Silver Treasure

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

An undersea expedition recently identified the wreck of the Mantola, which steamed out of London on her last voyage in 1917 — with 20 tons of silver aboard:

In this case, Odyssey is to get 80 percent of the silver’s value and the British government 20 percent. It plans to attempt the recovery in the spring, along with that of its previous find.

Last month, Odyssey announced its discovery of the British steamship Gairsoppa off Ireland and estimated its cargo at up to 240 tons of silver — a trove worth more than $200 million. The Gairsoppa was torpedoed in 1941.

Both ships had been owned by the British Indian Steam Navigation Company, and both were found by Odyssey during expeditions in the past few months. Odyssey said that the Mantola’s sinking in 1917 had prompted the British government to pay out an insurance claim on about 600,000 troy ounces of silver, or more than 20 tons.

Mr. Stemm said the Mantola’s silver should make “a great target for testing some new technology” of deep-sea retrieval.

The Mantola was less than a year old when, on Feb. 4, 1917, she steamed out of London on her last voyage, bound for Calcutta. According to Odyssey, the ship carried 18 passengers, 165 crew members and diverse cargo. The captain was David James Chivas, the great-nephew of the Chivas Brothers, known for their Chivas Regal brand of Scotch whiskey.

Four days out of port, a German submarine fired a torpedo, and the ship sank with minimal loss of life.

In an expedition last month, Odyssey lowered a tethered robot that positively identified the wreck. The evidence included the ship’s dimensions, its layout and a display of painted letters on the stern that fit the words “Mantola” and “Glasgow,” the ship’s home port.

I suppose the Brits had to ship out tons of silver to make war-time purchases.

Although even the larger, WWII-era sinking came before the Manhattan Project started, it does raise an interesting point made by Viktor Suvorov in Inside Soviet Military Intelligence:

During the Second World War a section of the tenth directorate [GRU] (economics and strategic resources) was studying the trends in the exchange of precious metals in the United States. The specialist were surprised that an unexpectedly large amount of silver was allocated ‘for scientific research’. Never before, either in America or in any other country, had such a large amount of silver been spent for the needs of research. There was a war going on and the specialists reasonably supposed that the research was military. The GRU information analysed all the fields of military research known to it, but not one of them required the expenditure of so much silver. The second reasonable assumption by the GRU was that it was some new field of research concerning the creation of a new type of weapon. Every information unit was brought to bear on the study of this strange phenomenon.

Further analysis showed that all publications dealing with atomic physics had been suppressed in the United States and that all atomic scientists, fugitives from occupied Europe, had at the same time disappeared without trace from the scientific horizon. A week later the GRU presented to Stalin a detailed report which had been compiled on the basis of one unconfirmed fact, but its contents left no room for doubt about the correctness of the deductions it made. Stalin was delighted with the report: the rest is well known.

The Manhattan Project was using silver wiring in electro-magnets to separate weapons-grade uranium:

A total of 940 magnets were constructed with coils fabricated from about 28 million pounds of silver in the Phelps-Dodge Copper Products Company located in Bayway, New Jersey and another 268,000 pounds of silver was shipped to Oak Ridge to be fabricated into busbar pieces.

(Hat tip to our Slovenian Guest.)

Comments

  1. Ben says:

    I understood they used silver for the electrical wiring because copper was needed to make ammunition.

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