The short answer
Odyssey reported recovering about 3.2 million troy ounces in 2,792 silver ingots from SS Gairsoppa during 2012 and 2013. The wreck had been identified in 2011.
A wartime loss before a salvage story
SS Gairsoppa was a British cargo ship carrying supplies from India to Britain when a German submarine attacked it on February 16, 1941. The Postal Museum describes a cargo that included silver, tea, and mail. Its account also records that only one of the 86 people aboard survived. The silver's history begins with that human loss.
Odyssey Marine Exploration identified the wreck in 2011, not 2012. Its later regulatory filing places the site about 4,700 metres beneath the Atlantic, approximately 300 miles southwest of Galway, Ireland. Discovery and recovery were separate stages: locating the vessel did not mean that its cargo had already reached the surface.
What the recovery figures describe
Odyssey reported recovering 1,218 silver ingots during 2012, weighing approximately 1.4 million troy ounces. The 2013 operation added 1,574 ingots, reported as approximately 1.8 million troy ounces. Together these make 2,792 ingots and about 3.2 million troy ounces. The ounces are explicitly troy ounces, the precious-metals unit, rather than ordinary household ounces.
The company's July 2013 announcement said the recovered ingots represented more than 99 percent of the insured silver reported aboard. It separately discussed indications of additional uninsured silver and stated that none of that additional cargo had then been located. An estimate of everything possibly carried should therefore never be substituted for the measured recovery.
That announcement described a record for deep shipwreck recovery at the time and explained that remotely operated equipment worked from the recovery vessel Seabed Worker. A dated, attributed record claim is more useful than a timeless assertion about the largest treasure haul ever. It identifies who made the claim and the operation being compared.
Follow the metal's documented history
The salvage operated under a contract with the United Kingdom's Department for Transport. Odyssey's filing describes reimbursement of search, recovery, and processing expenses before division of the remaining proceeds: 80 percent to Odyssey and 20 percent to the UK government. Finding the wreck was not a simple case of taking ownerless treasure.
The same filing says most recovered bullion was refined, while some original ingots were preserved for collectors. The project's silver catalogue records both .917 and .999 fineness among the insured cargo. A later coin made from recovered silver and an original marked shipwreck ingot consequently tell different stories. Before relying on either description, look for documentation connecting the particular object to the recovery and any subsequent refining or manufacture.
About this edition
Original source and editorial notes
Adapted from original material by Rich Silver. Original source card: Silver fact: supplied original card (publication date not established).
Reviewed 2026-11-04. Corrected discovery from 2012 to 2011. Retained approximate troy-ounce recovery figures with attribution and separated insured cargo recovered from unlocated additional cargo. Avoided ambiguous tons-to-tonnes conversion and an unqualified largest-ever claim. Distinguished salvaged original ingots from later products made with recovered metal. The card has no verified publication date or public URL; none has been inferred. No source-card graphics are reproduced.