So all this happened to me again on Saturday. If the devs want to try and look at logging, here's what I know (all times are eastern US):
2:13pm - had 3997 gold, turned in 2x golden chickens. Had no change in gold on my client for over an hour.
3:30pm - had 4184 gold (apparently the 2x golden chickens were worth 187 gold). Turned in 2 captains chests, 1 marauders chest. No change in gold for the next few hours.
After that time, I attempted to buy a jacket from the merchant -- I never got the jacket. I tried to buy it again (as I still had gold), but it wouldn't let me. So... the game seemed to have taken the gold, but didn't deliver the item or update the fact that it sold it to me.
I eventually quit the game (still have to alt+f4 to quit) and logged back in. I then had the jacket and my gold was decreased.
This is STILL an issue... with 10 days left to go, getting gold from voyages still doesn't work correctly. It seems pretty obvious that the client is NOT getting timely updates from the server. This is going to cause an extreme amount of confusion and player rage at launch.