A stash of gold coins found Monday is the latest piece of evidence that a shipwreck 40-plus miles off the North Carolina coast is that of the steamship Pulaski, which took half its wealthy passengers to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1838.

Divers found 14 gold coins and 24 silver coins in a spot “no bigger than a cigar box.” All predate the ship’s sinking and include one British coin that experts say could be worth $100,000. Other gold coins in the collection are valued in the $10,000 to $12,000 range, officials said.

James Sinclair, a marine archaeologist involved in project, says finding gold coins proves the team is in the right spot.

“This evidence supports reports that valuables, including gold and silver, were aboard the Pulaski when she sank,” Sinclair said in a statement.

Those involved in the project have one particular passenger in mind: Charles Ridge, a man who survived but lost $20,000 in the disaster, all of it in gold coins.

Ridge’s fate is legendary, because he rescued a wealthy heiress by holding her atop a “a floating piece of parlor furniture.” He proposed marriage as they drifted along for four days. She accepted, even though he’d lost everything when the ship exploded and sank.

The coins were uncovered as part of joint project by Blue Water Ventures International and Endurance Exploration Group, two publicly traded companies that expect to find a treasure trove of valuables brought aboard the doomed luxury ship by wealthy passengers.

Keith Webb of Blue Water Ventures said in an interview Friday the 14 gold coins are not Ridge’s fortune.

“When we find his money, it won’t be the size of a cigar box. It will be the size of a chest,” said Webb. “We will find it, I assure you, and it will be in one pile. And that will be gold coins with a specific history attached – an actual story of a man whose riches are lost and a woman still committed to marry him…. It’s romantic. It’s exciting.”

Webb predicts they’ll find thousands of coins that could be worth millions. So far, he says they’ve found 70 U.S., Spanish and Mexican coins during a half dozen visits.

The sinking of the Pulaski is listed among the nation’s worst maritime disasters.

Around midnight June 13-14, 1838, the ship’s boilers exploded, and 100 of the roughly 200 people aboard died. The passengers included some of the South’s wealthiest families, who had little time to collect their things before jumping overboard. Newspaper accounts tell of “panicky passengers in their night clothes, seeking refuge on the promenade deck as the bow rose out of the water and ripped apart.”

It was long believed the Pulaski went down about 30 miles off the coast, but the explorers believe they have found the wreckage more than 10 miles farther out to sea.

A report compiled by Webb at the project’s start noted the shipwreck happened in an era when wealthy women would have been traveling with a large quantity of personal jewelry to maintain their public stature. “In many cases, jewelry would already have been antiques; family heirlooms produced by some of the finest jewelers in France, Russia and England and date from the 1600’s or 1700’s,” says the report

Historians hope the divers will eventually uncover definitive proof of the ship’s identity, possibly the ship’s bell with Pulaski etched in it, or numbers on the boilers that can be traced to a manufacturer. So far, neither has been found.

Other artifacts discovered include two turkey trays, a men’s straight razor and a candlestick holder. Endurance Exploration owns the wreck site, having filed an admiralty claim in federal court. That means it has legal right to salvage the spot and owns whatever is recovered.