Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

by Gary Kinder (Author), Gary Kinder (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.25

  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.

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.25

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $4.20

  In September 1857, SS Central America , a side-wheel steamer carrying 500 passengers and tons of gold from California, sank in a hurricane 200 miles off the Carolina coast and was lost in legend for more than a century. Its tragic story resurfaced in 1989, when Tommy Thompson, an ocean engineer, sailed into Norfolk harbour with over ten tons of pioneer gold. Using oceanography, computer science and information theory to sift through historical records and penetrate the deep sea, Thompson's team had recovered perhaps the greatest treasure ever found. This book presents an historical record of the initial disaster, rendered in detail from contemporary accounts, and a chronicle of the technological breakthrough in which deep-sea robots were developed to perform heavy, delicate and complex work one-and-a-half miles below sea level. It describes how a team of scientists and engineers, the Columbus-America Discovery Group, battled against massive storms, technological challenges and intrusive salvagers to succeed in their quest.