If you lose a phone or a wallet on your way home, chances are, you can backtrack and have a decent chance of retrieving it. But if you’re a cargo ship, however, you might be screwed. If you lose your cargo, odds are it’ll sink to the dark depths of the ocean, and no one will ever find it again.
There are more than a handful of examples of spoils of war being transported back to the victory’s country and somehow disappearing along the way. Let’s take a look at some of the most expensive cargoes that are probably still somewhere out there.
1. The Train of Walbrzych
This is the infamous Nazi gold train. It was rumored to have about 300 tons of gold, jewelry, art, and other expensive things on it, but it never arrived at its destination. In fact, we have no idea where it went missing or if it even existed in the first place. If we assume that it did exist and had 300 tons of gold on it, however, its modern-day value would be just shy of 20 billion dollars.
2. The Amber Room
Another piece of fine art was lost in the fallout of the war against the Third Reich. This room was originally built by Germans in the 1700s by slapping amber all over it. The Russian Tsar loved it so much that he eventually had it given to him as a gift and added a lot more amber to the room. Hitler wanted it back since the Germans made it, but nobody knows if the room was able to be extracted before the Catherine Palace was bombed. It’s been rebuilt as an $11 million room, but the original was said to be worth about twenty times that much.
3. Jewels of Lima
If it’s jewels, you can probably imagine it will be worth a lot. These lost jewels are valued at about $1 billion and contain pretty much every gem you can think of. It even had a seven-foot statue in solid gold of Mary holding baby Jesus. Naturally, it was adorned with 1684 jewels. And that was just one of the items that were lost. It has a typical pirate’s treasure story attached to it, too: when Argentina threatened Lima, the British sought to leave with all the loot but were sunnk by a Spanish warship, leaving the treasure lost forever.
