery and recovery of the SS Central America gold has been involved in this search for over 35 years. Back in 1983, Bob searched all local and national libraries for microfiche records from September 1857. “Two or three days a week, several hours a day, Bob sat on the main floor of the William Oxley Thompson Library at Ohio State, amid the bare concrete columns and the file cabinets filled with rolls of microfilm, his head in a reader, his blue eyes scanning the white on black film of articles from the front pages of old newspapers. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, the New York News, the New York Times, the New York Journal of Commerce. When he saw something pertinent, he made a copy and took it home, where he studied it and pulled information to place on the matrix….”
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