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As a mail steamer known as the S.S. Central America chugged alongside the Atlantic coast In 1857, certain for brand spanking new York, it was hit by a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina. More than four hundred folks died, 38,000 pieces of mail were lost, and an estimated 21 tons of gold - a huge portion of the nationwide wealth not too long ago prospected within the California Gold Rush - plunged to the underside of the Atlantic after a sinking that took upwards of 40 hours. The shipwreck took with it a lot business gold, and so many newly-rich gold prospectors, that the incident triggered a downturn within the U.S. And you’d better imagine people tried to search out and retrieve the “Ship of Gold,” as it turned recognized. For 130 years, treasure hunters scoured shallow waters of the Atlantic off the coast of the Carolinas for indicators of it, however no person had any luck even estimating the placement of the wrecked ship. No one, that is, till 1988, when an Ohio engineer named Tommy Thompson discovered the shipwreck - with relative ease, apparently.

Convincing 160 buyers (principally from his dwelling state of Ohio) to give him virtually $13 million to invent a robotic gadget to find and retrieve the loot from beneath 8,000 ft (2,438 meters) of open ocean, Thompson turned a hero. In case you’re interested, when an unlimited treasure is found, it’s no simple matter parsing out who it belongs to. When Thompson and his crew first discovered the wreckage of the Central America, authorized troubles arose virtually instantly. Insurance coverage corporations claiming to have insured the ship within the 1800’s, Memory Wave as an illustration, instantly sued for a reduce of the profits. In 2000, when Thompson bought a portion of the primary 3-ton haul for an estimated $50 million, the traders who had funded the expedition sued him for their share of the gold (they haven’t seen an ingot of it yet). Then, in 2012, when Thompson was called into courtroom yet once more, he didn’t show up.

A warrant was issued for his arrest, however when the police tried to find him, they found as a substitute that he had disappeared fully. And catching him and his girlfriend Alison Antekeier was difficult