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The discovery of the Central America was an engineering
success, and the shipwreck itself was a spectacular scientific discovery, but
it was the gold that financed the expedition and that would allow us to stay
and learn.
Predictably, the weather worsened by mid-October. Everyone
was tired after long weeks at sea, and the pressure to get back to shore for
the winter was intense. In the control room, our eyes began to play tricks on
us as we searched the complex scene of rotting timbers, rusting iron, and
general debris for something shiny or in the shape of an ingot.
 Then, just days before we were to leave the site, Milt spotted
some anomalies on some photographic negatives. One of the crew returned from
the onboard lab, where he was developing some photographs. Bob, Barry, and I
examined the images he was excited about and saw a color we had not encountered
before: gold.
Because Nemo's dives are precise, we knew exactly where
on the shipwreck site the underwater robot had taken the pictures and where the
next dive would take place. Within hours, the submersible was back on the
bottom. As we flew the ROV toward the location of the photographs, Milt set the
lights. At first we thought we were looking at bricks, but as the beams were
adjusted, the color came out. Suddenly, the same monitors that had revealed
nothing but colorless ocean terrain for weeks now appeared to be painted
brilliant gold.
 These weren't bricks, but ingots, ingots
everywhere… stacked on the bottom like brownies… stacked like loaves
of bread… spectacular gold bridges of gold ingots piled on top of timbers
and spread over the ocean floor. Then, a little farther along, we found piles
of coins, heaped in towers and seemingly spilling into frozen waterfalls. The
coins in this part of the shipwreck, which we named the "Garden of Gold," were
spread amid the wreckage, stretching beyond Nemo's lights into the blackness of
the sea.
We had all privately imagined the moment we would find the
treasure, but none of us ever thought that it would be so otherworldly in its
splendor. The gold of the Central America looked like something out of a fairy
tale beyond one's wildest imagination. It sparkled with brilliance in the first
light to play off its surface in 130 years.
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