( CNN ) It took more than seven decades , but England finally got its delivery of tons of silver coins . For most of those years , the money was deep at the bottom of the Atlantic , the monetary casualty of a cruel World War II sinking . In November 1942 , the unguarded SS City of Cairo was sunk by a German U-boat while carrying 296 civilians and cargo that included 100 tons of silver . The vessel sunk to more than 16,800 feet under the surface ( 5,150 meters ) where it went undiscovered until 2011 when Deep Ocean Search decided to go looking for it . The sinking was the stuff of legend . The City of Cairo was bringing silver rupees from India to England as part of the war effort . After a stop in Brazil , two torpedos sank the ship in the Atlantic . After the ship went under , the U-boat reportedly surfaced and the captain said to the survivors in lifeboats : `` Goodnight , sorry for sinking you . '' The captain 's lament is the title of a book about the event . Only a handful of people died as the ship sank but about 100 more passed away during the desperate attempt of the six boats to make it to land , which was hundreds of miles away . When the last of the lifeboats was found 51 days later , all but two people in it had died . Deep Ocean Search said in a news release that during the 2011 search it located an unnatural object on radar . A sub found the City of Cairo split into two parts , buried by silt . `` Under contract to the UK Ministry of Transport , DOS recovered several tens of tons of silver coins from a depth of ( 5,150 meters ) , '' the company said . The depth is a world record , the company claimed . Other deep-water operations reported in the media that are close to this depth include the 1987 search for the wreck of a South African Airways plane at 16,000 feet ( 4,700 meters ) and the discovery of the SS Gairsoppa at about 15,400 feet ( 4,800 meters ) in the North Atlantic in 2011 . The BBC reported the City of Cairo salvage operation was completed in September 2013 , but the British government made the company keep it secret until this week . The coins were melted and the silver sold , the BBC reported . Deep Ocean Search got a percentage of the sale , and the UK Treasury the rest , according to the BBC . At today 's rates , 100 tons of silver would be worth about $ 50 million . Remains of USS Oklahoma crew to be exhumed at Pearl Harbor . CNN 's Jessica King contributed to this report .
The ship was sunk in 2011 hundreds of miles of the coast of South America . A British company says the salvage operation occurred at a world record depth . The torpedoing is the subject of the book `` Goodnight , sorry for sinking you ''