USA (24 Dec 2003) -- It lay in darkness at the bottom of the Atlantic for almost a century and a half, guarded only by the occasional shark. Now the 150-year-old steamship has a visitor: a robot bristling with lights, cameras and mechanical arms that is picking its way through the wreckage, hauling up a fortune in gold and silver coins, eventually perhaps 30,000 of them. The ship is the SS Republic, which sailed from New York in 1865, just after the Civil War, carrying 59 passengers and crew members and a mixed cargo meant to help New Orleans recover from the war. However, during a hurricane about 100 miles off Georgia, it sank in waters a third of a mile deep. Its cargo of lost coins, experts say, may now be worth $150 million. That would make it one of history's richest treasure wrecks, though far shy of the Atocha, a Spanish galleon lost off Florida in 1622, from which $400 million worth of treasure was claimed to have been recovered in the 1980s. "It's a dream come true," said Donald Kagin, an expert on 19th-century coins who is advising the company that found the wreck. "There are piles of coins." The company, Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla., announced the find in August and said it hoped to retrieve the coins. Today it is announcing that the treasure is real and is detailing its findings. So far, the company has retrieved more than 1,600 gold and silver coins. None is dated later than 1865, tending to confirm the wreck's identity, said Greg Stemm, 46, the company's director of operations. "For some reason, even the silver coins are in great condition," he said. "Part of it is surely the physical environment down there." The icy deep, explorers are finding, can often preserve objects, even precious metals like silver that corrode easily. | | A public company, Odyssey sells stock and hopes to turn a profit mainly by setting up shipwreck museums and selling coins. It argues that coins have less archaeological value than items like ship parts and navigational gear and that selling them is an ideal way to finance recoveries of purely historical interest. |
