1st American Reserve Blog

“The bottom was carpeted with gold. Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing – bars stacked on the bottom like brownies, bars stacked like loaves of bread, bars that appear to have slid into the corner of a room. Some of the bars formed a bridge, all gold bars spanning one area of treasure over here and another area over here, water underneath, and the decks collapsed through on both sides. Then there was a beam with coins stacked on it, just covering it. You couldn’t see the top of the beam, it had so many coins on it.”
– Tommy Thompson’s reaction to the first view of the SS Central America gold (page 452)

 “There’s the lure,” said Bob [Evans]. “That’s what brought us here” … “the crew could see the precise grooves etched around the edges of the coins, which now appeared huge on the monitors. One had its back turned, and when Moore adjusted the camera across the top they could read, ‘United States of America.’ At the center was an eagle shield and the rays of the sun, and they could count thirteen stars in a tight oval above the eagle. Curving upward like a smile along the bottom appeared ‘Twenty D.,’ and right above the ‘n’ in ‘Twenty’ was a tiny ‘s,’ the mark of the San Francisco Mint.  ‘Look at that eagle shield on the back,’ said Bob, ‘the luster on it.’…. There stood a coin upright, face front, just as pure and lustrous as the day it left the San Francisco Mint. It was emblazoned with the bust of Lady Liberty, lovely in profile, her hair crossed with a tiara and cascading in ringlets down her neck, thirteen stars surrounding her, and her ringlets stopping just short of the date ‘1857.’ In a pocket thirty feet across, the ocean floor lay covered with these coins. Doering figures he had now seen more gold in one place at one time than any other treasure hunter in history, and that included Cortes and Pizzaro.” (pages 454-455)