Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder

Description

Bestselling author Gary Kinder tells, for the first time, an extraordinary tale of history, maritime drama, heroic rescue, scientific ingenuity, and individual courage. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea is the riveting true account of death, danger, and discovery on the high seas in the dramatic search for America's greatest lost treasure.

In September 1857, the side-wheel streamer S.S. Central America, carrying five hundred passengers and tons of gold from the mountains of California, sank in a hurricane off the Carolina coast. Lost in legend for more than a century, the tragic story resurfaced in 1989, when Tommy Thompson, a brilliant ocean engineer, sailed into Norfolk harbor with more than ten tons of pioneer gold. Using a combination of oceanography, computer science, and information theory to sift through historical records and penetrate the deep sea, Thompson's team had recovered the mint-state coins, antique bars, and sparkling gold dust from 8,000 feet below the surface of the sea — proving wrong everyone who said it couldn't be done and establishing mankind's first real working presence on the deep ocean floor. It was, as Life magazine proclaimed, “the greatest treasure ever found”, and its dollar value has currently been estimated in the hundreds of millions.

This AudioBook is a copiously historical record of the disaster, rendered in chilling detail with diaries from the survivors and eyewitness accounts, as well as newspaper reports from the worst peacetime at-sea disaster in American history. It is a chronicle of the technological breakthrough in which deep-sea robots were developed to perform complex work. And it is an incredibly exciting adventure story of how ateam of scientists and engineers, the Columbus-America Discovery Group, battled massive storms, technological challenges, and intrusive salvagers on the open seas to find the lost treasure. It is a fascinating story both of the power of the human will to succeed and of technological triumph.

Editorial Review

The facts speak for themselves. In 1857, the Central America, a sidewheel steamer ferrying passengers fresh from the gold rush of California to New York and laden with 21 tons of California gold, encountered a severe storm off the Carolina coast and sank, carrying more than 400 passengers and all her cargo down with her. She then sat for 132 years, 200 miles offshore and almost two miles below the ocean's surface–a depth at which she was assumed to be unrecoverable–until 1989, when a deep-water research vessel sailed into the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, fat with salvaged gold coins and bullion estimated to be worth one billion dollars.

Author Gary Kinder wisely lets the story of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, led by maverick scientist and entrepreneur Tommy Thompson, unfold without hyperbole. Kinder interweaves the tale of the Central America and her passengers and crew with Thompson's own story of growing up landlocked in Ohio, an irrepressible tinkerer and explorer even in his childhood days, and his progress to adulthood as a young man who always had “7 to 14” projects on the table or spinning in his head at any given moment. One of those projects would become the preposterous recovery of the stricken steamer, and the resourcefulness and later urgency with which the project would proceed is contrasted poignantly with the Central America's doomed battle in 1857 to stay afloat.

Thompson, who spent nearly a decade planning and organizing his recovery effort, emerges as one of the great unsung adventurers of these times (the technical innovations alone required for such a task produced a windfall for the scientific community and defined a new state of the art for deep-sea explorers and treasure hunters), and the story of the steamer's sinking is compelling enough to make any reader wonder why the Central America sinking isn't synonymous with shipwreck in this Titanic-happy age. –Tjames Madison