[Snickering Hound]

This may be a lot of fuss about nothing. Russian experts say it’s highly unlikely that so much gold would’ve been placed into one basket, arguing that it would have been safer, and much wiser, to move such huge amounts of gold by train, the Telegraph reports. What’s more, the Dmitrii Donskoi, which was packed with 12 artillery guns, 1,600 tons of coal, and hundreds of sailors, couldn’t possibly have had enough room for the rumored number of boxes of gold.

Have to get to the 2nd to last paragraph...

[FredZarguna]

200 tons of gold stacked in solid ingots would occupy a space only 3 feet high by 6 feet wide by 16 feet long.

That aint a whole lot of space in the hold of a ship.

By contrast, the 1600 tons of coal would occupy a volume 120 times larger. If they wanted to move it that way, they could easily have found space for the gold. (For example, just by leaving <1% of the coal behind...)