On Sept. 12, 1857, an American steamer named the SS Central America sank after being bombarded by Category 2 hurricane winds off the coast of the Carolinas. This “Ship of Gold” had been carrying 578 passengers and crew members and over 30,000 pounds of gold. Only 153 passengers survived, making it the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history at the time.
Over 130 years later, a marine engineer named Tommy Thompson rediscovered the wreck of the SS Central America and collected about two tons of her treasure. The payoff was huge. Thompson walked away with millions, transferring much of his riches to overseas accounts.
But it wouldn’t be smooth sailing for Thompson. After neglecting to pay his investors the millions of dollars he owed them, he went on the run — and even after police finally tracked him down to a hotel in Florida years later, he refused to reveal the location of his loot.
This is the story of the hunt for the SS Central America, “America’s greatest treasure ship.”
The History Of The SS Central America And Its Sinking
Public DomainCommander William Lewis Herndon, the captain of the SS Central America.
Launched in October 1852, the SS Central America was a 280-foot American steamer ship built in the Webb shipyard in New York. Captained by William Lewis Herndon, a Navy Commander and explorer, the ship ran between North and South America throughout the 1850s, carrying a fortune in gold obtained in the California gold rush on each trip.
On Sept. 3, 1957, the ship left port in Panama on a routine voyage to New York, carrying 101 crew members and 477 passengers, many of them gold miners, as well as a cargo of over 30,000 pounds of gold.
On Sept. 9, 1857, the SS Central America got caught in a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas. The ship struggled to navigate through the storm, and by Sept. 11, she had begun taking on water.
“It appears that when the sea had commenced with fury, the ship laid down upon one side, causing her engines to labor heavily from the total immersion of one paddle wheel, and increasing the difficulty of passing the coal and firing,” read a January 1858 report detailing the disaster, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. “This angle caused the ship to strain heavily at the turn of her bilge, either working the oakum out of her seams or working the timbers apart, causing extraordinary leakage.”
Women and children were put aboard lifeboats while the men worked around the clock to bail the ship. The crew also flipped the ship’s flag upside down, a universal sign of distress. But no other vessel could get close enough to aid the SS Central America. On Sept. 12, she fell victim to the storm and sank.
Public DomainA depiction of the ship’s sinking in 1857.
One survivor, a miner from Michigan named William Chase, described the last few moments before the sinking:
“There was some praying, also some swearing, and some fighting for loose boards and box tops. Some deliberately turned in and went to bed, choosing to meet their fate in that form. The majority did not expect the vessel to go down so soon.”
Of the 578 passengers aboard the vessel, only 153 survived the disaster.
Tommy Thompson Discovers The Wreck
At the time of its sinking, the SS Central America carried three tons of gold from the gold rush. It was also rumored to hold a secret federal shipment of 15 additional tons, worth hundreds of millions of dollars today.
In the years following the disaster, treasure hunters scoured the Atlantic, hoping to find the sunken gold. But it wasn’t until Tommy Thompson, a marine engineer from Ohio, took a stab at it over 130 years later that the SS Central America and her lost treasure were rediscovered.
U.S. MarshallsTommy Thompson, the man who discovered the wreck of the SS Central America.
For years, Tommy Thompson had pored over historical records and maritime documents to pinpoint the likely location of the SS Central America’s resting place. He managed to convince 161 private investors to pledge over $12 million to his expedition, launching the Columbus America Discovery Group in 1985.
On Sept. 11, 1988, Thompson’s crew used a remotely-operated submersible to investigate a sunken ship about 200 miles off the coast of South Carolina. Before long, they had recovered the ship’s bell, which helped them to positively identify the wreck as the SS Central America. And after a few more dives, the team struck gold.
“The bottom was carpeted with gold. Gold everywhere, like a garden,” Thompson recalled in Gary Kinder’s 1998 book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. “The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing.”
The team brought about two tons of gold coins and ingots to the surface. The Seattle Times reported in 2019 that that much gold amounts to around $76 million today. But because of the treasure’s historical value, it was worth far more.
And according to Thompson’s team, they’d left tons more behind on the sea floor.
Tommy Thompson’s Legal Woes
Unfortunately, the discovery launched Thompson into several legal battles. In 1989, 39 insurance companies sued Thompson in federal court, claiming that they had insured the treasure that sank with the SS Central America and that a significant portion of it therefore belonged to them. In the end, courts awarded the discovery team 92% of all of the recovered gold.
In 2000, Thompson sold some of the gold to private companies, making a reported $50 million, and transferred some of his earnings to offshore accounts. But in 2005, several of Thompson’s investors sued him, claiming he had never paid them back for the millions they had paid to finance his expedition. For his part, Thompson claimed most of the money he’d made from the treasure had gone to legal fees and loans.
In 2012, a court issued a federal warrant for Thompson’s arrest, ordering that he disclose the whereabouts of roughly 500 gold coins minted from the treasure. Instead, he went on the run.
Finally, in 2015, after two years of searching, police tracked Tommy Thompson down to a Florida hotel where he’d been hiding out with his girlfriend, paying his rent in cash and living under a fake name.
California Gold Marketing GroupSome of the ship’s sunken treasure.
In 2018, Thompson was ordered to pay back his investors $19.4 million in compensatory damages. But Thompson still refused to disclose the location of the missing coins, saying simply that they were in a trust in Belize.
Today, he sits in prison, accruing $1,000 in fines each day until he reveals the location of the treasure.
Treasure Hunters Continue To Seek Out The SS Central America
While Tommy Thompson was the first to discover the SS Central America, he and his crew only excavated a fraction of the ship.
In March 2014, the company Odyssey Marine Exploration (OME) received a contract to complete an archaeological recovery and extraction project on the famous shipwreck. This time, a court-appointed organization called Recovery Limited Partnership would be overseeing the work.
“This is an iconic American shipwreck, and, as salvor-in-possession, we have a duty to not only recover the remaining valuable cargo and significant items of cultural heritage at the site, but to also share what we learn with the public,” said Ira Owen Kane, the receiver for Recovery Limited Partnership, according to the Maritime Executive.
During this second expedition, OME extracted over 10,600 gold coins, some 14,000 silver coins, 577 gold ingots, and over 100 pounds of gold dust and nuggets.
Holabird Western Americana CollectionsThese jeans recovered from the SS Central America may be the oldest Levi’s ever found.
Over the years, a number of artifacts recovered from the SS Central America have fetched steep prices at auction, including a pair of jeans that may be the oldest Levi’s ever found and a daguerreotype photograph of a woman dubbed the “Mona Lisa of the Deep.” The most profitable find was an 80-pound gold ingot, which sold for a whopping $8 million in 2001.
In total, tens of millions of dollars worth of gold and other treasures have been sold since Tommy Thompson first discovered the wreck of the SS Central America. Many consider it to be the greatest American treasure ever found.
But for Thompson, and for the victims of the SS Central America wreck, the pursuit of that gold proved to be a curse.