Le Prince de Conty Shipwreck Hoard

In December 1746, the Prince de Conty, a trading ship from the French East India Company, sank on its return from Nanjing, China in a storm off the coast of Brittany near the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer. In addition to the ship’s official cargo of porcelain and ivory, the crew was carrying around 100 smuggled gold ingots.

In 1974, the shipwreck was discovered by amateur marine archaeology divers who did not immediately notify French authorities of the discovery. A site survey was conducted a year later, during which time its trove was heavily looted. The illicit excavations continued until 1985, when a storm dispersed the rest of the vessel's remains. At least 16 Chinese gold ingots were looted from the site between the initial 1975 site survey and the final excavations in 1985. Three of the gold bars were eventually sold to the British Museum, while another five made their way to the United States, where they emerged on the art market in an online auction via eBay.

The repatriated ingots were first identified in late 2017, when the head of France's underwater archaeology department, Michel L'Hour, spotted them listed in an upcoming auction at Stephen Album Rare Coins in California. The auction catalogue described them as boat-shaped gold bars stamped with Chinese characters, which are “nearly identical to the bars from the wrecks of the French East India Company vessel Prince de [C]onty [sic].”

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) analysts identified the seller as Eleonor "Gay" Courter, an author and film producer residing in Florida. Courter claimed that she had received the ingots from her French friends Annette May Pesty and her deceased partner, Gerard. In 1999, Annette Pesty appeared on the Antiques Roadshow, where she claimed to have discovered the ingots while diving off the West African island of Cape Verde. However, the story was exposed after Pesty's brother-in-law, Yves Gladu, an underwater photographer, confessed to having retrieved 16 gold ingots from the shipwreck during around 40 dives on the site between 1976 and 1999. Gladu stated that he sold all the ingots to an unspecified individual in 2006 in Switzerland.

After it was determined that they had possessed at least 23 gold ingots, Eleonor and Phillip Courter were arrested in the United Kingdom on a European warrant charging them with trafficking of cultural goods and money laundering. They were subsequently allowed to return to the United States. HSI seized the ingots and, following an unsuccessful restitution claim by China, repatriated them to France on March 2, 2022.

Also repatriated in the ceremony was a 3rd-century CE Roman coin from Corsica and an 18th-century human skull. The coin was seized in May 2013 at an auction house in Los Angeles by HSI after they identified that it had been looted from a shipwreck in the Gulf of Lava near Corsica. HSI seized the skull in June 2014 as part of its investigation into a Houston-based antiquities dealer triggered by an examination of a shipment by U.S. Fish and Wildlife inspectors. Analysts were able to locate the skull's original findspot as the Paris Catacombs. HSI further noted that the dealer had provided falsified documentation about the skull.

The Lava Treasure
https://mola.omeka.net/items/show/2527

Stolen Gold from 18th-century French Shipwreck Could Lead to Charges for U.S. Novelist and Her Husband
https://archive.fo/Jv0Yu

U.S. returns gold treasure looted from 1746 shipwreck and skull stolen from Parisian catacombs to France
https://archive.fo/KsPYX

US Investigation Leads to Return of Gold Ingots, Other Historical Artifacts to France
https://archive.fo/4qs8b

Gold Ingots From 18th-Century Shipwreck Returned to France
https://web.archive.org/web/20260428042134/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/arts/design/china-france-gold-ingots.html

A Cursed Ship and the Fate of its Sunken Gold
https://archive.fo/uJWrw

Stephen Album Rare Coins
https://archive.fo/jQxV2