TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 7.1

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V28 2025 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 32, 2025, Article 16

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

Individual coins, ingots, nuggets and artifacts also created special moments during my decades of involvement with the S.S. Central America. I would like to share one of those stories.

In the previous expeditions, over two decades earlier, our gold recoveries were exclusively from the area where we found the commercial shipment. So, except for a minor amount of possibly intermingled passenger gold, the treasure we recovered 1988 – 1991 represented the money of banking and big business, shipped in large amounts on the twice monthly mail steamers to Panama, and then on toward New York.

In 2014, our recoveries from the coin piles we found in the debris field brought much more variety to the numismatic inventory of the SSCA. This was not the money of the businesses; this was the money of the businesspeople, the money of the wealthy street, the money that a businessman or a miner might like to have at hand for the expenses of a triumphant trip back east to "The States." So, instead of the boxes of double eagles we found in the commercial shipment, we found dozens of gold dollars, quarter-eagles, half-eagles, and eagles, strewn together in distinct groupings, small and large, or sometimes buried within heavier debris.

In the early expeditions, 1988 – 1991, we recovered over 7500 gold coins, but only three $3 gold pieces, all 1856-S. They were unusual, quite possibly representing passenger gold that had intermingled with the commercial shipment during the shipwreck's 13-decades of collapsing.

The Redbook (A Guide Book of United States Coins – an industry standard) still states (2024 Edition,) "…the coin was never popular with the general public and saw very little circulation." The statement dates back for decades in the Redbook, expressing standard numismatic opinion. So I was never surprised that we found only three.

In 2014, the results of our excursions into the debris field of the SSCA shipwreck in 2014 suggest that this lack of popularity may not have been entirely true, at least in San Francisco in the summer of 1857. We found sixty-three $3 gold pieces in 2014, coming from multiple coin piles, with as many as an astonishing sixteen emerging from Coin Pile #2.

It seems, at least someone found three bucks to be a useful denomination in that time and place.

Although I was a novice at numismatics when the project began in the mid-80s, I now had 30 years of coin study under my hat. Even before the season began, I realized that the "small gold" discoveries might be significant. (I think of "small gold" as anything smaller than a $20 Double Eagle.) I had a mental list of target coins, since an abundance of small gold coinage could result from our exploration of the debris field, or from other passenger sources.

In the reference library I had at sea was a spiral-bound copy of the 2014 Redbook, (A Guide Book of United States Coins – an industry standard,) and in my MacBook I had a digital version of the Krause Publications Standard Catalog of World Coins. My copy was from 2009, a few years out of date on prices, but perfectly suited for identifying any 19th-century foreign coins we might find.

The targets I looked for included the obvious ultra-rarities, like the 1854-S $5 half eagle (only 268 made, only 3 known in 2014) and the almost equally rare1854-S $2.50 quarter eagle (only 246 made, but a few more known – sources say a dozen.) With the SSCA story behind them, such finds could be million-dollar coins, which were becoming more and more frequent. It was tantalizing to speculate about a scenario where one of these tiny rarities (not at all valued as a collectible at the time) could find its way into circulation, and into the purse of some miner or San Francisco businessman a mere three years after being made, and from there onto a steamship bound for New York in September of 1857.

Alas, we never found the fruition of such a fantasy. But I always looked for them, whenever I had a fresh-from-the-seabed half-eagle or quarter-eagle in hand.

But there were other targets. I looked at lustrous, exposed surfaces where the ubiquitous rust had flaked off the gold, places that hinted at very high grades and values, mindful that many marks and issues could be obscured beneath the rust and mineralization that coated all or parts of almost every coin. We wouldn't really know what we had until the curating was finished and everything was in its final state, graded and encapsulated. Everything I had learned from the recovery and curation of the early expeditions' fantastic finding of 7500 gold coins from the commercial shipment was now applied to the broader components of the treasure, from all over the shipwreck site. I had plenty of experience in spotting high-grade mint-state coins, having seen thousands of "before and after" examples.

Two other $3 pieces had come from the Port Coin Pot we had just previously examined from the same dive, recovered from a different part of the debris field. They were an 1856-S and an 1855-S. Nice coins no doubt, but they didn't immediately look like anything extraordinary.

But now we had a new group of coins, from a different pile. I checked the two $3 coins then in front of me, both of which showed fabulous flash and practically flawless surfaces. Yep! 1857-S. Both of them. I arranged them on the mat and pulled the exam glove tightly over my fingertips. Keenly aware that the five-gram wafers of gold on the table could be worth over $100,000 apiece, I wanted no mistakes. A loose glove was not going to mess this up! They were both wonderful coins. That was obvious. I picked up what I judged to be the better of the two.

We already had a photo of an 1857-S $3 for the spreadsheet file, so Neil didn't photograph these coins when they were fresh in the Coin Room. I regret that we did not get pictures of them before we put them away. It was not required by the system and the procedure, so we skipped it. But they were certainly special. My recollection is that there were areas of both coins, particularly in the fields, where the rust had already flaked off during the jostling of recovery. Exposed, flashy fields, between Liberty and the legend, and between the wreath and the rim, led to my extra caution. My observation is that rust spalls off unblemished mint-state gold very easily, and that was certainly the case here. On both coins there was thin rust over 60% to 70% of their surfaces, but it could not disguise the marvels that lay beneath.

In the Spring of 2018, the results were final. During the curating in the lab in California, the rust came off these coins easily. And the results, as expected, re-wrote the condition census for 1857-S $3.

The new FINEST KNOWN 1857-S $3 came from the SSCA, and it graded MS-67. The second coin graded MS-65, and would have been the finest known, had it not been eclipsed by its sister.