Euro American Rare Coins and Gallery

When gold fever hit the denizens of the past, men (and women) would use all available means to reach wherever the gold was found. The preferred method of travel to the Western gold fields was by ocean-going ships. The fastest way to California was a steamship to Panama, a river ride and then some mule packing through the mountains, and then again on another steamship up the Pacific coastÖusually to San Francisco. The trip from California back to

the East also was not without peril. The most commonly plied water route consisted of a boat trip from San Francisco to Panama. Until the railroad was built, one had to travel by mule pack, then by a riverboat to traverse the fifty-mile Isthmus of Panama. Once on the Atlantic side, one would board another ocean going vessel and travel up the East Coast, usually ending the trip in New York City. There was nothing to warn a ship about storms or other hazards of the sea.

The final trip of the SS Central America started out as the numerous other runs up and down the Atlantic coast had. The trip to Panama under the command of Captain William Lewis Herndon was uneventful. The ship was a side-wheel steamer that was classified as an official government mail steamer, thus it was required to be under the command of an officer of the United States Navy. Captain Herndon was an experienced ship captain, who had written a book about his exploration of the Amazon River in the early 1850s. With passengers and cargo unloaded in Panama, the ship was filled with returning miners, their gold, cargo, and nearly three tons of gold bars and coins belonging to banks and businesses. (The rumor of a secret military shipment of three tons of fifty pound gold bars is so persistent that the present-day salvers are planning another expedition to see if it can be found.)

Many of the passengers aboard the Central America had been together since they departed San Francisco in the steamer Sonora and traveled down the Pacific coast to Panama. After the journey across the Isthmus of Panama, they had embarked on what they thought would be the easy journey up the Atlantic coast to New York City. The trip on the SS Central America would not turn out as hoped, in fact it would result in the greatest peacetime maritime disaster in American history. Only the heroic efforts of the Captain and the passing ship, the Norwegian bark Ellen, would allow nearly all the women and children along with a few men to escape the watery grave awaiting over four hundred souls on this star-crossed ship. Some laid the blame to the name change from the George Law to the Central America only a few months prior to this unprecedented calamity. Of course, it was the unexpected hurricane that doomed the ship, her cargo, and the hapless passengers, many of whom were miners who were expecting to live like kings on their golden wealth from the distant West.

Todays sophisticated weather warnings would have saved the SS Central America had they been available, she would simply have steered a course around the storm or turned around if that were not possible. Of course, Captain Herndon did not have that luxury and plowed ahead unaware of the danger that awaited his giant side-wheel steamship. The storm hit and for two days the men (and women and children) bailed water, but to no avail. Taking on much more water than they were ridding themselves of, the experienced Captain knew his charge was going to be lost. On September 12, 1857, Captain Herndon calmly put on his dress uniform and returned to the helm and sank beneath the pounding waves of the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. There she lay in cold, stony silence until she was discovered in 1988 by the salvers, who must have run the gamut of emotions when they saw the huge paddlewheel in the murky depths. At over 8,000 feet, she was nearly perfectly preserved save for the iron-eating bacteria that devoured much of the one hundred fifty tons of iron that made up the structure of the doomed vessel.

The recovery and subsequent preservation of the gold from the SS Central America is one of the greatest tales in all of treasure hunting history. The nearly perfectly preserved gold and other artifacts was a result of the depth, coldness, and pressure. The gold nuggets from the SS Central America represent a unique opportunity to purchase an authentic relic from the California Gold Rush.