Doomed ship of gold's ghostly picture gallery is plucked from the seabed
Dalya Alberge
Sun 27 Feb 2022 03.00 EST
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Eerie photographs recovered from the 1857 wreck of the SS Central America are now being published for the first time
Dalya Alberge
Sun 27 Feb 2022 03.00 EST
It is one of the most famous treasure wrecks ever discovered, a steamer named the “ship of gold” after it sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina with one of the largest cargoes of gold ever lost at sea. Miners who had struck it rich in the California gold rush were among those bringing home to New York their hard-earned wealth, only to lose their lives when the SS Central America was struck by a hurricane, sinking nearly a mile and a half beneath the waves.
When nuggets, ingots and coins were recovered from the seabed in various expeditions between 1988 and 2014, the world was dazzled. But, with reported values of tens of millions of pounds, it sparked a complex legal case that landed its original treasure-hunter in jail.
Now Dr Sean Kingsley, a British maritime archaeologist, is focusing attention on another facet of the recovered artefacts: an astonishing collection of 19th-century portraits that somehow survived at the bottom of the Atlantic.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/27/doomed-ship-of-golds-ghostly-picture-gallery-is-plucked-from-the-seabed