Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
by Gary Kinder

The Search for the S.S. Central America

{Lead in}
In 1973, the Dean of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State University posed a simple question to an unusually gifted engineering student: How are we going to work in the deep ocean? Scientists could film and photograph in the deep ocean and do crude sampling and recovery, but no one could work down there. The student, Tommy Thompson, had spent most of his twenty-one-year-old life consciously cultivating a creative mindset, experimenting constantly, driving everyone around him crazy, putting himself in unusual, sometimes dangerous situations, just to see what would happen. He would circle even the simplest problem, look at it from different angles, turn it upside down, challenge the formula he was supposed to use, then give his answer. "If you’re going to be educating yourself in this world," he would say, "you might as well be thinking about things that will yield value all the way along."

During the ten years after his mentor posed the question, Thompson read scores of esoteric treatises on working in the deep ocean and telephoned scientists all over the country about their research in fields that might be related. He worked with some of the treasure hunters in Key West, observing their operations and filling notebooks with his observations on their lack of methodology and the myriad problems with trying to find anything in shallow water.

While working as an engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute in the early 1980s, Thompson began researching historic ships lost in the deep ocean. After running many shipwrecks through his historic shipwreck selection process, a form of risk analysis, he focused on the Central America. Two friends, Bob Evans, a geologist, and Barry Schatz, a journalist, joined with him to research the sinking of the ship and brainstorm on how to find it and learn from it with a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers. Thompson’s goal was to find the fabled steamer and recover her treasure, but his purpose was to open the deep-ocean frontier to science, history, medicine, mining, and archaeology.

By the summer of 1985, Thompson had the backing of the managing partner at the accounting firm Deloitte, Haskins, and Sells in Columbus and a name partner at one of the biggest law firms in the Midwest, Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur, who helped him shape the project into a business offering that would attract local Columbus investors. Eventually, the partnership raised almost $12 million for the venture.

Before setting to sea, Thompson consulted with Dr. Lawrence Stone, the world’s foremost authority on optimal-search techniques. "He was going about this in a careful scientific fashion," Stone remembers in the book. "He wasn’t in it strictly for the money. That came through strongly, and it’s very consistent with the way he’s acted ever since."

In the summer of 1986, Thompson and the Columbus-America Discovery Group set to sea to find the Central America with prototype sonar that enabled them to search five thousand feet of ocean bottom in a single swath. The following year he led a group of engineers in creating a robot that could perform intricate, heavy, and often delicate tasks in water over eight thousand feet deep. But their work was delayed when two competitors who had mounted their own expeditions to find the Central America appeared at the site and tried to drive Thompson off. After several confrontations at sea and in the courtroom, a federal court gave Thompson exclusive rights to recover the ship.

In 1988, Thompson flew his unmanned robot over the rusting remains of two huge paddle wheels, the final resting-place of the Central America. Next, he located the ship’s three hundred-pound bell, then found steamer trunks, and then came a sight few people could imagine. "‘The bottom was carpeted with gold,’" says Thompson in the book. "‘Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything.’"

"For 131 years one of the world’s richest treasures — perhaps a billion dollars in fine gold—lay lost and out of reach in the frigid, lightless depths of the Atlantic. . . . Then in 1985 an unlikely trio from Ohio—a research engineer, a geologist and a journalist—began a cautious but brilliant search for the ship, using cutting-edge technology and a revolutionary undersea robot. In October their research vessel docked in Jacksonville, Florida, having recovered [the Central America’s] gold."—"The Greatest Treasure Ever Found," Life, March 1992

{Excerpt}
Outside Battelle, Tommy was now amassing voluminous notes on underwater technology, beginning to formulate relationships with suppliers, and corresponding with historical archives at several libraries on the East Coast. For years he had collected information on deep-water, historic shipwrecks, and the list had grown to forty. He and Bob met more frequently, together refining what they called the Historic Shipwreck Selection Process and narrowing the targets to a project Tommy could present to investors. "We developed the language as we went along," said Bob, "the selection criteria for projects in general, and then we analyzed the risks involved with each ship."

They divided risk into intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic risks were those inherent to the site: probability of previous recovery, accuracy of historical documentation, and the environment around the site. All deep-water shipwrecks scored high in the first category; most of them scored high in the second category; few of them did well in the third. Shipwrecks with a high total score then advanced to form a universe of "Feasibly Recoverable Shipwrecks with Low Intrinsic Risk."

Next, they assessed the extrinsic risks, those that had to do with recovery: Favorable Operational Factors, Positive Site Security, Legal Rights Obtainable. Is the technology available to access that site, can we guarantee site security in that area of the world, and do we have legal protection?

Once they had eliminated all ships but those with low intrinsic and low extrinsic risks, each ship had to pass a final test: Was there anything on board worth recovering?

The Titanic was a hunk of steel seven hundred feet long that would burn a hole through a sonar chart; even if it rested in mountainous territory, they could probably find it, and the abundant historical documentation would help them narrow the search area. But the Titanic presented two insurmountable risks: Her steel hull would be impossible to penetrate even with the technology Tommy saw on the horizon. And if they could get inside, she carried nothing worth recovering; some loose jewelry perhaps, rings and bracelets and necklaces scattered in various small cubicles, but no treasure centrally stored, nothing they could use to make the payoff attractive to investors.

"In terms of financial risk," said Bob, "the Titanic was not a good project."

Other deep-water ships presented similar problems. Myths had arisen around some of them that tons of gold lay stored in secure compartments. But no historical data supported the myths. In 1909, the British White Star luxury liner Republic had gone down fifty miles off Nantucket, and for decades, rumors had circulated that it had taken millions in gold coins with it. But no official records existed. "Sure, there were a lot of rich people on board," said Bob, "but how much was in the purser’s safe? Nobody knows."

The Andrea Doria, an Italian liner hailed by her owners as the "Grande Dame of the Sea," collided with another ship in dense fog in 1956 and also went down just off Nantucket. She was a glistening seven-hundred-foot floating museum of murals, rare wood panels, and ceramics designed by Italian artists, and her passengers also were wealthy, but once again myth about the treasure on board sprouted from rumor with no documentation.

Tommy and Bob were convinced that the San José had carried more than a billion dollars in treasure to the bottom when British warships landed a cannonball in her munitions cache and sank her in 1708. But the San José was off the coast of Colombia in murky, turbulent waters.

After many deep-water shipwrecks were run through the selection process, the sidewheel steamer SS Central America rose to the top in every category. It had sunk in an era of accurate record keeping and reliable navigation instruments. Dozens of witnesses had testified to the sinking, and five ship captains had given coordinates that placed the ship in an area where sediment collected no faster than a centimeter every thousand years. The extrinsic risks looked as favorable: She had a wooden hull, which would be easier to get into, and massive iron works in her steam engines and boilers that would provide a good target for sonar, even if much of the iron had corroded and disappeared. And it was off the coast of the United States, so they wouldn’t have to negotiate with a foreign government and they could more easily provide site security.

One other thing appealed to Tommy and Bob: the ship was American and its treasure symbolized one of the most defining periods in American history, that narrow window running from the California Gold Rush through the Civil War. If they could find it, they would open a time capsule representing an entire nation during a crucial period in its formation.

"The Central America," said Bob, "scored much, much higher than any other project when subjected to this selection process."

And her gold shipment was documented: With gold valued at $20 an ounce in 1857, the publicly reported commercial shipment totaled between $1.210 and $1.6 million. Although many of the Central America’s records, including her cargo manifest, had been destroyed in the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906, some accounts estimated that the gold carried by the passengers at least equaled the commercial shipment. And the Department of the Army recently had confirmed a story approaching myth that had circulated for years: that the Central America carried an official secret shipment of gold destined to shore up the faltering northern industrial economy. The letter, dated April 2, 1971, acknowledged that the information about the shipment had been declassified, and it verified that secreted in her hold the Central America had also carried six hundred fifty-pound bar boxes, or another thirty thousand pounds of gold.

Use of this excerpt from Ship and Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:.

Copyright © 1998 by Gary Kinder. All rights reserved.

Read excerpts from the book:
Thompson's interest in exploration
The Gold Rush
The Search for the S.S. Central America