Russian warship ‘carrying £100B in gold’ discovered off South Korea | Hacker News Reader

Russian warship ‘carrying £100B in gold’ discovered off South Korea

telegraph.co.uk

29 pointsfold_left10 comments

From a December 2000 NY Times report,

  Shares of Dong Ah surged 41 percent this week, to 410 won
  (33 cents, United States) on Wednesday. Today, the Korean
  Stock Exchange halted trading and ordered the company to
  provide an explanation on Friday.

  The run-up in the stock came after local media reports said
  that the venture, the Korea Ocean Research and Development
  Institute, had discovered a warship of the Imperial Russian
  Navy, the 6,200-ton Dmitri Donskoi. ....

  ...

  Sergei Klimovsky, chief of scholarly research at the Central
  Naval Museum in St. Petersburg, told Bloomberg: "As far as
  we know, at best, there might have only been some gold coins
  on board to pay the salaries of officers. But there was no
  hoard of gold, and to send a large amount of gold by ship
  from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok is ridiculous. It would
  have been safer to send it by rail."

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/08/business/investor-frenzy-...

I eagerly await the next South Korean discovery of the ship in 2034.

"£100 billion in gold" sounds like an implausibly large amount. I estimate it is about 3 or 4 thousand metric tons. But could such a ship carry that much?

Amount of gold aside, it looks like the Dmitrii Donskoi sank during or around the battle of Tsushima, having sailed all the way from the Baltic, and around the Cape of Good Hope, in one of the most ignominious and infamous fleet movements in history. Why would Russia put several hundred metric tonnes of gold on a cruiser which was heading to fight Japanese warships?

To pay the troops at Port Arthur, and because it anticipated winning any battles along the way.

The whole thing was a farce. I’m not sure if it was a thing common with other navies but reading the history of the ship is reading a long list of accidents and mistakes. The shambles of the war with the Japanese is is well covered in Montifiore’s book on the Romanovs, and he presents it as a collection of worn out ships, a badly led navy and a massive vanity project with a healthy dose of racism leading to underestimation of Japanese abilities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Dons...

At about $40k/kg for gold, I get 2,500 metric tons. The ship was about 6,000 tons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donsko...) so it theoretically could carry that, but it would be over half of its maximum load. Add in fuel, engines, guns, about 600 men, their food, etc. and assuming (unlikely) it would still float, you would have to be suicidal to take it to sea.

Wikipedia currently says 200 tons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donsko...), but then it would be worth on the order of 10 billion.

That still seems a lot to me. What would a warship “assigned to the cruiser force of the Second Pacific Squadron” at wartime would need that much gold for?

Also, the current gold reserves of the USA are about 8,000 tons, worth in the ballpark of $200 billion. Even after striking out a zero, this find would be about 3% of that.

Yes, something must be off of a factor of almost 20.

According to the just updated Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donsko...

"200 tons of gold worth £100 billion (c. US$133 billion)"

Which puts it at 500 British Pounds per gram, while it should be around 30.

The ship sank in 1905, in case people who can't bypass the paywall might have been wondering.

Nowadays, several countries have GDP much greater than "£100B" and I think that was very much not the case in 1905. Anyone have the figures for 1905 at their fingertips?

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