Doomed to Fail - Ep 241: A Ship of Dreams (and Gold) - The SS Central America

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Picture it - it's 1857, and you are on a ship filled with gold from San Francisco to the East Coast of the USA! There are so many things that could go wrong crossing Panama, heading up the Caribbean, pirates, probably?  Then the boat DOES sink along with a crap-ton of gold. Fast forward to the 1980s when Tommy Gregory Thompson (treasure hunter, thief, crazy man) starts to find the gold!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortenthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow American. What your country can do. Ben Taylor, how are you? Good. I'm in a much better place than I was the other time. I found my headphones. My kids are gone.

They just left to go to friends. I didn't even say goodbye. They're just gone. Yeah, I'm living their lives. They're doing their things. I assume they're fine. Well, welcome to your show. Thank you.

Welcome to your show. Thank you. It's so nice. Yeah. Wow. That was very kind of me. Well, Taylor, do you want to introduce us? Yes.

Hello. Welcome to Doom to Fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures, and I am Taylor, joined by Fars. Join here. For those that are joining us late in our run, I used to do the introduction and Taylor fired me. So you can do it again. I forgot, I forgot about that.

That was so long ago. What did it used to be like? I don't know. It was probably terrible because I just kept forgetting about it and I started forgetting about it when you were doing it. And I think that's when you were like, we're done. We're done with that as far as I'm taking over. So here we are.

That was hundreds, hundreds of episodes ago. Hundreds and hundreds. Well, Taylor and esteemed audience, today is going to be a far story. It's going to be a really, really fun one. I did. It's going to be really fun. This was probably the most fun I had researching a topic in a very, very long time. So, yeah, I think from now on, I'm just going to do fun topics because it puts me in a really happy mood.

And I like to think about them afterwards. Research topics that are like gory and gross. I don't want to think about it, you know? Yeah, that's fair. Let's do fun stuff. We'll do fun stuff going forward. I mean, this is for us. this yeah literally literally just for us an audience too uh so today i'll be covering a fun

treasure hunting story that sounds like it happened centuries ago but it is a saga that's actually still going on today as of like uh two weeks ago so very modern it started a long time ago but it is very modern i think there was an art heist just this week this is not that I know, but I'm just saying that, like, it's still going on. Oh, yeah. A Renoir, Saisan, and Matisse were stolen from the Parma Museum. Just as week. It happened in three minutes.

That's so fun. We're never going to see this again. They did it fast. They went in the front door and out the garden, bang, boom. Yeah, that is, those are already on some billionaire Saudis yacht. Yeah, they're on an island. Yeah, it's not good.

So the treasure in question for today's story was treasure aboard a ship called the SS Central America. So we're going to start the story with SS Central America. This one's going to be a fun winding pattern that is so relevant to our modern times. Please listen. Please stay tuned. This is going to be really fun. Yay. The SS Central America was known as the ship of gold, which was a very fitting name for it.

It was launched in 1852 with the purpose of moving California Gold Rush, gold around the country specifically up to New York. Around the country? Yes. How? From where? Like all the way down? I'm going to tell you because this was part, this is so interconnected. It's so fun. I had the exact same thought to it. I was like, I was like, wait, this makes no sense. Tell me the way. I like, I feel like, it's like the SS rob me.

Yeah, yeah. When you name it the ship of gold, it's like, hey, pirates, please show up and take all my shit. Yeah, by the way. So the route it used was it would go for San Francisco. So San Francisco is on the Pacific Ocean side. That's where all the gold is being mine. It would go down south to Panama, cut across the business of Panama, because back then that wasn't the Panama Canal. And then it would go up to New York, and that's where I would disembark.

There's a little more nuance to it because it would actually go to, like, Cuba and then New York, but I'm just giving you those shorthand. What's the, it's, it's myths of Panama. I thought you couldn't get through Panama. What's an isthmus? So you could, it was just very, very long, windy and treacherous to get through it. That's why they built the Panama Canal to make it a straight line through instead of like this complicated journey. Oh, I didn't even know that was an option. I thought it was like, you always had to go all the way down. Yeah, yeah.

Cool. Cool, thanks. If you look at a map from North and South America, you assume these people are nuts for making this trek. And that's why Taylor asked the question. She just asked her why I researched the hell out of this thing. To go from San Francisco to Panama, straight across as the pro flies is a 3,300 mile journey.

It is huge. If you look at it on a map, you're like, why would anybody do this? Going from the East Coast to the West Coast to the East Coast from San Francisco to New York, it's like 2,500 miles. So it's dramatically shorter than going this route. but this was before the U.S. built the transcontinental railroad. That was completed in 1869. So this path was actually the easiest way to ship gold around the U.S.

is where it gets really fun. So what was going on in the U.S. at this time that would necessitate the shipping of copious amounts of gold around the country? And this is a part that's going to be really familiar to people who are living right now in terms of what's happening to the markets in the U.S. Back in the 1850s, developing railroads across the U.S. became the hot speculative market. The opportunity seen limitless with potential massive upside to investors who took part in it. There was a huge amount of capital.

About 6% of the GDP was being poured into the construction of railroads. But there wasn't a demand for railroads because there weren't any railroads to create the demand for the railroads didn't need to exist. Right. So the idea was let's build them, and then there's going to be demand for these once we build it. It's like this new technology. It's cool. It's interesting. It's going to totally, you know, unify the entire country. And there would be a ton of demand for it. But there wasn't. There was a small group of mega rich people and companies, along with huge investments from regular folks who are building up massively expensive infrastructure around the entire country way ahead of demand, assuming that the demand would be there. eventually.

And the idea was that it would arrive relatively quickly, which obviously did not. Hence, we got the panic of 1857, which is when the railroad speculation over-leveraged banks and institutions resulting in liquidity crisis, necessitating

gold being shipped around the country through this channel, essentially. Taylor. Hannah-Wa is an esthmus. Bist. So, crossing it just means like walking across it.

I don't know what an isthmus is. It's a, I looked it up. It's a tiny piece of land that connects to big areas of land. Ah, okay. Then I use the wrong term for, I use the wrong term for an isthmus. It's like a, I don't know, River Cruz, we'll call it. Right. But not that straight line.

It's not a straight line. No. I have been listening. I'm just learning that. It's like you learned that word in the archipelago at the same day in like sixth grade. I missed that day. I was definitely sick. Taylor, can you draw a corollary between the history of railroad speculation in modern times?

I don't know. Is it every market that oil? Is it AI? Is it the housing process? It's AI. Okay, cool. Think about that. We don't know, we know it's important.

We don't know exactly what it is going to do. And yet, companies are throwing trillions and trillions of dollars into it. on the speculation that eventually we will understand how to extract the value out of this thing. Right. And then it'll be worth more than what we spent on it, essentially, right? And Juan was explaining that to the kids how, like, they don't make any money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also really interesting because just like AI, all these AI companies are popping up out of nowhere.

But really, they all know that, like, it's a race for maybe two of them, maybe three of them, right? So, like, it's speculative in every conceivable way. So anyways, back to the SS Central America. So in September of 1852, it set sail from Panama to Cuba to New York with about 578 sold aboard and 30,000 pounds of gold worth approximately $9 million in 1857 money. So probably like hundreds of trillion dollars, more money than has ever lived in the world for today's money. After it left Fort in Havana, it was struck by a hurricane somewhere off the Carolina

coast and sank. 425 people and all the gold went down with it. The remaining people were saved by passing vessels. So that's our layup for the story. Cool. Cool. Let's lay some very, very fun, interesting legal groundwork for what happens when things are lost at sea.

You have two key maritime principles. that the courts have to interpret based on the specific situation they're addressing. You have the law of salvage, and this principle assumes that lost property has an owner, and that someone who salvages a property can own some sort of compensation. Basically, does it have an owner or does it not have an owner? That's kind of a legal question. I know all this from ghost ship. You're not telling you.

I know. I know. This is for the audience that is less esteemed and is not watching ghost ship, which you should. Pause this right now and go watch. and then come back and then you're welcome at least watch the um the uh intro yeah then you have the law of fines which again is a ghost ship reference um that principle applies if property is abandoned meaning there's no owner who can demonstrate that they have any interest in the property in which case you can just keep it like whoever finds it fighters keepers

that's basically now to our protagonist slash antagonist in 1985 of a guy named Tommy Gregory Thompson founded the Columbus America Discovery Group. I'm going to call it CADG for short because that's a lot of words to say. Um, I can pause you? Yeah. How did it sink? Oh, a hurricane.

Okay, so just a hurricane, like normal, nothing weird. Yeah, it was like a cat too, if I remember correctly. It wasn't anything insane. Okay. Uh, so we have this guy Tommy. So he was a brilliant engineer. He's a water jet propulsion. expert. And his goal for this newly formed company was to use all his expertise to try and find

the long-loss SS Central America. Nobody had found it up until this point. This is 1985. He would raise about $12 million from around 160 different investors to help kind of fund the search. And he hired this guy, this mathematician, a guy named Larry Stone, who used a methodology called Bayesian search theory to narrow down the search to about 1400 square miles. of where this thing probably went down. I was going to do a deep dive into Bayesian search theory, and the second I started researching, I was like,

there are so many swiggly math lines here that I can't even lost me immediately. It's a ton of math. Right, because you could be at like any depth, even if it's a deeper place. Yeah. Because it could be like

stuck on a thing or it could go down or whatever, yeah. 100%. But But this guy was the key. This guy was like the one that kind of like helped them whittle it down to some path that I actually searched for. Tommy designed and built a deep C ROV remote operated vehicle named Nemo very cutely. And on September 11th, 1988, Nemo's cameras picked up some broken dishes and other man-made artifacts at about 7,200 feet below the surface. After some more dives and closer inspection became clear that they had actually discovered the SSF.

Central America for the first time since it went down. For the next three years, they worked to recover the wreckage and a ton of gold. During that time, they recovered 10,600 gold coins and 577 gold bars, most of which were stamped and attributed to what's called the A-Sayer, which is like back then, those are the guys that would do the stamping of the gold so you can understand, like, its lineage and make it to where it came from. Because it had the A-Sayer stamp, they knew that this obviously was sourced

from Gold Rush, California, and then it was part of the Central America. During this time, Tommy had sold off approximately $52 million worth of the gold he had recovered, which was still somewhere around 5% of what was actually down there. So there was a ton of

gold out there. Wow. In 1990, this before blows my mind. In 1990, 39 insurance company, who had paid out a claim in 1852 or who had bought and absorbed other companies that had paid out claims, they showed up saying that because we paid out claims in 1857, for that wreck, we now have the rightful ownership over what you found, this wreckage. Right.

There was a lot of back and forth from this and appealed, like, there was a lot of appeals, like, sued and not sued, whatever. Like, this parts were all, but basically long story, short of it, is that the courts found that this was a salvage, meaning that there was ownership and an ownership interest associated with the wreckage. It was never abandoned,

and they granted 92% of the treasure to Tommy, but the rest of it had to go to the insurance companies. So make them whole, but you also get this, this is part of your compensation. Then, CADG, investors also came for Tommy. In 2005, the business was sued by investors claiming that Tommy had took all the money and ran. He never paid back the $12 million investment with interest to conduct a search. There were a ton of delays on this. And by 2012, nothing had really been

resolved yet. But Tommy had violated a court order to appear to a hearing. And then he disappeared. So he had a contempt charge for not showing up to court, basically. Like that's what it has a pockets full of gold coins. I imagine he looks just like Jack Sparrow. But he just walks around, jingle jangling everywhere, the gold clacking on gold. It's got to be really fun being him. I hope he hasn't married.

For real. So he is held in contempt by this court, this federal court for not showing up when he was ordered to. And order was issued for U.S. Marshals to find and invest him. And so this would have been three years later. So in 2015, he was found living under an, alias in Boca Raton, Florida, and arrested. He was ordered by the court to turn over 500 recovered gold coins, which he said he would,

but then immediately he said he has no access to release them, so you can't have them. The judge obviously didn't buy that. Again, held him in contempt of court and sent him to prison. It wasn't like a fixed sentence. It was like, we're doing this to coerce you into giving us the gold coins. Like, give us the gold coins, give us the location. That's what we're going to use to, we're going to use prison and get this out of you because you owe it to these insurance companies and your investors.

He spent 10 years incarcerated without revealing the precise location of the shipwreck or the location of the missing gold coins. Wow. Eventually, a judge decided that further incarceration was unlikely to pry this information out of him. and so he was released. He got released like March 4th of this year. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

He spent 10 years a job. He spent from age 62 to 73 because there was a little bit of a timeline overlap there in prison, in federal prison, the nine that he could get access to this gold. Wow. But while he was incarcerated, another company was founded most likely by his previous investors. I couldn't actually figure this out. A lot of folks want this to be secret.

So there actually wasn't a ton of information about this. That company was called Odyssey Marine Exploration. And it seems like they figured out at least where part of the wreckage is. Because later on, remember the A-Sayer stamp I mentioned? A bunch, after he was incarcerated, a bunch of those started showing up at auction houses. And so we think that somebody figured out exactly where it is, or at least parts of where it is, and is trying to recover the gold. Apparently there's still a ton that's down there.

Like I said, by the time they had spent three years doing a recovery on this, only 5% of it had been actually recovered. So there's still a ton down there. The closest coordinates that are publicly available say the ship is between 7,200 and 8,000 feet below the surface, 160 miles off the coast of South Carolina, and roughly 200 miles off of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. And that's the closest that's publicly available right now. How deep is that?

Is that like, like, how is that like, how do you get there? It's like a mile and a half to, yeah, it's like a mile and a half under. Okay, that's pretty deep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do they get stuff from there? So they sent, they, so back when he was doing it, they were doing it through ROBs because back then doing it with like a manmade vessel wasn't considered safe enough to do it. And so they're using ROV like suction based ROVs to kind of scoop things up down there and bring it up to the surface.

Fun. Yeah. Yeah. Really wild story. That is a short one, but it's really fun because it tells you a lot about what the world looked like, you know, 200 years ago and how it looks like now. And then also this guy's an absolute cartoon character. I mean, he could still have a lot of money if he told them where it was. No, I don't know what his deal is.

It's not like his deal is you get zero dollars. Like, you still get a lot of money. and then you can like go find more treasure, you know, don't sit in jail for 10 years. I know, but he's like a pirate. Like, you know, you can't really, he's not going to be like, yeah, let me give my money to this insurance company, these suits with ties on. I don't know. 10 years since there's a lot to give up for that. Dude.

What a story, though. What a story. He could have been out stealing art. Maybe he did steal that art since he's out and that art just got stolen. I hope he's on a beach somewhere drinking rum with a parrot on his shirt. or telling people he just got out of jail. And he's just dug up a treasure chest that he buried there. Yeah.

It's so fun. That's my story. That's cool. I'm looking at pictures. There's pictures of like the people and stuff that were on the boat and like we're saved. And that is wild. Oh, I do see a, honestly, I see a box of treasure. Yeah.

Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So that is the story of Mr. Tommy Thompson, the SS Central America. And I did try and look up other stories like that, but I was like, this is going to take me down a weird rapid hole. So I probably don't need to go any deeper than that. But there's plenty of other stories like that. Apparently being a professional shipwreck person is like a real thing, which is great.

Shipwreck. The world. Shit is so cool. I mean, obviously like I'm thinking like what I've seen in like pirate movies, but it is super, super, super. fun just to be like, oh, by the way, down there there's tons of, like, how many, how much gold is the bottom of the ocean? So much. And like all the stuff. Like when, like the, even like thinking, like, obviously the Titanic, like, there's just like silver and dishes and candlesticks and shoe buckles and just like stuff that'll be on there forever, you know? Yeah. I see. So that's my

story. I would love to get feedback on this one because it is kind of fun. So please write to us at Dumbentafelpod at gmail.com or write to us on the social at Duminafel pod. What else we got, Taylor? That's it. I don't have anything new since yesterday. I have a fun one. I'm reading a book about it next. So I do are the one that you did on like that nurse who murdered his family was like really popular. And that's fun. And I've had a want to do gruesome things, but I do want to do,

like, I have a fun Victorian-era murder to tell you next time. I'm into it. I'm into it. That's fun.

Right. No, it's not, it's not like, it's not like, blood and guts. It's like a mystery kind of and,

like, kind of fun, you know? If the person would be dead now anyways, it can, it can still be fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

exactly. It's like so much, yeah, enough time has passed. Exactly. It'd be fun. Yeah. I get it.

I get it. I don't want to, I mean, everything is so awful. What did I watch? I did watch, I watched Ready or Not the new one. Is it good? Yeah, it's fine. It's just like, it's extraordinarily bloody.

And it also hits a little bit different at like post-Eptstein stuff because it's like rich people, hunting people and like, I don't know. They do that. Did you see Dump Link? No. That one is probably the most Epstein Island one. Mm. Yeah.

And I did watch, uh, scream and, scream chew on the plane. And those were obviously also bloody, but fun. Yeah, they're slasher. They're supposed to be fun. Yeah. Don't blink has one star and Ron Tomatoes. 22%.

Oh, no, it's called Blink twice. Okay. I was like, that can't be it. Yeah, yeah, it's blink twice. It was well reviewed. Oh, yes, yes, yes, I see. Good one. I see, I see. Yeah.

Oh, fun. That's new. Yeah, yeah, last year, or two years ago, I guess. Got it. It is a better. It's a 74% rotten tomatoes. I don't know. If anyone has a movie as good as Ghost Ship, let us know, but I've yet to find one. Also, why don't people make movies like Ghost Ship anymore?

Ships are such good horror venues. There was a Queen Mary movie, but it wasn't very good. It was like very, very, I know. It sucked. I saw that, too. Budget. Yeah. But, like, yeah, no, exactly.

that's scary there was also a zombie zombie Nazi movie yeah I can't I remember what that was called that was pretty good

but again it's so it can be so fun and moody if you place it on a ship because ships are in Canada scary anyways and the ocean's terrifying so like you already got like 90% of the problem solved by just putting it on a ship so if you were a Hollywood

producer writer or director please write to us and tell us why y'all are totally whiffing this. Oh, my God, there is so many. Like, wait, there's an old one from the 70s called Shockwaves about undead SS soldiers on a remote island. Fun.

That's fun. That sounds super fun. I should watch that. It has a really great, great picture of zombie Nazis. Oh, wait, what's going to tell you? there is a thing that is oh my god i heard this like a really long time ago but have you ever seen that picture that someone took in an abandoned boat but there's a man with an accident no um i'm like i know this is going to come up so there's a 2014 picture and i don't know if this is

true but if a dry docked okay so this is my googling it's a dry dock decommissioned vessel in australia A man was taking photos at night without the flash, just like taking pictures in it. And I don't know if he, like, worked there or whatever. But one of the pictures that he developed afterwards or whatever saw afterwards had a man standing at the end of a hallway with an axe. And so it was like probably a squatter. But like, it's, I'm going to do. But it's very scary.

That's creepy. I found it. You know, it's creepy. You found it. Like, I'd much movie about that guy. Yeah, let's find that guy. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fun.

Because also when you're out in the middle of the ocean, like these shipwrecks, like, they're fun to look at also. But like, when you're dying on a shipwreck, I mean, just that feeling of like, this is it. There's no one can save me. There's nowhere to go. You know, like, there's nothing that can help you. And even, like, we were at the, there's like a,

an air museum here and they have like a Pearl Harbor exhibit. And, like, all the dudes who, like, died in Pearl Harbor, like eight days later because I couldn't get him out you know so I saw that too because I went to yeah there was they have one of the doors from the Arizona there like an actual like door from the ship and there's a weird hole that looks like aftermarket like somebody put that there and it says that like that's the hole that like divers drilled into like days after the thing went down to see if they could find anybody still alive in there. So scary.

It's like dark and you're just like, they're going to die in there. So scary. Do you watch Poseidon Adventure, the old one? Yeah, that was great. Yeah. See, I do know some movies. If it's shipwreck, if it's boat movies, I know them. If they're not, I've never watched them.

There's got to be a cruise horror movie. Okay. We can cut this off, whatever. But anyone who has boat movies. Well, write to us to do an NFL pot at Gwiton.com. Find us on the socials. We'd love to hear from you. And we're going to do a lot more fun stuff.

So stay tuned and tell your friends. Tell your friends. Thank you. Thank you, Faris. Sweet. Good. Bye.