Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea - Hardcover

Kinder, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871134640 ISBN 13: 9780871134646

Publisher: Avalon Travel Publishing, 1998

Synopsis

In 1857, the "SS Central America," a side-wheel steamer carrying nearly six hundred passengers returning from the California Gold Rush, foundered in a hurricane and sank off the Carolina coast. Over four hundred lives and twenty-one tons of gold were lost.In the 1980s, a young engineer from Ohio set out to do what no one, not even the U.S. Navy, had been able to do: establish a working presence on the deep-ocean floor and open it to scientific discovery. After years of intensive effort, Tommy Thompson and the Columbus-America Discovery Group found the "Central-America" in eight thousand feet of water, and in October of 1989 they sailed into Norfolk with her recovered treasure. Here is the story of both the victims and heroes of the disaster, and the visionary team that opened Earth's last frontier.

About this title

Product Description:

507 pages. Book and Jacket are both in Very good condition throughout. In 1857 The SS Central America A Side Wheel Steamer Carrying Nearly Six Hundred Passengers Sank Off The Carolina Coast. Over 400 Lives Were Lost And Twenty One Tons Of California Gold Was Lost.

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 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 harbour at Norfolk, Virginia, fat with salvaged gold coins and bullion estimated to be worth $1 billion.

Author Gary Kinder wisely lets the story of the Columbus-America Dicovery 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, his progress to adulthood as a young man who always had "7 to 14" projects on the table or spinning in his head adds fascinating texture and depth to the story. One of those projects would become the unlikely recovery of the stricken steamer, and the resourcefulness and drive with which the project proceeds is contrasted poignantly in the narrative with the Central America's doomed battle to stay afloat in 1857.

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 hasn't achieved greater notoriety in this Titanic-dominated area.

About this edition

• Publisher: Avalon Travel Publishing
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0871134640
• ISBN 13: 9780871134646
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 507