Currently reading
Alex
The Glass Room
Peter the Great: His Life and World
If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
Skin Deep
The Good Daughter
A Boy in Winter
The Tie That Binds
The Idiot (Everyman's Library, #254)
The Velvet Hours
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
This was an absolutely fascinating and extremely well researched story of The sinking of the S.S. Central America, which had been carrying five hundred passengers, many of them returning from the Gold Rush in California in 1857. The ship ran into trouble when a hurricane hit and the S.S Central America sank 200 miles of the Carolina coast. The Ship was sailing from Panama to New York, It had been carrying 500 passengers and 20 tons of gold from the goldfields of California worth (at the time) 2 million dollars. (Over 50 million Dollars currents valuation). After 150 years of lying at the bottom of the sea, an engineer from Ohio by the name of tommy Thompson set out Along with the Columbus-America Discovery Group to find the Central America in eight thousand feet of water and try and make claim on the millions of Gold sitting at the bottom of the sea.
This book was written in 1998 and I obtained a used hard copy on Amazon as I had been fascinated when first leaning of this story. This is an extremely well written and researched Account firstly of the tragic sinking of the S.S Central America and her passengers and the first 150 pages of the book sets the scene and you become acquainted with Captain, crew and passengers of this ship. The story of the sinking is very well documented and you feel as if you are right there on the ship and feel the fear and the cold of the passengers. This was a heartbreaking story of the sinking and the Captain of the ship was hailed a hero by the surviving passengers which is well documented in this story.
When the story moves to the 1980s and Tommy Thompson’s quest to find the site of the S.S Central America the book becomes a lot more technical but is still fascinating to learn how deep-sea-robots were developed to perform heavy and complex work.
The third part of the story once again picks up pace and I read with baited breath to the end of this engrossing and captivating story. The author Gary Kindler has written a remarkable historical account of the sinking of S.S. Central as well as an entertaining adventure story.
When I finished this account I realized there had to be more to this story from when the book ended and after a little research online I was shocked and amazed at the happenings since. I wonder was Gary Kindler as amazed as me at what has taken place since he wrote this book and perhaps there is another book yet to be written
A fascinating tale of history, science and adventure, heavy on detail and quite complex but engrossing and unputdownable and a book I will certainly remember many years from now.
