SS CENTRAL AMERICA'S PHOTOGRAPHIC TREASURE

 

Glass plate photos strewn among the gold coins and jewellery on the wreck of the SS Central America

It is one of the most famous treasure wrecks ever discovered, a steamer named the ship of gold after it sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina with one of the largest cargoes of gold ever lost at sea. Miners who had struck it rich in the California gold rush were among those bringing home to New York their hard-earned wealth, only to lose their lives when the SS Central America was struck by a hurricane, sinking nearly a mile and a half beneath the waves.

When nuggets, ingots and coins were recovered from the seabed in various expeditions between 1988 and 2014, the world was dazzled. But, with reported values of tens of millions of pounds, it sparked a complex legal case that landed its original treasure-hunter in jail.

Now Dr Sean Kingsley, a British maritime archaeologist, is focusing attention on another facet of the recovered artefacts: an astonishing collection of 19th-century portraits that somehow survived at the bottom of the Atlantic.

He told the Observer: Glass plate photos had preserved the faces of miners, merchants and their families, staring up at the living from the seabed.

The portraits are eerie, but beautiful. These were the loved ones of those who had been on a ship that sank 150 miles from the Carolina coast with the loss of 425 lives. A judge and a comedian were among the passengers.

Kingsley said: There are two ships with iconic names. Titanic is known as the ‘ship of dreams'. This is known as the ‘ship of gold'. For me, the gold is a distraction. The glass plates are the true star treasures from this wreck. There's dozens more down there that I hope one day will be saved too.

When the hurricane hit, those on board dumped their bags, unable to save their prized possessions as well as their lives. As the steamer sank, the bags floated down. The leather and canvas decomposed, while gold coins and clusters of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes with dozens of individual photographs were scattered across the seabed.

Bob Evans has been researching the SS Central America since 1983 and he was the chief scientist and historian in the original field operation. He spoke of the excitement of recovering the photographs: It's over the top. They really bring forth the humanity of the event. We don't know who these people in the photographs are. These were the last things these men had with them on the deck before the ship sank – and what a moment. These were the things that were most important to them, their money and these images. They represented friends or relatives or maybe even themselves.

To read the complete article, see:
Doomed ship of gold's ghostly picture gallery is plucked from the seabed (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/27/doomed-ship-of-golds-ghostly-picture-gallery-is-plucked-from-the-seabed)

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