The bounty of the treasury goes on tour ... while he stays in prison because he did not give up his gold

artifacts that were recovered from a 165 -year -old shipwreck have embarked on a journey through the United States while the man who discovered it in prison.

Tommy Thompson will stay behind bars in Michigan until he reveals the whereabouts of the 500 gold coins that he recovered from the SS Central America, which sank in 1857 off the coast of North Carolina.

For his followers, the 70-year-old is an fearless deep-sea researcher, whose daring heroic deed revealed the secrets of the so-called "gold ship".

But for the authorities and the investors who invested millions of dollars, he is little more than a fraudster.

The tour through the artifact - a potpourri of objects from the gold rush - is the latest chapter in the bizarre saga.

There were 425 people on board the 280-foot side wheel steamer when he was in the eye of a hurricane category 2, with wind speeds of 105 miles per hour that cracked through the sails.

only 153 of the passengers, of whom many miners who had come across gold, survived. His loss triggered a national panic.

The ship was on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean until it was discovered in 1988 by Thompson, an oceanographic engineer, who saved coins, gold bars and luggage from the ship.

He had collected almost $ 13 million from local investors to finance the use of a high-tech submarine and a team of historians, scientists and engineers.

Things became complicated later when the insurers of the ship claimed the find. This later triggered two rounds of expensive legal disputes that Mr. Thompson won.

The gold was sold to a marketing group for $ 50 million (£ 41 million). However, the investors received nothing, with Thompson said that the money had been devoured from the costs of the original expedition and the legal dispute with the insurers.

Investors sued and Thompson disappeared in 2012 by withdrawing the authorities by staying in hotels under the wrong name and paid everything in cash instead of using a credit card or a bank account.

three years later he was captured and sentenced to two years in prison because he had not appeared in court as part of a plea.

A condition of the deal was that Thompson should say where the 500 missing gold coins can be found.

At one point he said that the coins in Belize were in a blind trust. At other times he told the court that he did not know what the legal dead end, left him in prison for disregarding the court and was confronted with a daily fine of $ 1,000 (£ 810) per day.

While the fines amount to more than $ 2 million (£ 1.6 million), hundreds of artifacts were issued.

The objects include letters, a saloon sign, a gun in the halter, clothing and a first edition of The Count of Monte Cristo.

You have already been seen by visitors to the Old West Show in Grass Valley California.

The pieces will find their way through the country before they are auctioned in autumn.

In the meantime, Thompson remains in the legal floating, whereby the judge Algenon Marbley insists that he stays in custody until he says where the coins are located.

"The lucky part of it is that I also have a lifelong term of office," he said at a hearing in February 2017.

"So we will always have a special place to accommodate him and others like him who do not believe that laws apply to them and that absolutely violates the law."

Thompson, which was plagued by health problems, said that prison restrictions, such as the restriction of telephone calls to seven minutes a day, would have prevented him from hiring a lawyer.