TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 2.2

 

Before that moment standing over the light table in the ship's darkroom, whenever I thought about the SSCA treasure, I imagined a big pile of coins, perhaps piles of degraded bags of coins, like moneybags from the cartoons of my youth. Or Scrooge McDuck's money room that he could swim in. Now we saw the reality, a collapsed and jumbled pile of degraded boxes of coins, along with boxes of ingots of various sizes.

 

The manipulator we had installed on Nemo, was pretty high-tech, and could grab and lift hundreds of pounds if necessary. But it needed adaptations for delicate work. The engineers and techs built flexible fingernails, something like spring-loaded calipers, or a gonzo pair of tweezers, with rubberized tips.

Here's an artist's conception (mine):

 

The pilot could grasp a fragile object, and, while watching the long springy fingernails deflect with additional force, apply just enough pressure to pick it up without shattering. Pilot John Moore used it when grabbing that bottle we picked up in our first practice recovery.

 
Harris Marchand & Co. Ingot No. 6458, the largest bar
recovered with the springy fingernails

The Coverdell Letter states that there was a Army shipment of 600 fifty-pound bars of gold that was lost on the S.S. Central America. I won't waste much time on a deep retrospective analysis here. There are many ways in which such a transport of gold is implausible or impossible. There is no other verifiable historical record of such a shipment, nor any plausible historical justification for why such a shipment would have been made, nor even any reason why such uniform-size bars, 50 pounds, as referenced in the document, would be made. But I did not yet know this in 1988. Like I mentioned before, I was not yet a numismatist.

Finding bars as part of the commercial shipment was unexpected. We were expecting coins. It was confusing at first, and we thought it possible the existence of gold bars meant that it was the mythical Army shipment. But, even at first sight, these ingots obviously were not 50-pound bars. They were not a standard size, ranging from brick-size down to domino-size. They were certainly far more interesting, and more massive in their reality than the phantom tons of an imaginary hoard.

As a further note, After the return season of 2014, I have now personally examined every place on this shipwreck site where such a gold bar deposit of 30,000 pounds could be found. In my opinion, it is not there. It is interesting how a forged document, likely fabricated around 1970, about a shipwreck from 1857, can linger within the treasure hunting culture and become, almost by overwhelming human desire, a part of the myth of the pre-discovered treasure, until finally dispelled by the discovery of the physical reality. This is a discussion for philosophers, or brandy, or both.

In short, the bars we found are not those bars, and although not comprising as stupendous a sum as the fictitious 15 tons, the monetary ingots we did find were certainly mind-boggling, thousands of pounds of glorious historical treasure, revealing stories and details not told in the history books.

There is something magical about a gold bar. No matter how large it is, the weight is reliably surprising when you take it in hand. The behemoth bars are almost hazardous to handle. And the little bars are just plain cute, but still hefty.

Examination of the first bar we recovered revealed the pattern and practice of them all. No matter what size, they all were marked with the same five pieces of information:

1. a maker's mark, the company who cast the ingot
2. a serial number, unique to that ingot, and presumably to comparable matching business documentation
3. the number of Troy Ounces, to the hundredth of an ounce
4. the purity, expressed as Fine, which is parts per thousand
5. the dollar value, just like a total at the bottom of a ledger, in dollars and cents

I ran the algebra on a bar. $20.67179 per ounce for the pure gold. (My thoughts: Hmm. That's interesting.)

It was obvious that those five pieces of information made the piece into usable money. A monetary ingot. The bar was a coin. It was just a coin of a unique non-uniform denomination. The bar was specie.

And so, it all made historical sense. The Garden of Gold deposit contained the specie of the historical accounts. This was the reality of the words I had seen in fuzzy microfilm four years earlier.

$1,219,189.43 in specie.

Before we found the gold bars, I had always wondered why the shipment was listed down to the cent. You can't match that figure using gold coins. Were they shipping pennies? The answer: monetary ingots were a large part of the shipment, and the bars were each calculated to the cent. Thus, uneven dollar amounts.

To read the complete article, see:
Treasure Talk: Episode 2 Part 2 THOSE AMAZING GOLD BARS (https://finestknown.com/treasure-talk-episode-2-part-2those-amazing-gold-bars/)

For the complete series, see:
Category Archives: Treasure Talk with Bob Evans (https://finestknown.com/treasure-talk-with-bob-evans/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n12a12.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 2.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n13a17.html)

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