Curated Silver

The SS Gairsoppa: silver from three miles down

In February 1941 a tired British steamer was limping home through the North Atlantic. The SS Gairsoppa, 412 feet long and owned by the British India Steam Navigation Company, had sailed from Calcutta bound for London. Her holds carried tea, pig iron and around seven million ounces of silver, worth £600,000 at the time and badly needed to pay for Britain's war.

Short of coal and unable to keep pace with her convoy in heavy weather, she broke away and steamed on alone. About 300 miles south-west of Galway, a German U-boat found her. A single torpedo struck, and within around twenty minutes she was gone. Of the 85 people aboard, only one, Second Officer Richard Ayres, survived after nearly two weeks in an open lifeboat. Ship and silver settled onto the seabed at a depth of almost 4,700 metres, close to three miles down, in water so deep and black that nobody expected to see either again.

For seventy years, that was the end of it. The UK government, which had paid out on the war-risk insurance and so owned the cargo, invited salvage bids as early as 1989, but no one could reach that depth. Then technology caught up. In 2011 the Department for Transport awarded the job to Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Florida company, on terms that let it keep 80% of the value of whatever it raised. That September, a remotely operated vehicle swept its lights across the wreck and confirmed the name.

What followed was a feat of deep-sea engineering. Working from the support ship Seabed Worker, pilots in a control room steered robotic arms through collapsed decks and into a cramped strong-room. In July 2012 they landed 1,218 silver ingots at Bristol. The next summer they brought up 1,574 more. By the end, 2,792 bars, around 110 tons and more than 99% of the insured silver, had been lifted. It was a world record both for the deepest and the largest recovery of precious metal from a shipwreck.

There was a pleasing coda. In 2014 the Royal Mint struck 20,000 commemorative silver coins from Gairsoppa metal, so bullion that left India for a war chest finally entered circulation in Britain, seventy-three years late.

One mystery remains. Wartime records hint that extra, uninsured government silver may also have been aboard. If so, Odyssey never found it, and it may still be lying somewhere in the dark.

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