Twenty fathoms beneath the waters of Lough Swilly, a glacial fjord off the coast of Ireland’s County Donegal, lies more than $10 million worth of gold.
That’s all that remains of a massive cache of sunken treasure lost during World War I on the HMS Laurentic, an armed British merchant cruiser that struck two mines and sank on January 25, 1917.
The Laurentic was ferrying more than 3,200 individual gold ingots, weighing in at around 44 tons and valued by the Bank of England at nearly £5 million ($25 million) from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cash-strapped Allies had assembled the gold to purchase arms and supplies from the United States.
Read the full story at http://www.history.com/news/the-10-million-dollar-cache-of-wwi-era-gold-thats-sitting-off-the-coast-of-ireland
