EQUITY WATCH : Gold Rush
The pot of gold is not at the end of the rainbow. It’s in 8,000 feet of water 160 miles off the coast of South Carolina. It was located there four years ago by a consortium of treasure hunters, it’s worth upwards of $1 billion and--need it be said--its ownership has been the subject of intense legal battles.
The cache ended up on the ocean bottom when the Central America, a ship carrying it and nearly 500 passengers to New York from the California gold fields, sank in a hurricane 133 years ago. More than 400 lives were lost along with three tons of gold coins and bars, but the disaster didn’t end there. When the ship went down, so did the U.S. economy. By some accounts, a number of shaky New York banks were desperately depending on the gold shipment to keep them in business. When the gold was lost, a wave of bank failures followed, and the Panic of 1857 was on.
A federal judge this week held that the gold belongs to those who found it, rejecting claims by eight insurance companies that ownership was theirs because they long ago paid out claims on the losses. Maybe they had, said the judge, but when the companies destroyed their records from that period, they abandoned all rights to recovery.
What a happy ending for some determined treasure hunters, who have now done what nearly everyone dreams of doing! Never before has there been a find like this one.
But the open sea is the graveyard for many treasure-loaded ships. There’s no telling what other hunters armed with the best of modern technology may yet uncover.
