| Lauren Collins
Staff writer Until the Prince de Conty came into my life, when an acquaintance began telling me the wild story of the boat’s sunken treasure, I’d never given gold a tremendous amount of thought. I’d worn gold jewelry—gold-plated, mostly. I knew the color gold but not the substance gold—so revered, prized, and lusted after that Freud compared humans’ greed for it to that of a baby holding on to its shit. One expert thinks that about a hundred gold ingots went down with the Prince de Conty, a French frigate that wrecked off the coast of Brittany in 1746. They originated in China and came in three versions: “chocolate bar” (for its rectangular form), “bread” (also rectangular but slightly longer, like a baguette), and “shoe” (the rarest, shaped like a clog). For more than two hundred years, the ship’s treasure lay, lost and then forgotten, at the bottom of the sea. In the nineteen-seventies, treasure hunters rediscovered the wreck and pillagers scooped up the ingots, stashing them in attics or funnelling them to trusted relatives. One marine archeologist has been chasing the gold ever since. My piece, “A Cursed Ship and the Fate of Its Sunken Gold,” follows the ingots’ dramatic afterlife—particularly as it pertains to Phil and Gay Courter, a semi-retired Florida couple who agreed to hold on to some for French friends and found themselves drawn into an international scandal. In the course of my reporting, I was fascinated by the way that people spoke about the Conty’s gold. Whether they obsessed over it or wished they’d never heard of it, they all seemed to agree that it possessed a kind of magic—a certain strange energy that you had to touch to know. At the Museum of the French East India Company, near Lorient, a curator showed one of the Conty’s ingots—a “chocolate bar.” Emboldened by the intriguing testimony of my sources, I asked whether I could hold it. The curator carefully unwrapped it and placed it in my hand, which immediately sank. I hadn’t expected it to be so heavy, like a can of soup—nearly three hundred and seventy grams of metal and memory, spanning centuries and an extraordinary journey from China to France to my palm. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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