Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
by Gary Kinder

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 off-shore 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 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, 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.

Hardcover, 507 pages

-- Tjames Madison

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