TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 5.1

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V28 2025 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 22, 2025, Article 13

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

It is safe to say that we have all experienced rust. Rust is common everywhere. Everyone has grabbed some dirty object only to find their hands soiled with the reddish-brown stains of iron oxide. While it may seem odd to talk about rust in an article about treasure, the reader should realize that the greatest lost treasure in United States history sat for decades in a rusty world.

Hundreds of tons of iron were used in the construction of the S.S. George Law, the steamship that would see its name changed to Central America in June of 1857. At the bottom of the sea, over the course of 13 decades, the massive engines and boilers of the great steamer were transformed into ghostly monuments, reduced to rusty hulks, appearing to melt into the surrounding seafloor. Both chemical and biological agents were responsible for the scene we found in September of 1988.

I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. What we saw was the aftermath of a disaster that took hundreds of human lives, an appalling tragedy. My intention has always been to honor the memory of those 425 men who were lost, and the legacy of the 153 survivors, whose lives were changed forever by the Great Storm of 1857. There is a profound spiritual element involved in working on this important site.

As a scientist, there is also the physical reality, and the practical matters that accompany difficult work under challenging conditions, on a deep-sea site that is utterly fascinating and complex, a wonderful manifestation of history as well as natural processes, a shipwreck that shouts obvious facts, but gives up other secrets slowly, if at all.

Marine biologists have a term for what happened when the SSCA sank to the seabed. It was a "woodfall," usually a word applied to trees that drift out to sea and sink. In the case of the SSCA, it was an enormous woodfall, the equivalent of dozens of trees. From a deep-sea biological resource point of view, in addition to around 600 tons of nutritious wood, it also had lots of small and large nooks and cavities. Even at a depth of 7,200 feet (2200m,) more than a mile below where any sunlight can penetrate, life still proliferates.

And so, on September 12, 1857, the S.S. Central America sank, fell through the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, passed into the cold depths of the Western Boundary Undercurrent, and impacted the seabed 2200 meters down. It settled onto a flat, slightly sloping field of microscopic shells of plankton, in a region otherwise devoid of any large features.

Suddenly, 600 tons of wood and a few hundred tons of iron plopped down in the middle of this setting. For benthic animals, those who live at the bottom of the sea, this was a huge opportunity, the base for a food web to develop, and a hard substrate.

Sessile animals are those who attach to objects and grow on them, like sponges and corals. These animals and many other invertebrates begin life as free-swimming larvae, which drift with the currents until attaching to something hard. It can be anything non-poisonous, a piece of wood, a lump of coal, a gold bar.

The arrival of the wood triggered a feast. Bacteria immediately started to colonize and consume the timbers. Small invertebrates began to graze on the bacteria, and these were in turn eaten by larger species. The nutritious waters provided plenty of food for filter feeders like corals, sponges, and adaptive starfish. The structure of the shipwreck introduced another commodity rare in that vast, flat plain: a third dimension. Animals that crawl could also climb. We found several filter-feeding starfish arrayed high atop the paddle wheel frame and other features that protruded up into the nutritious current.

TT5-05-Rust-transition-ARCH-S-00105-scaled

Iron is the fourth commonest element in the earth's crust, after oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. So, we know a lot about iron, and with both iron and oxygen so abundant on the planet it is no surprise that rust is as well.

When first recovered, some of the artifacts showed this layering, the changes in chemistry from the thin rust forming in the open water with abundant oxygen, descending into the brownish-red rust at the sediment surface, then deeper into darker and blacker deposits where less and less oxygen is present, and then clear, with no rust forming once deep enough.

What this means for the S.S. Central America shipwreck site is that rust is everywhere. Iron-fixing bacteria proliferate, and they have spread the rust onto almost every exposed surface. Rust bubbles from every iron surface and is redeposited on the ceramics, the coal, and even the gold.

It appears to flow down the sides of machinery and to drip from chains and water tanks like so many icicles or stalactites, like flowstone in cave formations. The team that discovered the shipwreck of R.M.S Titanic dubbed the dangling formations "rusticles."

I have heard it a million times, "Wait a minute! Rust on gold? Gold doesn't rust, does it?"

No. The rust doesn't form from the gold. The rust forms on the gold. The rust forms around the gold. It is a surface deposit. In a sense, it is the rock that encases the gold, like the sedimentary rock matrix around fossils.

This is completely unlike tarnish on silver, which involves a chemical reaction between the elements in the air and the silver itself. (Airborne sulfur is a major contributor to tarnish.) So, tarnish is actually a silver mineral, and it represents a change of the original silver surface.

Not so with the rust on the gold of the SSCA. The presence of rust on the gold is due to chemical reactions, aided by biology, but the gold was not involved, except as an inert surface for the deposit.

After the 1988 season, I had a few double eagles to work with, a few rusty gold coins. How could I properly remove the rust and reveal what were obviously pretty fabulous coins that were hiding under the dirt? How could I "clean" the gold?

Honestly, coming from the world of science, numismatists don't like a lot of things. They have high standards, and they are very particular about originality. They are also a very semantic bunch, a fact I find both aggravating and endearing. In a normal world a whole host of synonyms might be useful, in addition to just straight "cleaning." Washing, rinsing, scrubbing, scouring, polishing, restoring, conserving, preserving, curating.

"Scrubbing," "scouring," and "polishing" are strictly forbidden, because they imply manipulation of the original surface, alteration or movement of metal, so originality is lost.

"Washing" and "preserving" are too general. How did you wash it? What did you do to preserve it?

"Restoring" implies manipulation of surfaces as well, that the restorer has done something to regain the originality, which, let's face it, cannot be achieved. It also suggests an even worse practice, "doctoring," in which a coin's surface or features are treated in a way to either conceal or enhance something about the coin, in other words, to deceive.

This leaves us with "conserving" and "curating." It could be argued that these are also too ambiguous to be useful. But they sound better than "cleaning," which is something you do to a dirty bathtub, or a carburetor. They sound more "scientifical."

I'm fine with being either a conservator or a curator. In my mind, a conservator is a technician, who applies specific treatments or actions to an object to achieve the desired condition. Also, in my mind, a curator is one who cares (from the Latin, curare: to care.) Perhaps it is splitting hairs, but the curator conserves, and catalogues, and studies the objects in question. Curation and conservation are about intent. My intention has always been to do no harm, neither concealing any defect nor enhancing any weakness, and to present a gold coin in as natural and original a condition as possible, to reveal it for what it is.

Somewhere, early in the project, probably after the flood of gold from the 1989 season, I settled on the title Curator to describe my relationship to the treasure. The sudden addition of thousands of pieces to the project's "collection," including thousands of the same thing (mint-state but rusty 1857-S double eagles) called for broader curatorial techniques, mostly cataloguing and tracking, rather than the more specific lab work of "conserving" gold.

But as Curator, I was also serving as conservator, and I have ever since. So, call me either.