SS Central America
She sank with three tons of California Gold Rush gold. The legal battle to recover it lasted longer than the search.
- Category
- shipwreck
- Status
- partially recovered
- Year lost
- 1857
- Region
- Atlantic Ocean
- Body of water
- Atlantic Ocean
The dossier
In September 1857, the SS Central America was steaming north from Panama carrying 578 passengers—many of them California gold miners returning east with their fortunes—and an official cargo of over three tons of gold. A Category 2 hurricane struck off the Carolinas. After two days of desperate pumping, she sank. 425 people died. The gold went with her to 2,200 meters. The sinking triggered the Panic of 1857—one of the first major US financial crises—because the gold she carried was badly needed by Eastern banks already under strain. The wreck was found in 1988 by a company called Columbus-America Discovery Group using a custom deep-sea robot called Nemo. What they brought up was extraordinary: perfectly preserved gold coins and bars still stacked in orderly rows, gold dust bags, and nuggets from the Sierra Nevada mines. An estimated $150 million was recovered in the initial salvage. Then the lawsuits began. Thirty-nine insurance companies claimed they had paid out on the original 1857 losses and therefore owned the cargo. The legal battle consumed most of the 1990s. Tommy Thompson, the engineer who led the discovery, disappeared in 2012 with some of the recovered gold and was eventually arrested as a fugitive. He remains in federal custody for contempt of court, having refused to disclose the location of the remaining gold in his possession. A second salvage effort in 2014 by Odyssey Marine recovered additional gold bars and coins. The total recovered to date is estimated at roughly $150-200 million. The remaining 60% of the cargo—estimated at hundreds of millions more—is still on the ocean floor at 2,200 meters.
Legal status
Multiple court-ordered ownership arrangements. Current recovery licensed to Odyssey Marine Exploration. Original discoverer Tommy Thompson in federal custody.