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Sunken treasure has an irresistible lure and for the next six months, it will be beckoning visitors to Discovery Place.
“Shipwreck! Pirates and Treasure” stars gold and silver plucked from an alien world – the crushing black depths of the Atlantic.
This trove was aboard the steamship S.S. Republic, which was bound for New Orleans when it sank off the Georgia coast in 1865 in a shrieking storm. In 2003, its rotted skeleton was found entombed 1,700 feet below the surface of the sea. Robotic scavengers have been slowly bringing its artifacts topside.
More than 50,000 gold and silver coins have been plucked from the sea floor along with 14,000 other items of the Civil War era.
“Shipwreck!” guides visitors through the relics and into the world of deep-sea exploration with videos and interactive exhibits, like a robotic arm that can be manipulated to pick up objects.
The exhibition highlights the work of Odyssey Marine Exploration, the salvage group that found the Republic using seamanship, technology and a good deal of detective work.
Historians and researchers were the first to go hunting for the Republic, says John Longley, Odyssey's director of business development. Libraries, insurance archives, survivor accounts and old newspaper reports yielded clues on where the ship might have gone down.
Odyssey patiently searched a 1,000-mile grid with sonar. Unexpected objects often show up in these searches – old warplanes, sunken sailboats and other wrecks. Odyssey knew the wreck it found 100 miles off the Georgia coast was promising when two side paddle wheels became visible on the scan – just what researchers expected to find on the ruins of the Republic.
Robots photographed every inch of the wreckage before recovery efforts began with the cooperation of Odyssey's conservators. In addition to being a salvage effort, the Republic's discovery is also considered an archaeological dig.
A video with the exhibit shows the moment of the Republic's discovery after 12 years of investigation and searching.
“It is absolutely a ‘Eureka!' moment,” says Longley. “We find things that have been lost forever. And it is an amazing feeling.”
