Gold Abandoned in Haste as the SS Central America Sank, September 12, 1857 (memoirs of survivor Oliver Manlove, as summarized in pages 124-125 of “Ship of Gold”)
“In the same part of the ship with the poet Oliver Manlove were two brothers named Horn, who had gone to California in 1850. Working together and working hard they had unearthed $6,000 worth of gold, which they had kept in a large carpet sack that one or the other had guarded throughout the trip. ‘I found Anson Horn weeping,’ wrote Manlove. ‘He said that his time had come, that he should never see his home again, which he had longed to see, praying and hoping for it. I tried to encourage him, but he fully believed that his fate was sealed, that all of our fates were sealed.’”
“Now they had to decide whether to take the gold or leave it behind. Most of the passengers were returning miners who had accumulated at least a few thousand dollars in gold, which they carried with them in treasure belts, carpetbags, and purses. But gold was dense. A red house brick weighed about four pounds; a gold brick of the same size weighed nearly fifty. Even in smaller amounts, gold could sink a weak swimmer or quickly exhaust a strong one. Yet some of the men had suffered great hardship since the summer of 1849 to accumulate the contents of that treasure belt or that carpetbag.”
“As if to dramatize the hysteria of such a dilemma, one man ripped open a bag containing $20,000 in gold dust and sprayed it about the cabin as though he were a pixie and the gold were nothing more than tiny grains of sand. Others unhitched treasure belts, upended purses, and snapped open carpetbags, flinging the shiny coins and dust across the floor. ‘Hundreds of thousands of dollars were thus thrown away,’ said a passenger.”
Thomas Badger “had a satchel filled with 825 twenty-dollar double eagle gold pieces fresh from the San Francisco Mint; he retrieved these from his stateroom and, according to a witness, ‘flung them unto the floor’ of the captain’s cabin, telling the men to help themselves. But no one did. Purses filled with gold lay untouched. Amid the shouting and confusion, some men stood topside in a resigned daze and tossed gold coins at the wind.”
These are some of the coins that we are now inspecting and placing on sale for you to enjoy!
To help you understand the background of the exciting new availability of the gold lost at sea over 160 years ago on the SS Central America, here are more selections from the book “Ship of Gold.” I want to relate the first reactions of the recovery team led by Tommy Thompson and Chief Scientist Bob Evans when they first saw the “garden of gold” from the SS Central America 7,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988….
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