SHIP OF GOLD
SHIP OF GOLD In 1857, the SS Central America,
a side-wheel steamer ferrying passengers fresh from the California gold
rush to
New York and laden with 21 tons
of gold, encountered a severe storm off the Carolina coast and sank, carrying
more than 400 passengers and all
of her cargo with her. "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea," by Gary Kinder,
tells how the Columbus-America Discovery
Group, led by maverick scientist and entrepreneur Tommy Thompson,
recovered the ship and salvaged some
billion dollars in gold. Kinder's painstaking research also surfaced the
harrowing story of the ship's sinking.
In an interview with Amazon.com, he recounted the heroism of
the worst peacetime disaster at
sea in American history.
******
From an interview with Gary Kinder
Her finest hour was when that ship
went down. To have 600 people cooperate as the ship is sinking beneath
them
at night, for several nights,
and knowing it's sinking and not only are you going to lose all of what
you've worked so
hard for the last four or five
years to pull out of the ground in California, but you're liable to lose
your life. And, oh
you've got children or you have
a wife here or you're worried about your husband. All these people--somehow
Captain William Herndon was able
to keep them working together for a common good. And if it had not been
for
his personality, that ship would
have sunk about Friday night or some time early Saturday morning. And all
the
women and children would have
perished, and everybody else that was on the ship.
As it turns out, every bucket that
they got off that ship gave them another second of time, and that probably
is
fairly accurate--one second per
bucket of water. They had 500 men bailing on this ship. Big buckets, that's
all they
were; down in the hold, they'd
just pass them up and dump them overboard and [hand them back down]. But
they
kept that ship afloat long enough
for that other beat-up old two-masted brig to come along. I don't know
of any
other attempted rescue more dramatic
than that one.
The Central America may have been
as big a story to people in the 1880s and 1890s as the Titanic is to us.
I remember going to see one of
the first Titanic movies when I was probably 8 or 9 years old, watching
my aunt
and my mother cry and cry. David
Niven was one of the main characters. There was the character who dressed
up like a woman and put a shawl
over his head and was able to get into one of the lifeboats, I remember
that.
There was a little boy left on
the deck as the lifeboats were lowered and that kind of stuff; he was going
to stay
with his father. I remember all
that. And I think it was just the last year or two that the final survivor
died. So we
had all these survivors still
alive for years and years and years. Plus, it was the biggest ship ...
I think it was the
biggest ship ever built. Biggest
non-wartime ship. And maybe it was the biggest ship,period. What was it,
700 feet
long? That it was built to be
*the* finest, *the* biggest, *the* best and most technologically advanced.
The Central America was a big ship,
too. It was one of the biggest of its day and almost 300 feet, and it was
beautiful--a beautiful old ship
with the big side wheels on her and all that.... The side-wheel steamer
was the
precursor to the luxury liners
like the Titanic. There were more people involved. There were 2,000 on
the
Titanic, I'd guess, and 1,500 perished.
And we had about 600 and about 428, I think, of those died. But again,
the Titanic was British and ours was
American. I was talking to my agent the other day, and he told me about
[the film] "Titanic," and I was just devastated!
And I said, "That's our whole story! The love story, the treasure
hunting, the ship sinking, and all this. But
ours is so much better!"