1905 Gold Sovereign (S.S. Egypt shipwreck recovery, 1922/1932)

On 19 May 1922 the P&O liner S.S. Egypt left Tilbury bound for Bombay carrying 44 passengers, 294 crew, and roughly £1,000,000 in gold and silver consigned to the British Raj government of India. The next evening, around 7 P.M., she ran into thick fog as she entered the approaches to the Bay of Biscay near the island of Ushant at the western tip of Brittany and came to a full stop. A faint steamship whistle could be heard somewhere ahead, but visibility was less than fifty yards. A ship suddenly emerged out of the fog - and within fifteen seconds the French cargo steamer Seine, a Baltic ice-breaker with strengthened bows, struck the Egypt head-on on her port side, midships.

The Seine's reinforced bow nearly cut the Egypt in half. She began to sink almost immediately. The crew started launching the lifeboats without the passengers, and within twenty minutes the Egypt was gone, taking 13 to 17 passengers and 71 to 84 crew with her.

The wreck lay in 70 fathoms (about 130 m / 420 ft) of water - normally beyond the safe limit of contemporary diving. From 1923 to 1928 several companies tried and failed even to find her. In 1929 the Italian salvage outfit SO.RI.MA. put the steamer S.S. Artiglio onto the job. While searching for the Egypt, the Artiglio also accepted a contract to salvage the Florence H, a WWI munitions ship that had sunk in Belle Île harbour - on the assumption that after thirteen years on the bottom her cargo of explosives would be inert. It was not. On 8 December 1930 the Florence H detonated, sinking the Artiglio and killing twelve of her crew. SO.RI.MA. immediately bought a replacement ship and rechristened her Artiglio II.

The Artiglio II finally located the Egypt later in 1930. Salvage began the following season - explosive charges blowing through the steel decks down to the bullion room while divers in armoured Neufeldt-Kuhnke "iron suits" worked at depths previously thought lethal. How much of the specie was actually recovered is genuinely contested in the literature: some sources say barely 1,000 coins came up, others claim that by the time work was abandoned in the late 1930s as much as 98% of the gold and silver had been salvaged. What is certain is that the Egypt salvage became one of the most celebrated technical feats in the history of marine recovery, and that recovered Egypt sovereigns were distributed in their original Lloyd's of London presentation boxes with individually-signed Chairman of Lloyd's certificates of authenticity.

This 1905 Edward VII sovereign is one of those pieces. NGC has graded it MS 63 with the special "Shipwreck Certification - S.S. Egypt (1922)" pedigree designation on the holder. It is accompanied by the original Lloyd's of London leather presentation case (lid embossed in gilt with the Lloyd's coat of arms and the motto FIDENTIA), the matching velvet-lined interior tray, and the original 1932 calligraphic certificate of recovery, signed in ink by P. G. Mackinnon, Chairman of Lloyd's, dated 30 June 1932 and reading: "EGYPT SALVAGE - This sovereign was recovered in June, 1932, by the Italian Salvage Steamer 'Artiglio' from the P&O steamer 'Egypt' which sank off Ushant on May 20th, 1922, in 70 fathoms after collision."

A choice mint-state Edwardian sovereign is common; an MS 63 Edwardian sovereign with a documented Lloyd's-issued shipwreck pedigree, the original presentation box and the signed 1932 chairman's certificate is genuinely rare - and exactly the kind of paper-trail provenance that makes a coin a Hall of Fame piece rather than just a date.