Association, sunk in 1707 off the Scilly Isles, southwest of England

                The sinking of this ship and four others in a fleet of 21 returning from the Mediterranean was one of the worst British naval disasters of all time. The Association sank on October 22 under stormy conditions after what can only be described as guesswork navigation that led the ships straight onto the rocks of the Scilly Isles, where as many as 2,000 sailors lost their lives as a result. The admiral of the fleet, Sir Cloudisley Shovell, whose ten chests of personal wealth (in addition to several others) were rumored to be aboard the Association, was one of the casualties of the sinking, although legend has it he reached shore alive, only to be murdered there by a local woman for a ring on his finger.

                The wrecksite was located in 1967 by British Navy divers, touching off a frenzy of activity on the site for years to come. Cannons and a few coins were raised in the 1960s, but it was not till 1973 that a significant amount of coins were found (8,000 in that year alone). These coins, mostly British silver and gold but also many Spanish and Spanish-American silver cobs, were sold at auction beginning in 1969 and into the early 1970s. The cobs presented an eclectic mix, mostly 8 reales from the 1650s forward (even a “Royal” presentation issue from 1676), but from nearly all mints (especially Lima and Potosí), some even left in as-found conglomerate form combined with British coins. It is interesting to note that parts of this wreck, like others in the area, were flattened hard to the muddy sea floor by huge boulders that still roll around with the currents, making for dangerous and difficult salvage.

DeLiefde, sunk in 1711 off the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland

                During the War of Spanish Succession it was deemed safer to take the northern route around Scotland than to skirt French coasts in the English Channel, but in so doing the Dutch East Indiaman DeLiefde wrecked on a reef in the Out Skerries due to faulty navigation under overcast skies, leaving only one survivor to tell the tale. Prompt salvage attempts by the VOC to recover the cargo of silver and gold coins turned up nothing—looting by locals was greatly suspected. Modern expeditions in the 1960s, however, located the ship and yielded upwards of 4000 coins (mostly silver “rider” ducatoons and gold ducats) in 1966-1968, many of which were sold at auction by Glendining (London) in 1969.

1715 Fleet, east coast of Florida

                The Spanish 1715-Fleet disaster was probably the greatest to befall any of the Spanish treasure fleets in terms of casualties and money, with reports of a loss of 14 million pesos (plus an equal or greater amount in contraband) and as many as 1,000 or more lives. It was a typical case of overloaded Spanish galleons foundering in a hurricane after delayed departure. In effect the 1715 Fleet was a combination of two fleets: the Nueva España (New Spain, i.e., Mexico) Fleet from Mexico and the Tierra Firme (Mainland) Fleet from South America, some 12 or 13 ships in all. Encountering a hurricane on July 30, all the ships were driven shoreward and destroyed except for a lone vessel, the tag-along French ship Grifón, which sailed onward without incident. Hundreds of the crew and passengers lost their lives while other hundreds of survivors improvised a camp on shore to await aid from the Spanish fort at St. Augustine, to which a party was sent.

                Salvage commenced soon afterward and lasted for several years. Nearly half of the vast treasure (at least the registered part) was recovered and kept in a nearby storehouse. In 1716, a flotilla of British freebooters under Henry Jennings raided the storehouse and carried off some 350,000 pesos of the treasure to Jamaica. The Spaniards, however, resumed operations until they could salvage no more and quit in 1719. The rest of the treasure remained on the ocean floor until our time.

                Modern salvage on the 1715 Fleet began in the late 1950s, when local resident Kip Wagner found a piece of eight on the beach after a hurricane and decided to pursue the source. With the help of a 1774 chart and an army-surplus metal detector, he located the original Spanish salvage camp and unearthed coins and artifacts. Then, using a rented airplane to spot the underwater wrecksite from the air and check the location again by boat, Kip found the source of the coins and soon formed a team of divers and associates backed by a salvage permit from the State of Florida. All of this took place over a period of years before it evolved into the Real Eight Company, whose ranks later included such luminaries as Robert Marx and the flamboyant Mel Fisher. The Fisher family still sub-leases the sites to hopeful salvagers today.

                The vast treasures yielded by the 1715 Fleet in our time fall into nearly every category, from coins to jewelry, precious stones to cannons, religious artifacts to Chinese porcelains. The 1715 Fleet remains the world’s largest source for New World gold cobs, while the silver cobs recovered number in the hundreds of thousands. Promotions of the coins by Real Eight and others have spanned the decades, in addition to significant auctions by Henry Christensen (1964); Parke-Bernet Galleries (1967) and Sotheby Parke Bernet (1973); the Schulman Coin and Mint (1972 and 1974); Bowers and Ruddy Galleries (1977); and even the U.S. Customs Service (2003).

                Despite a wealth of publications pertaining to the 1715 Fleet with names of the ships and the known locations of some of the wrecks, there is no universal agreement as to the identity of the vessel at each wrecksite. In many cases, in fact, it is possible that separate wrecksites represent different parts of the same ship. As a result, salvagers over the decades have resorted to nicknames for the sites based on landmarks, local individuals, and even features from the wrecks themselves, such as (from north to south): “Pines” (Sebastian), “Cabin” (Wabasso), “Cannon” (Wabasso), “Corrigans” (Vero Beach), “Rio Mar” (Vero Beach), “Sandy Point” (Vero Beach), “Wedge” (Fort Pierce), and “Colored Beach” (Fort Pierce). Regardless of the exact site of origin, a great majority of the coins and artifacts are sold simply as “1715 Fleet.”

Whydah, sunk off Cape Cod, Massachusetts

                Flagship of the notorious pirate Sam Bellamy, the Whydah sank in a storm on April 26 with the loss of all hands (including Bellamy himself) except for two. Found in 1984 and subsequently salvaged by Barry Clifford, the Whydah is widely recognized as the first identifiable pirate ship ever to be salvaged. There is now a museum dedicated to the ship on Cape Cod that houses all the salvaged finds from the Whydah, but before that opened, various cobs (silver and gold) and other coins from the Whydah would enter the market via local dealers, who presumably got them from lucky beachcombers and from the families of people who obtained the coins long ago. Today it is nearly impossible to acquire a coin from the Whydah.

Slot ter Hooge, sunk in 1724 off Porto Santo, Madeira Islands

                This East Indiaman, whose Dutch name means “Castle of Hooge” (a place in modern-day Belgium), was outbound to Batavia (Jakarta) with a load of three tons of silver ingots (15 chests) plus four chests of silver coins, three of which contained nothing but Mexican cobs. Blown off course by a storm, the Slot ter Hooge wrecked on November 19 off Porto Santo Island in the Madeira Islands (northwest of Africa), to the demise of some 221 people on board (only 33 survived). More than half the treasure was salvaged over the next ten years by the famous English inventor John Lethbridge, but the rest was forgotten until our time. In 1974 the wreck was rediscovered by the well-known salvager Robert Sténuit, who recovered many silver ingots and coins, mostly Dutch ducatoons but also some Mexican 8-reales cobs.

Le Chameau, sunk in 1725 off Nova Scotia, Canada

                This French man-of-war was attempting to reach Louisburg harbor with a consignment of troops and coins for the French colony when a storm sent her onto the rocks of Cape Breton instead, killing all on board. The main wrecksite was never found until 1961, when Alex Storm spotted cannons on the seabed and led a successful salvage expedition on the site in 1965, yielding many French silver ecus and gold Louis d’ors. The Chameau has been salvaged more recently as well.

Sea Horse, sunk in 1728 in the River Plate off Uruguay

                The Sea Horse was an English slave ship, plying her trade of human cargo from Madagascar to Buenos Aires, when she sank in a surprise gust of wind in the River Plate on September 29, 1728. She had just unloaded 138 slaves and had crossed to the Uruguayan side of the river at the colony of Sacramento before departure when the disaster struck, sending a large shipment of precious metal to the riverbed off the island of Gorriti near Maldonado. Much of the treasure was soon recovered, but part of it has been located in modern times as well.

1733 Fleet, Florida Keys

                Much like the 1715-Fleet disaster, the 1733 Fleet was an entire Spanish convoy lost in a hurricane off Florida. However, due to the lesser severity of the 1733 hurricane, which struck the fleet on July 15, and the shallowness of the wrecksites in the Keys, there were many survivors, and four ships remained in good enough condition to be refloated and sent back to Havana. A highly successful salvage effort by the Spanish yielded even more than the 12 million pesos of precious cargo listed on the Fleet’s manifest (thanks to the usual contraband).

                The wrecks themselves are spread across 80 miles, from north of Key Largo down to south of Duck Key, and include the following galleons (note there is not universal agreement as to which wrecksite pertains to each galleon, and each name is a contemporaneous abbreviation or nickname): El Pópulo, El Infante, San José, El Rubí (the capitana), Chávez, Herrera, Tres Puentes, San Pedro, El Terri (also spelled Lerri or Herri), San Francisco, El Gallo Indiano (the almiranta), Las Angustias, El Sueco de Arizón, San Fernando, and San Ignacio. This last ship, San Ignacio, is believed to be the source of many silver coins (and even some gold coins) found in a reef area off Deer Key known as “Coffins Patch,” the south-westernmost of all the 1733-Fleet wrecksites. In addition, many other related sites are known, mostly the wrecks of tag-along ships that accompanied the fleet proper.

                The first and arguably most famous of the wrecks of the 1733 Fleet to be located in modern times was the capitana El Rubí, which was discovered in 1948 and salvaged principally in the 1950s by Art McKee, whose Sunken Treasure Museum on Plantation Key housed his finds for all to see. Unfortunately throughout the next several decades the wrecksites in the Keys became a virtual free-for-all, with many disputes and confrontations, until the government created the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in 1990. The removal of artifacts from any of the sites is prohibited today.

                In contrast to the 1715 Fleet, and because of the extensive Spanish salvage in the 1730s, the finds by modern divers have been modest, especially in gold coins, of which there are far more fakes on the market than genuine specimens. Nevertheless, the 1733 Fleet has been a significant source for some of the rare Mexican milled “pillar dollars” of 1732-1733 as well as the transitional “klippe”-type coins of 1733.

Vliegenthart, sunk in 1735 off Zeeland, the Netherlands

                The East Indiaman Vliegenthart (“Flying Hart” in Dutch) had just departed Rammekens for the East Indies when the deadly combination of a northeast gale, a spring tide and pilot error sent her into a sand bank behind her sister-ship Anna Catharina. The latter ship broke apart in the storm while the Vliegenthart, damaged and firing her cannons in distress, slipped off the bank and sank in 10 fathoms of water. All hands on both ships were lost.

                Contemporaneous salvage under contract with the Dutch East India Company was unsuccessful, but it provided a piece of evidence, a secret map, that emerged from obscurity in 1977. Stemming from that, divers employed by the former London attorney Rex Cowan discovered the wreck in 1981, and in 1983 they found their first coins, one of three chests of Mexican silver and Dutch gold coins (totaling 67,000 guilders or dollar-sized units) for the East India trade aboard the Vliegenthart. The second chest was smashed on the seabed and its contents partially salvaged, while the third chest, intact like the first, came up in 1992. The divers also recovered several smaller boxes of large Dutch silver coins known as “ducatoons,” illegally exported and therefore contraband. Among the silver coins found were thousands of Mexican cobs, predominantly 8 reales, many with clear dates in the early 1730s and in excellent condition.

Rooswijk, sunk in 1739 off southeast England

                Off the southeastern tip of England, just north of the Straits of Dover, the sea hides a most unusual feature known as the Goodwin Sands, where sandbanks appear and disappear unpredictably and move with the tides. Many ships over the centuries have sunk here and silted over, and occasionally one of the wrecks will surface and be discovered. Such is the case with the Rooswijk, a Dutch East Indiaman that foundered on the Goodwin Sands in a storm on December 19, 1739 (by the calendar in use by the British at the time), with all hands and 30 chests of treasure, virtually gone without a trace.

                By chance in December 2004, the sands that had swallowed the wreck of the Rooswijk parted and allowed diver Ken Welling to retrieve two complete chests and hundreds of silver bars. Operating in secrecy, salvage continued in 2005 under the direction of Rex Cowan (in agreement with the Dutch and British governments) and is ongoing today. So far, several hundred Mexican silver cobs of the 1720s and early 1730s and transitional “klippes” of 1733-1734, as well as many more hundreds of “pillar dollars” and a smattering of cobs from other mints, have hit the market from this wreck, mostly through auction.

Hollandia, sunk in 1743 off the Scilly Isles, southwest of England

                Blown off course on her way to the East Indies, the Hollandia struck Gunner Rock and sank in about 110 feet of water about 1½ miles east of it on July 13, 1743. There were no survivors.

                The first sign of the wreck came in 1971, when divers under Rex Cowan located the wrecksite and within a couple years salvaged more than 35,000 silver coins among the nearly 130,000 guilders (dollar-sized units) recorded to be on board the Hollandia. A great majority of the coins were Mexican “pillar dollars,” but there were also some silver cobs, including the scarce Mexican transitional “klippes” of 1733-1734 and a few Guatemala cobs, in mixed condition.

Reijgersdaal, sunk in 1747 off South Africa

                More popularly known in the U.S. as Reygersdahl, this typical East Indiaman was carrying eight chests of silver coins (nearly 30,000 coins) when she sank on October 25, 1747, between Robben and Dassen Islands. After four-and-a-half months at sea, the crew had anchored there to fetch rock rabbits (“dassies,” for which Dassen Island was named) and other fresh food to relieve massive illness on board the ship, on which some 125 had died and 83 were incapacitated out of 297 people; but in the face of a gale, the anchor-line snapped and the ship foundered on the rocks. Only 20 survived the sinking, and only one incomplete chest of coins was recovered. The area was deemed too dangerous to attempt further salvage.

                Beginning in 1979, modern salvage on the wreck by the salvage company Sealit yielded thousands of coins (as many as 15,000 by the early 1980s, when protective legislation was enacted in South Africa), mostly in near pristine condition, which have been sold in various auctions and private offerings ever since. A great majority of the coins from this wreck are Mexican pillar dollars in excellent condition, but there were also a few hundred New World silver cobs, including Guatemala cobs, which are rarely seen from shipwrecks.

Nuestra Señora de la Luz, sunk in 1752 off Montevideo, Uruguay

                Actually a Portuguese vessel leased by the Spanish, the Luz left Buenos Aires in the summer of 1752 with a load of money bound for Spain and had just stopped in Montevideo for provisioning when a strong storm swept her into the coastline, spreading wreckage over a wide area and killing all on board. While over 90% of the treasure was recovered soon afterward, the powder-hold was never found, and as it turns out, that is where some 200,000 pesos (according to later reports) of contraband had been stored.

                In April 1992, divers working under Rubén Collado began to recover gold coins on a wrecksite in the Río de la Plata, and soon it became clear the wreck in question had to be from 1751 or 1752, as none of the coins was dated later than 1751. The finds, which were split with the Uruguayan government and then sold at auction in New York and Montevideo, consisted of mostly milled (bust-type) 8 escudos from the new mint at Santiago, Chile. Also in these auctions were 95 gold cobs and 353 silver cobs, the former mostly Lima 8 and 4 escudos (but also some Bogotá 2 escudos), and the latter mostly 8 and 4 reales from Potosí (with several more gold and silver cob sold privately). The gold is pristine, but the silver coins all show at least moderate corrosion.

Nuestra Señora del Rosario, sunk in 1753 off Montevideo, Uruguay

                The Rosario was reportedly carrying over 800,000 pesos of treasure on her way to Buenos Aires when she sank close to shore at the mouth of the Río de la Plata on June 30, 1753. All hands were saved, but the fate of the cargo is unknown. Recent finds of utilitarian items like spoons and buckles have trickled onto the market, but no high-value treasure so far.

Bredenhof, sunk in 1753 off Mozambique

                The Bredenhof was a Dutch East Indiaman headed to India with 14 barrels of copper “duits” (penny-like coins), 29 chests of silver bars, and one chest of gold ducats. On June 6, 1753, about 13 miles from the eastern coast of Africa and 120 miles south of the Portuguese settlement of Mozambique, the Bredenhof found herself in difficult currents and struck a reef. Amazingly, among the first items jettisoned to try to raise the ship off the reef were some of the chests of silver bars! The gold was taken by the ship’s officers, some of whom survived the trip to Mozambique, but the silver bars and copper coins were lost until modern times, despite salvage attempts in the 1750s.

                In 1986 divers with the salvage company Sealit found the wreck and recovered hundreds of silver ingots and hundreds of thousands of copper coins, all sold at auction by Christie’s Amsterdam that same year.

Auguste, sunk in 1761 off Nova Scotia, Canada

                After the end of the Seven Years’ War between England and France in 1759, French officers and aristocrats in Canada were sent from Quebec back to France in ships such as the Auguste. In stormy conditions and damaged by fire, the Auguste struck a sand bar on November 15 and subsequently sank in Aspy Bay off Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Only seven of the 121 on board survived, and the wealth of the passengers was lost until our time. To date, well over a thousand coins of various nationalities have been found, along with many important artifacts.

HMS Royal George, sunk in 1782 off Spithead, England

                Flagship of the British Royal Navy, the Royal George was the largest ship in the world when she was first launched in 1756. Among other distinctions, this ship took part in the American Revolutionary War. In 1782, while anchored at Spithead and heeled over slightly for repairs before sailing again, the Royal George suddenly flooded and sank in 65 feet of water, drowning hundreds of people on board, a national disaster of epic proportion.

                Salvage began right away, but only fifteen cannons were saved. Twenty-eight more cannons were hauled up in 1834. A more extensive salvage operation in 1839-1843 brought up the rest of the guns and even recovered most of the ship’s timbers. The bronze guns and timbers were then used to make small “relics” (replica cannons and small books with wooden covers, among other items), which are valuable souvenirs today.

Nicobar, sunk in 1783 off False Bay, South Africa

                One of very few famous shipwrecks of the Danish East India Company, the Nicobar was outbound to India with a load of copper plates from Sweden that were actually a form of coins, inasmuch as each one bore a date, denomination and mintmark, along with the monogram of the king or queen. Demonetized in 1771, the copper “plate money” became more like ingots, with trade value at the current rate for pure copper. But the Nicobar never reached its destination: After stopping at False Bay to replenish supplies and offload sick crew, the ship left again on July 10, 1783, and ran aground in a storm that night. The wreck was rediscovered in 1987 by local fishermen, who salvaged some 3,000 copper plates, the bulk of which were sold by Ponterio & Associates in California.

Cazador, sunk in 1784 off New Orleans, Louisiana

                The Cazador was a Spanish brig of war headed from Vera Cruz, Mexico, to New Orleans under the direction of Captain Gabriel de Campos y Piñeda. Her cargo of some 450,000 pesos of newly minted silver coins was meant to stabilize the fragile economy in the Spanish possession of Louisiana, which had suffered from the use of French paper currency. The fact that the coins never arrived probably hastened the decision to cede the colony to Napoleon in 1800, soon after which Louisiana was sold to the fledgling United States of America for $15 million.

                Nobody knows how the Cazador was lost, and no evidence of the ship was found until 1993, when a fishing crew led by Captain Jerry Murphy snagged their net on something about 50 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. When the net was brought up, it spilled out hundreds of silver coins onto the deck of Jerry’s boat, aptly named Mistake. Shortly thereafter, the fishermen obtained the rights to the find and began recoveries under the name of Grumpy Inc.

Halsewell, sunk in 1786 near St. Albans Head, Dorset, England

                A British East Indiaman outbound to India, the Halsewell hit bad weather in the English Channel and was blown onto the cliffs on the Dorset coast. She was battered to pieces as minority survivors scrambled into caves and up the cliffs.

                Local dive teams have salvaged coins and small artifacts from the Halsewell in recent years, but not in any significant quantities.

Piedmont (“Lyme Bay wreck”), sunk in 1795 in Lyme Bay, south of England

                One of a huge fleet of 300 ships on their way to the West Indies to suppress a French uprising, the Piedmont was forced into Lyme Bay during a hurricane on November 18, 1795, that scattered and sank the ships of the fleet all along the Dorset coast. The Piedmont and five other ships (Aeolus, Catherine, Golden Grove, Thomas and Venus) broke apart on Chesil Beach and came to be known collectively as the “Lyme Bay wrecks.” An estimated 1,000 men lost their lives in the disaster, including well over a hundred from the Piedmont alone.

                In the early 1980s, the wrecks were salvaged by divers Selwyn Williams and Les and Julia C. Kent, who discovered many silver cobs of the late 1600s on the wrecksite of the Piedmont. It is presumed that the coins had been captured or recovered from a seventeenth-century wreck and stored in the vaults of the Bank of England for about a century before being transported and subsequently lost again. These coins are usually recognizable by their uniformly dark-gray color, a bit sea-worn but not overly corroded. A significant group of extremely rare Colombian silver cobs from the Piedmont (but not identified as such) was offered at auction in 1995.

HMS Colossus, sunk in 1798 off the Isles of Scilly, southwest of England

                The Colossus is not famous for coins but for Greek vases! On board the Colossus, which was one of Lord Nelson’s warships returning from a Mediterranean campaign, was a significant collection of ancient Greek vases owned by Lord Hamilton, whose wife (Nelson’s mistress) had used them as props in her mini-dramas known as “Attitudes.” The ship had made it back from the Mediterranean and was anchored at St. Marys in the Scilly Isles when a strong gale caused her anchor cable to break and she wrecked with the loss of one life on December 10, 1798. The wreck was rediscovered by Roland Morris in the late 1960s and many of the broken vases were reassembled for the British Museum, with many other artifacts displayed in Morris’ own museum until its liquidation in 2002. Another salvager found a new portion of the wreck in 1999, and since 2001 the wreck has been under the protection of the government.

Leocadia, sunk in 1800 off Punta Santa Elena, Ecuador

                This wreck, salvaged periodically in the late twentieth century, typically yielded portrait (bust) 8 reales from Lima, Peru, but more recent work in 2001 brought up a handful of small silver cobs of the mid- to late 1700s mostly from the Potosí mint. These were probably from a small, private purse and not part of the more than 2 million pesos of registered silver and gold cargo aboard the Leocadia when she departed Paita, Peru, bound for Panama in a convoy of merchant vessels. On November 16, 1800, the Leocadia struck a shoal and broke apart 100 yards from the beach at Punta Santa Elena, with a loss of over 140 lives in the disaster. Within the next year the Spanish salvaged about 90 percent of the registered treasure, leaving more than 200,000 pesos (not to mention the expected contraband) behind to tempt divers in our time. Judging from the paucity of coins from this ship on the open market, we may assume that many more are still to be found.

Admiral Gardner, sunk in 1809 off the southeast coast of England

                Along with her sister-ship Britannia, the English East Indiaman Admiral Gardner was outbound with an immense cargo (48 tons!) of copper coins for circulation in India when both ships sank in a storm on the Goodwin Sands on January 24, 1809. Ten lives were lost, as was all the cargo. The coins were recovered in modern times, literally a million of them packed in wax inside wooden barrels.

Fame, sunk in 1822 off South Africa

                An English wooden merchant vessel en route to England from Madras, India, the Fame succumbed to a heavy swell and found herself driven onto the rocks at Sea Point, near Table Bay, off South Africa, in June of 1822. All but four lives were saved as the ship broke in two and sank. The wreck was rediscovered in 1965 and yielded a wide variety (but not a big quantity) of coinage, not a cargo but most likely from among the personal belongings of the passengers and crew.

General Abbatucci, sunk in 1869 off Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea

                Traveling from Marseilles, France, to Civitavecchia, Italy, with high dignitaries and papal guards, the General Abbatucci was laden with specie and lavish birthday gifts for Pope Pius IX when she collided with the Norwegian barquentine Edward Hwidt and sank within two hours off the island of Corsica, southeast of France. There were only 54 survivors.

                In 1996 the wrecksite was located and worked remotely by Blue Water Recoveries at a depth of about 8,000 feet. Even though the main cargo of the ship was not found, the salvage did yield jewelry and coins in addition to some small artifacts, all sold at auction by Christie’s (London) in 1997.

Douro, sunk in 1882 off Cape Finisterre, Spain

                The British Royal Mail Steamer Douro was en route to England from Portugal when she collided with the Spanish steamship Yrurac Bat and sank in the early morning hours of April 2, 1882, in deep water off the northwest coast of Spain. All but six people on board survived, but the ship and its cargo of tens of thousands of gold coins were a total loss. The wreck was found and salvaged in 1995 by Sverker Hallstrom and Nigel Pickford using a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) at a depth of 1,500 feet. The cargo of gold coins, mostly British sovereigns was sold at auction by Spink (London) in 1996.

Egypt, sunk in 1922 off Ushant, France

                In May of 1922, the Egypt encountered thick fog off the northwest coast of France and was accidentally rammed by another ship, the French cargo steamer Seine, sinking the British ship within twenty minutes. The Egypt was carrying some 15 tons of silver and gold bullion in addition to British gold sovereigns totaling £1,054,000 (1922 values). Nothing was salvaged until the early 1930s, when an Italian company recovered an estimated 95% of the treasure from the ship’s depth of 420 feet, an amazing success for its time.