61 tons of silver were recovered from a sunken ship off the coast of Ireland. An American company recovered the deepest and largest precious metal haul from a shipwreck ever, with a total worth in silver almost $36 million.

On Monday, the Florida company Odyssey Marine Exploration announced that it had recovered over 61 tons (1.8 million ounces) of silver bullion this month from a World War II cargo ship, which wrecked 300 miles off the coast of Ireland in 1941, CNBC reports.

"This is the heaviest amount of precious cargo ever recovered from the deepest depth," Odyssey's president Mark Gordon told "Squawk on the Street" on Monday.

The wreck is the SS Gairsoppa, a 412-foot British ship that sits nearly three miles below the ocean's surface, CNBC reports. Odyssey said that it has recovered a total of 2,792 silver ingots, or 110 tons, from the site since 2012, including 1,574 ingots in the most recent recovery. Each ingot weighs about 1,100 ounces.

Odyssey said that 99 percent of the insured silver on Gairsoppa has been recovered. According to its contract with the U.K. government, the company will keep 80 percent of the haul, while 20 percent will go to the government. The cargo has been transported to a secure location in the U.K. 

"This was an extremely complex recovery which was complicated by the sheer size and structure of the SS Gairsoppa as well as its depth nearly three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic," Greg Stemm, Odyssey's chief executive officer, wrote in a news release.

"To add to the complications, the remaining insured silver was stored in a small compartment that was very difficult to access," Stemm continued.

According to CNBC, the haul is worth about $36 million.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Gairsoppa left Calcutta, India, in 1941 on its way to London with tons of tea and 7 million ounces of silver, worth 600,000 British pounds at the time.

A German U-boat spotted the cargo ship and fired a torpedo that sunk the Gairsoppa 300 miles southwest of Galway Bay.