TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 11

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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 4, 2026, Article 13

In January 2025, 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

In addition to their money, there were other signs of the wealthy society that once walked the decks of the Central America. Gold was money, but gold was also adornment, what we in the 21st century would call "bling."

In 1989, when I first settled into the messy process of searching the dredge tailings, collecting the coins and concentrating the gold dust, I also saw evidence of jewelry. It often came as individual links of gold chain, mixed in with the gold dust. Some of these little bits still reside within the various encapsulated "pinches" of gold dust from the SSCA. I see it every now and then when I examine one in detail. Then one night, an astonishingly beautiful and mysterious ring appeared, set with multiple stones, and glimmering in the ship's bright deck lights as I held it up to examine. I recall that my quiet comment was an awestruck, "Wow!"

I wrote a message to our history department, Judy Conrad and our staff back at the home office in Columbus, describing a gold ring set (in succession) with a diamond, a pale ruby (possibly rose quartz,) an amethyst, a garnet, an emerald, and a missing stone. What was this assortment of stones? Was this a mother's ring, with the birthstones of her children? That was my best guess.

I believe we would fax messages to the Home Office once each day. Communications were different back then. Judy wrote back, rather quickly I recall, maybe only a day or two after my discovery of the jewels in the muck. "Could it be a REGARD ring?" she asked. A pre-engagement token of affection, a "friendship" ring if you will, a love charm from the mid-19th century.

Of course! That's what it is! I was elated. The gold always delights, but gold coins are money, historically a medium of exchange. This ring spoke about other cultural practices, men and women and courtship. I often talk and write about how the treasure has stories to tell. Lawyers are familiar with a Latin phrase that scientists should use as well, "Res ipsa loquitur." The thing speaks for itself. Receiving this message from the historians, I felt like the treasure was shouting.

Our prime business objective for finding the shipwreck and the treasure was to recover the commercial shipment. With the amount of money we were spending, there wasn't any wasted time. Almost all our landings on the seabed were adjacent to the big treasure pile. We established a "science station" nearby, which we could visit to tend experiments and observe and collect biology without spending an hour getting there. But, as you can appreciate, our main activity was picking up gold and trying to figure out how to do it most efficiently, balancing that with the care needed to not damage coins potentially worth $20 thousand apiece.

The debris field held many fascinations, some objects we could understand and some we couldn't. Things look different after 13 decades under the sea. We knew there was gold in the debris field, but we didn't explore extensively to locate widely dispersed gold. We continued to work on our prime objective, the multi-ton deposit at the stern of the shipwreck.

There was one concentration of coins sitting in the portside debris field that was clearly visible. It sat in an area that looked to be swept clean of sediment, a bare patch of sediment with a few dozen coins on top. The coins appeared to be the same size; we assumed double eagles. Sitting beside the coins was a chain. Its well-preserved condition suggested that it was gold, undoubtedly more jewelry.

We found this first "coin pile" during early photographic surveys, and we descended for a close look, but never landed to recover anything. All of this we left for a later date, thinking that we could always come back to recover the pile. So, we left it as an "Ace in the hole." It was there if we ever needed it. Meanwhile, we continued working on the much larger commercial shipment, where thousands of coins remained, then hundreds. We knew that at some point the commercial shipment deposit would be depleted, and we would then turn our attention to the passenger gold.

At the end of 1991, we hadn't finished recovering all the commercial gold shipment, and so we had not taken the time to recover the little pile of double eagles out in the debris field either. In 1992, the ruling from Federal District Court in Norfolk granting us ownership based on Finders' Law was overturned on appeal. The Circuit Court ruled (2 to 1) that Salvage Law should apply in our case rather than The Law of Finds, and the case was sent back to District Court and Judge Kellam for a second trial. (See Treasure Talk Episode 4, Parts 1 & 2.) The resulting legal entanglements coupled with other business complexities ushered in over two decades of human and robot inactivity on the S.S Central America shipwreck site.

I didn't get back to the site for 22 ½ years. Many things had changed. Tommy Thompson was out of the picture, except as the subject of a manhunt by U.S. Marshals. The court had appointed a Receiver, Ira Kane, who in turn had hired me to resume my role as the Chief Scientist and Historian of the Project. I went back to the site with a new colleague, Craig Mullen, now serving as the Receiver's Director of Marine Operations, and a new set of crewmates from our contractor, Odyssey Marine Exploration. No one else remained from the early expeditions. I held all the "corporate memory" of the shipwreck site and what we had done there. Ira Kane, referred to me as the "Last Man Standing."

Indeed, I was still standing, and I enjoyed a sudden flood of new information. The passage of two decades had brought wonderful advances in technology, particularly in areas of digital photography, video, navigation, and user comment logging, and the integration of all these systems. As well, whereas 1990 Nemo had the thrusting horsepower of a garden tractor pushing 6 Tons of machinery through water, 2014 Zeus (Odyssey's ROV) had more like the force of a sports car, and it could travel around the shipwreck independent from the motions of the ship it was tethered to by a mile and a half of cable. That's an oversimplification of an enormously complicated subject: simultaneous surface versus deep-sea navigation. The important part here is that there had been huge advances, in the total power of the ROV, and in the world of computer controls and systems integration.

Within two weeks a digital photomosaic survey with excellent spatial control had revealed another couple dozen coin pile locations, both confirmed and probable. The one we knew about from the late 1980s was designated as "Coin Pile #1," and it became convention to call places where we found at least two coins a "coin pile." Once Odyssey had established a convention, it was hard to change, since we were operating 24/7, and it was more important to capture the data than to have it logically named, or to change the classifications. So, many spots within the 5-meter-wide commercial shipment deposit received designations as separate coin piles, although their starting positions before the shipwreck collapse had become difficult to discern, the boxes or bags as originally arranged within the strong room. In my mind, the commercial shipment started out as one deposit, then split into two huge "coin piles" as the shipwreck's stern folded open during collapse.

Once the "coin pile" moniker had been established, Odyssey also designated some "Ingot Piles" and "Nugget Piles." None of these rose to the anthropological significance of the coin piles in the port side debris field. Here we found the money of the wealthy street, in some cases concentrated into a literal pile.

Some of these deposits were coins only, just the money. But, more frequently we found suites with all kinds of valuables. In the final minutes, as the Central America was about to sink, the stern section was swamped first, and the men crowded onto to foredeck with the final possessions they were trying to save, their money, their jewelry, and their photographs. Most cast their heavy bags and gold-stuffed belts on the deck, some pouring out gold dust, as I mentioned in last month's episode. These bags perched on deck as the ship spiraled upright to the bottom during a half-hour descent, impacting the seabed with enough force to explode the decks and boilers up and over to the port side, and propel the passengers' bags into a broad area, now comprising the portside debris field.

So, there are "coin piles" where we found mostly coins, perhaps with one or two pieces of jewelry, like Coin Pile #1 that we first saw in ‘88. There were also coin piles that had flashy numbers of small gold coins, beckoning us into an array of jewelry, large gold nuggets, and photographic cases, as well as the coins. Coin Pile #2 was like that. I'm currently working with a colleague on research about what the constituent coins in these coin piles tell us.

Here are some of the coin and gold-nugget adorned jewelry pieces later recovered from the piles. See the complete article for details. Wonderful finds! -Editor