In 1857, the SS Central America sank off the Carolinas carrying 30,000 pounds of gold; recovered after its 1988 discovery, one ingot alone sold for $8 million

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“The bottom was carpeted with gold. Gold everywhere, like a garden,” treasure hunter Tommy Thompson said of the seabed, as quoted by All That’s Interesting from Gary Kinder’s 1998 book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea.

The steamship SS Central America, under Navy commander William Lewis Herndon, left Panama in September 1857 bound for New York, per All That’s Interesting. Aboard were 477 passengers and 101 crew members.

A hurricane caught the ship off the Carolinas, and it sank on Sept. 12, 1857, about 200 miles off the South Carolina coast. Of the 578 people aboard, 153 survived, according to the outlet.

The ship carried about 30,000 pounds of federal gold from the San Francisco Mint, meant to supply banks in the eastern U.S., according to the , as published by CBS News. The sinking contributed to an economic panic.

More than a century later, a team led by marine engineer Thompson located the wreck, using a remotely operated vehicle on Sept. 11, 1988. It recovered the ship’s bell to confirm the identity, per All That’s Interesting. The wreck lies more than 7,000 feet down, CBS News reported.

Thompson’s team recovered about two tons of gold coins and ingots, according to All That’s Interesting. Courts later awarded the discovery team 92% of the recovered gold after 39 insurance companies sued, per the outlet.

The most famous bar is the Eureka ingot. An 80-pound gold ingot sold for a record $8 million in 2001, per CBS News. Another one, an 866.19-ounce ingot stamped by the assay firm Justh & Hunter, sold for $2.16 million at Heritage Auctions in 2022, CBS News reported. Greysheet described the Justh & Hunter bar as the largest of its kind found aboard.

Thompson’s own story took a turn. Investors who backed the expedition sued in 2005, saying they had not been paid from a $50 million sale of more than 500 gold bars and thousands of coins, per CBS News. An Ohio federal judge issued an arrest warrant in 2012 after Thompson skipped a court hearing, and authorities tracked him in 2015 to a Florida hotel, where he was living under a fake name.

Thompson said the money mostly went to legal fees and bank loans, and that about 500 remaining gold coins, valued at $2.5 million at the time, had been turned over to a trust in Belize. He told the court in 2020, “I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold,” according to CBS News.

A judge held him in civil contempt for refusing to answer questions about the coins and sent him to jail at the end of 2015. Contempt time is generally capped at 18 months, but Thompson stayed locked up for years. The judge ended the contempt sentence in 2025 and ordered a two-year sentence for the missed 2012 hearing. Thompson was released from federal prison in March 2026, per the AP.

Other treasure stories have happier endings for finders. A medical student who found Forrest Fenn’s chest sold pieces of it for $1.3 million.

Related: In 2011, Kerala’s Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple had five of its six vaults opened; an initial estimate put the gold and jewels inside at more than $20 billion

This story was originally published by Parade on Nov 1, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Source: Crime