In 1988, treasure hunter Tommy Thompson and his colleagues found the Golden Ship – the famous American ship named SS Central America that sank to the bottom of the sea 130 years earlier.

At that time, Thompson successfully salvaged thousands of gold bars, coins and antiques worth more than 50 million USD (more than 1.1 trillion VND). But that’s only a very small part of the legendary treasure on the SS Central America!

Back in history…

SS Central America was one of the ships operating in Central America and the east coast of the United States in the 1850s.

The 20-ton gold ship remains a mystery to this day.

The SS Central America was engaged in carrying passengers and cargo to and from California during the height of the mid-19th century Gold Rush, making regular voyages between New York and Panama.

On September 3, 1857, 476 passengers and 102 sailors on the ship left the port of Colon in Panama for New York City.

Five days later, the ship staggered amid a terrible storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Passengers and crew struggled non-stop for 30 hours to keep the ship going through the waves, but the engines were flooded, and strong winds tore off the sails and broke the masts. The ship finally had to resign, on the evening of September 12, it carried the bodies of 425 passengers and a mountain of treasure worth between 100-150 million USD (nearly 4,000 billion VND) and sank into the sea.

The sinking of the Central America ship was later compared to the Titanic tragedy of that time. The loss of gold was so great that it was one of the factors that caused the financial crisis known as the “Panic of 1857”.

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All efforts to find the huge amount of gold failed until 1988, when the Columbus-America Group (CAG) expedition team, led by Tommy Thompson, located the wreck 2,400 meters below the seabed.

Ommy Thompson (right) talks with Bob Evans as the Arctic Discoverer departs from Norfolk on June 18, 1991

In the late summer of 1988, a robotic vehicle was dropped to the bottom of the sea to examine a blip that had been missed on the search network. On the surface ship’s screen, the famous waterwheel of the Central America appeared, and despite the thick layer of mud covering the seabed, it was clear that the objects strewn across the shipwreck were of a similar size. a football field containing gold bars.

Since the fall of 1989, gold and antiques under the shipwreck began to be brought to the surface, opening a treasure mining campaign including 535 gold bars and 7,500 gold coins, including gold bars weighing up to 80 pounds (over 36kg). ) – one of the largest gold bars ever discovered in the world.

Thompson once described the moment he first saw the treasure in a book: “None of us thought it would be this extraordinary. Part of America’s heritage, this is history hidden in the form of national treasure. And we found it.”

Bob Evans and the largest gold bar from the shipwreck, weighing over 36kg.

However, Thompson’s joy did not last. 39 insurance companies began suing Thompson, claiming the gold was insured by them and should belong to them. Salvage was suspended while the legal dispute was resolved.

In January 2015, Thompson was arrested on charges of defrauding investors . As of June 2017, Thompson was still detained in an American prison because he refused to “reveal” about where the mined gold was hidden…