While from the shipwreck of Le Chameau mostly silver coins were recovered, there was another ship, that sank a century later, laden with tons of gold. It was the SS (steamship) Central America, often dubbed as "the Ship of Gold". It was hit by a hurricane, and went down on September 12, 1857, 160 miles from Charleston, South Carolina. From the crew and the passengers, only 153 were saved, while 425 lives were lost.

The cargo of the SS Central America was mainly gold ingots from the mines of California, en route to the Philadelphia Mint, and stacks of gold eagles from the San Francisco Mint, which started its operation in 1854. These bear the mint mark "S", and were quite rare before the cargo of the Central America was recovered and sold in auctions.

Here is an image of the obverse and the reverse of a San Francisco-minted 1857 20-dollar "double eagle" gold coin, probably from the shipwreck (image courtesy of the CoinPage ).

There are many websites, and even books, devoted solely to the story of the SS Central America, so I am not going into this very deeply, just let me add one more interesting detail. On board of the Central America, there were slugs and coins, made by the private mint operators Samuel Wass and Agoston Molitor, who were of Hungarian origins. (Yes, I am a Hungarian, too.) They produced $5 and $10 dollar coins until the opening of the San Francisco Mint, then they switched to the large $50 coins. Here is an image of the obverse and the reverse of this coin. Although not as beautiful as John Grover Kellogg's famous $50 dollar coin, this was probably the only US coin that bears a Hungarian name on its reverse!

A piece of this coin was sold at an auction for more than $210,000 in January 2007. - I also read somewhere that the inventory of the coins, recovered from the SS Central America, shows that only one single piece of the $50 Molitor coin was found. This explains that its price is still in the 6-digit range.

(C) 2007, Zoltan Barczikay.