TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 2.1

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V28 2025 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 13, , Article 17

In January, our good friend Bob Evans began publishing a series of blog articles on the Finest Known website detailing his experience as co-discoverer and curator of the treasures recovered from the wreck of the S.S. Central America. Subject of the book "Ship of Gold", many exhibits, countless interviews and articles, books and auction catalogs feature the legendary haul of gold coins, bars, nuggets, gold dust and more from the 1857 shipwreck. Here's another excerpt - see the complete article online. -Editor

40 years ago, I immersed myself in the S.S. Central America Project. My neighbor, Tommy Thompson, had done some historical research related to a shipwreck and treasure from 1857, a ship I had never known before. He enlisted me to join him, and that ship and treasure became major figures in my life.

While reading the historical newspaper accounts of the treasure, I repeatedly encountered the word “specie.” As a geologist and paleontologist (my university studies) I was very familiar with “species,” the term both singular and plural for particular animals or plants. But the term “specie?” This was something a little different.

Looking it up, in an actual book dictionary, (since we used those back four decades ago,) revealed that it meant “coined money.” OK. That was good enough. The 1857 newspapers referred to “the treasure” and “the specie” as if they were interchangeable terms, so as far we were concerned specie meant coins.

I was not a numismatist. Not yet. When I was a kid, I briefly dabbled in very low-end coin collecting, looking for S-mints among jars and boxes of “pennies.” But it didn't last long, and I moved into other pursuits: birdwatching and fossil collecting.

25 years later, I came back into numismatics from the top down, starting in 1988 with our discovery of the S.S. Central America treasure and its thousands of mint-state $20 gold coins. Fresh out of Gold Rush San Francisco, this numismatic time capsule revealed details of those boom times that are not told in the written word.

But before 1988, I did a little research about what we might find. I perused some coin books in the Columbus Metropolitan Library, the “Red Book” (A Guide to United States Coins,) and the “Green Coin Book.”

I xeroxed and shared the pertinent pages with my colleagues, Thompson and his friend Barry Schatz, who had joined our early project thinktank. Their eyes widened and brightened wide as they saw the prices on some of the rarities. “Wow! Are there really coins worth $50,000? And they were made in 1856… we could find a bunch!”

I cautioned that we could not assume we would find any rarities, certainly not in large quantities, and we should just use these valuations for conservative estimates. Still, it seemed likely that the listed commercial shipment, over $1.219 million in 1857, would be worth at least tens of millions, possibly a hundred million dollars or more.

While organizing the project and the expeditions in the mid-1980s, that was all we needed to know. The treasure was a “black box” of gigantic value. To speculate further was of no value. We focused our research on other more immediately important questions. Where was the shipwreck? Could we design or hire equipment to find it? What kind of condition would it be in? Could we find the treasure once we found the shipwreck? Could we design or hire equipment to recover the treasure?

It's a fascinating story, well worth a full read even though today we know the answers to those questions - yes, they could and did find and recover the treasure. Here's one of the first photos of the wreck, with piles of gold coins and ingots on the ocean floor. -Editor