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."
"£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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
