Originally published in 1998 and a best seller in its hardcover and
paperback publications, Gary Kinder's Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue
Sea tells the story of the sinking of the SS Central America, a
side-wheel steamer carrying nearly six hundred passengers returning from
the California Gold Rush, two hundred miles off the Carolina coast in
September 1857. Over four hundred lives and twenty-one tons of
California gold were lost. It was the worst peacetime disaster at sea in
American history, a tragedy that remained lost in legend for over a
century.
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 science, archaeology, history,
medicine, and recovery. The SS Central America became the target of his
project. After years of intensive efforts, Tommy Thompson and the
Columbus-America Discovery Group found the Central America in eight
thousand feet of water, and in October 1989 they sailed into Norfolk
with her recovered treasure: gold coins, bars, nuggets, and dust, plus
steamer trunks filled with period clothes, newspapers, books, journals,
and even an intact cigar sealed under water for 130 years. Life
magazine called it "the greatest treasure ever found."
Gary Kinder tells an extraordinary tale of history, human drama, heroic
rescue, scientific ingenuity, and individual courage. Ship of Gold in
the Deep Blue Sea is a testament to the human will to triumph over
adversity. It is also a great American adventure story of the opening of
Earth's last frontier.
