| NOTE: This audio book is no longer available = out-of-publication. Now that you are here, we hope you look around. We have 1000s of audio books and would be glad to order any available audiobook you don't see here. We look forward to serving you. This audio book may be available from us in another version, on another format or as a digital - download. Written by Gary Kinder - audio book narrated by Bruce Davison - Abridged Nonfiction - 4 CASSETTES - 5 hours Publisher, Random House Audiobooks (1998) "The Central America was as sensational a shipwreck in its century as the Titanic was in ours." --The Washington Post Bestselling author Gary Kinder tells, for the first time, an extraordinary tale of history, maritime drama, heroic rescue, scientific ingenuity, and individual courage. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea is the riveting true account of death, danger, and discovery on the high seas in the dramatic search for America's greatest lost treasure. In September 1857, the side-wheel streamer S.S. Central America, carrying five hundred passengers and tons of gold from the mountains of California, sank in a hurricane off the Carolina coast. Lost in legend for more than a century, the tragic story resurfaced in 1989, when Tommy Thompson, a brilliant ocean engineer, sailed into Norfolk harbor with more than ten tons of pioneer old. Using a combination of oceanography, computer science, and information theory to sift through historical records and penetrate the deep sea, Thompson's team had recovered the mint-state coins, antique bars, and sparkling gold dust from 8,000 feet below the surface of the sea - proving wrong everyone who said it couldn't be done and establishing mankind's first read working presence on the deep ocean floor. It was, as Life magazine proclaimed "The greatest treasure ever found," and its dollar value has currently been estimated in the hundreds of millions. This audiobook is a copiously historical record of the disaster, rendered in chilling detail with diaries from the survivors and eyewitness accounts, as well as newspaper reports from the worst peacetime at-sea disaster in American history. It is a chronicle of the technological breakthrough in which deep-sea robots were developed to perform complex work. Ant it is an incredibly exciting adventure story of how a team of scientists and engineers, the Columbus-America Discovery Group, battled massive storms, technological challenges, and intrusive salvages on the open seas to find the lost treasure. It is a fascinating story both of the power of the human will to succeed and of technological triumph. "The Central America was as sensational a shipwreck in its century as the Titanic was in ours. The loss of the gold it was carrying, historians have noted, was a significant contributing factor to the panic of 1857, one of America's major economic depressions of the 1800s. Its deep, remote location, however, discouraged even elementary search and salvage efforts until about five years ago when a series of computer-sparred breakthroughs in ocean engineering technology made such deep-sea exploration economically feasible for those outside the government." --The Washington Post Author Biography: Gary Kinder is the bestselling author of Victim and Light Years. He has been researching this story since 1987. He lives in Seattle. About the reader: Bruce Davison is well know for his reoccurring character on Seinfeld, as well as his film appearances in Longtime Companion, Short Cuts, and Six Degrees of Separation. He also appeared on stage in How I Learned to Drive. |
