About book Ship Of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea (1999)
On September 9, 1857, the sidewheel steamer "Central America", which was carrying passengers from the Panamanian port of Colón to New York, encountered hurricane winds and savage seas off the coast of the Carolinas. Although a sturdy ship, her sails were quickly shredded and a leak in one of the seals around the paddle wheels prevented her boiler from functioning. Captain William Herndon exhausted every means to save the stricken ship and its passengers, many of whom were on their way home from the California gold fields: when the pumps failed, the crew and male passengers formed a bucket brigade to combat the rising water in the hold. They lost the battle on the evening of September 11, when the "Central America" sank beneath the waves, taking her captain and 425 of her passengers and crew with her. Over the years, the ship became a Holy Grail for treasure hunters, because 21 tons of gold went to the bottom with her. But because she was over two miles below the ocean's surface, recovery seemed impossible- until renegade marine scientist and explorer Tommy Thompson, leader of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, developed the technology to enable deep water exploration and artefact gathering. In 1989, he obtained access to the wreck of the "Central America" and collected gold coins and bars with an estimated value of one billion dollars. Author Gary Kinder has done a great job weaving together two struggles that occurred centuries apart: that of the "Central America" passengers and crew to survive, and Thompson's battle against the scientific and technological odds to salvage the wreck. I was especially fascinated by the legal process via which American discoverers obtain salvage rights to sunken vessels: after collecting an artefact from the "Central America", Thompson's team took it to the Norfolk, VA courthouse so that the U.S. marshal could "arrest" it and a judge could award the site to them. Thirty-nine insurance companies traced their lineage back to those 1857 insurers that had covered the valuable contents and paid for the loss, and they now claimed, 132 years later, that the treasure belonged to them. A third struggle then commences, this one in the courts. My only complaint is that there were so few pictures accompanying the text. But I still award "Ship of Gold" a five star review because Gary Kinder's prose has made a word worth a thousand pictures.
"Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea" by Gary Kinder reads like a Clive Cussler novel but is actually nonfiction. Kinder tells an exciting well-researched story about the 1857 sinking of the Central America, an American passenger ship, off the coast of North Carolina. Roughly 400 people perished, and several millions of dollars worth (adjusted) of California gold was lost in treacherously deep waters. It was apparently the worst maritime disaster until the Titanic, and until the 1980s, no one knew exactly where it was. Not that it mattered, because the technology didn't exist to retreive anything from that depth. That is, not until an intrepid and ingenuous engineer named Tommy Thompson (an OSU grad, no less) was struck by the "treasure-hunting" bug and set out on a well-funded expedition with state-of-the-art underwater submersible and artifact retrieval technology. This is a great sea-faring adventure told extremely well. The first part literally grabs the reader and doesn't let up, as Kinder describes the events of the hurricane that leads up to the sinking of the Central America. Kinder uses first-hand narratives to capture the emotionally draining stories of the survivors. The second part, equally fascinating (although admittedly not as exciting) tells the story of Thompson's attempt to get his expedition underway. Rounding up legal teams and scrounging up fund-raisers may be exciting to some, but at times these parts do drag. Thankfully, Kinder knows how to keep the reader engaged and never dwells too long on the boring bits. There are a few scenes of suspense, when rival treasure-hunters (some not as legal-minded as Thompson) attempt to horn in on their scene. The climactic "discovery" and recovery scene is well worth the wait. This book is probably what James Cameron's "Titanic" could have been if it wasn't bogged down by the stupid love story. "Ship of Gold" is just pure manly adventure story.
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tAuthor Gary Kinder spent over ten years researching and writing this book about the shipwreck of the S. S. Central America about two hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina in a severe hurricane. He devotes the first eighty pages of the book telling how the ship’s passengers were carrying gold which had been found in California during the famous 1857 Gold Rush. The ultimate tally of lives lost came to 565 while 149, mostly women and children, were saved. Kinder takes advantage of the survivors’ stories to give us the harrowing details of their rescue.tFast forward now to the 1970s when we meet Tommy Thompson, Ohio State University graduate in mechanical engineering, who also has a fascination with deep ocean exploration. After several false starts, he launches a project to locate the S. S. Central America and explore the possibility of recovering its artifacts. He encounters many problems along the way, the first of which is money, but he convinces a group of wealthy investors to back him in a limited partnership. Tommy gathers together a ship, a crew, a small group of technicians, and conducts multiple runs along ocean paths calculated according to statistical probabilities of locating the wreck.tBut Tommy and his intrepid group are not alone out there on the ocean. In spite of his enforcing tight security on the venture, they are badgered by treasure hunters who suspect that Tommy is onto something big. Once he finds something at the sea’s bottom of 8,000 feet below the surface, a new problem arises; he must establish the venture’s legal rights to conduct further undersea work at the site.tThere are several surprises along the way and they deal with the actual artifacts found and in what condition they are when brought up to the surface. The book actually has a plot and characters, like a novel, but it’s all an exciting true story. The added bonus for me was learning about deep water exploration, the technology of submersibles operating at extreme depths and pressures, and the discovery of biological life previously unknown to scientists and oceanographers.tThis is an excellent book and I recommend to everyone.
—Dick Reynolds
I first read this book about 2002, and it left such a strong impression, book that I actually reread part of it again last year. Ship of Gold is actually two stories in one. It was a fascinating and captivating book and I couldn't put it down. The first book tells the story of the ill-fated voyage of the SS Central America, a ship laden with gold from the California gold rush that sinks off the Carolinas in 1857. Then it continues with the story of Tommy Thompson, a young engineer, who envisions a future of working on the floor of the ocean. He gets involved in a treasure ship salvage project and that sparks his interest in locating other ships with the goal of developing the technology to salvage them and to continue his work on the bottom of the ocean. The author does an outstanding job of weaving these two stories together and bringing the characters involved to life. He also does an excellent job of telling the story of the engineering and technology development in layman's terms. This is a story of both tragedy and heroism, well paced with an excellent narrative. Outstanding! Note: There are a number of interesting sites on the internet devoted to these events, some showing many of the items recovered. I have heard there is a recent book, not by the same author, that provides additional details related to the recovery efforts taking place after the end of the original book.
—Betty
That is probably one part of the book that is lacking. They do find the gold and they start the recovery process, but the author never mentions how much was found.
—Jason Blythe
