A Book Review

~ by H. Glenn Carson

SHIP OF GOLD
IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA

A Review ~ by H. Glenn Carson

nce in a while, something comes along in our everyday, hum-drum lives interesting and important enough to knock us right out of our ruts. That happened to this author a few days ago. I finally got my hands on a book that was printed in 1998 by Atlantic Monthly Press. The book slipped unnoticed beneath my radar screens for almost five years, and I can’t tell you how that happened. I like to keep up with things in the treasure field but this one frankly escaped my notice. So I am doing something I seldom, if ever, do:

I’m telling my treasure-hunting friends about an excellent book.

Yes, I am writing a book report—it makes me feel like a seventh grader handing in my past-due scribbles to a prim and proper English teacher.

he central figure of the book is Tommy Thompson. Tommy grew up in Defiance, Ohio, a kid more interested in tearing things apart to see what made them work than he was in reading or any other part of school. It’s interesting that Tommy usually put those things he tore apart back together again. He thrived on hands-on sorts of things, and his reading abilities soared when he discovered he could read Popular Mechanics and science journals.

This interest and ability in finding out how things work — and then making them work in new ways — got Tommy through High School and into the engineering school at Ohio State University. Ohio State has fifteen engineering departments and graduate schools, in which eight thousand or so students are enrolled. Tommy actually wanted to be an inventor. The problem is there are no schools for wannabe inventors.

Fine. Tommy headed in the direction he wanted to go anyway. He entered Ohio State’s mechanical engineering school. He became determined to be an ocean engineer and soon realized that he was the only one at Ohio State heading out to sea. Fortunately for Tommy, enrolled in land-locked Ohio State, his advisor was Dan Glower, the dean of mechanical engineering.

Dan, almost from the first, saw in Tommy the makings of an imaginative machine designer. He recognized a person who had both the social curiosity and the desire to make things work. He explained to Tommy that he was choosing to work in an extremely hostile environment.

The ocean is a wet, corrosive, heavy, and hostile work place.

an Glower and Tommy worked out a major in mechanical engineering that emphasized machine design and included an ocean engineering option. It was a five year program that exposed Tommy to microbiology, corrosive sciences, and marine geology, all knowledge anybody wanted to work in the ocean needed to know about. There were special studies projects that had Tommy involved in solar energy, the development of a fly-wheel car, and pseudo-plastic.

While all this was going on, Glower talked to Tommy about entrepreneurial activity and the benefits of putting things together in new and different ways to meet developing challenges. By Tommy’s third year he spent increasing amounts of time in Advanced Topics, where he and Glower talked about mostly ocean engineering.

Good stuff for a kid who did not want to build equipment already on store shelves, who wanted to see what others had already done and go sailing on beyond it. It was a time for mastering tough disciplines, working out new answers to old questions, and developing Tommy’s way of looking at things in a different way.

More and more as Tommy’s schooling neared its end, the main line of thought became, “How do we work in the deep ocean?” It was a significant question, for nobody had actually done much to answer such a question.

o matter how productive, how interesting, or how beneficial, time in college comes to an end, and it did for Tommy Thompson. Dan Glower warned him that jobs in ocean engineering were scarce, and also that he might seek openings with treasure hunters in and around the Key West area. It was not surprising that Tommy made his way to Key West, and soon made contact with Mel Fisher. Mel had been hunting hit or miss for years, mostly miss, and had no money when Tommy met him. They did talk, and Tommy eventually spent a good amount of time with Mel’s operations through the summer of 1976.

Tommy soon knew that he did not like the helter skelter manner in which everyone was hunting shallow wrecks, even though Mel’s system seemed to be a little better than most others. There was poor record keeping, nobody really knew what sites had or had not been hunted, or how well they had been hunted. Tommy saw the need for better planning, good grid search areas, and better evaluation for what had and had not been accomplished.

Tommy Thompson’s life — or even a 507-page book about his life — cannot be covered in a short magazine article. This fellow had some impressive accomplishments before he ever started to go after the gold on the SS Central America.

e met John Doering, a treasure hunter working with Seaborne Ventures. They had in mind going after the Silver Shoals treasure but money problems held them back for a time. Tommy saw in them a better-run organization than most, but still treasure hunters without a solid plan. The group gave up on the Silver Shoals project when they heard that Burt Webber had signed an agreement with the Dominican Republic and was already bringing up huge amounts of silver. Seaborne Ventures were out of money anyway, and abandoned the Silver Shoals idea. Tommy was glad he had not gotten involved with them.

He was invited, shortly after this, to become a member of the Battelle Memorial Institute. This is a prestigious organization that existed above all to make discoveries and inventions. Just the sort of thing Tommy Thompson was all about. The group’s head man recognized in Thompson a most capable person, but feared that he would not stay in the group as long as five years.

ne of the things Tommy spent much time and effort on while working with Battelle, was the feasibility of mining the deep ocean. He spent twelve hour days doing this, and often entire weekends, but at night he was by then thinking of ships lost in the deep ocean. He also thought more about robots that could work and great depths, realizing that at the time there were less than a dozen such constructs and that none of them worked very well.

In these years of traveling and huge time spent talking over the phone to a diverse array of scientists, engineers, and oceanographers, Tommy was building a large pool of expertise he soon would call on.

One such man was Mike Williamson, who had developed the undersea sonar system, the SeaMARC. Tommy saw how helpful it would be in locating wrecked ships, but the tool carried more than a million dollar price tag and Williamson had a stated policy of never working with treasure hunters. Of course he had never run into anybody like Tommy Thompson.

y the fall of 1983, Tommy was devoting much time to studying several deep water shipwrecks. The Republic, the Titanic, the Andrea Dorea, and the San Jose. He included the sidewheel steamer named the SS Central America, even though, at the time, many treasure hunters thought that ship had gone down in more shallow waters near the Carolinas than it actually had. Tommy by then did not believe that idea.

Gradually the list was shortened.

• The Titanic had a thick steel hull, could be easily pinpointed, but getting inside the wreck would be both dangerous and expensive.

• The San Jose lay in turbulent waters off Columbia. With perhaps a billion dollars aboard, there still were no records to back up that belief.

• The Andrea Dorea was a magnificent wreck, with rumors of vast wealth aboard her, but the rumors were undocumented.

• The Republic had sunk fifty miles off Nantucket, but even though it was believed that millions in gold coins were aboard the ship, again there was no proof.

• With the SS Central America, there was all sorts of proof. It was known that only the commercial, listed gold aboard was worth at $20 per ounce between $1.21 and $1.6 million dollars. That did not count the gold carried by passengers, or the gold thought to have been placed aboard by the army.

s time passed, and Tommy came closer to putting together an actual project to seek and recover the gold aboard the SS Central America, he began to see ever more clearly, the need to put together different groups for solving the different problems soon to be created by working on such a monumental project. He already had obtained the help and ideas of several people in simply reaching the idea of going after the gold aboard the wrecked ship, once other possibilities were considered and then rejected.

The need for heavy and careful research had already come, and such work had to continue. There was an obvious need to create a group capable of seeking and obtaining funding for the project, for such a project would demand far more money than the little those already involved had.

Tommy knew that a legal group would have to be put together, for what they were trying to do surely would end up in the courts. He also realized he would face stiff competition from others. Very likely others were also interested in the SS Central America, maybe even doing research on it, and others would try to horn in once the project got underway. With success would come the need to have people capable of evaluating, pricing, and helping in the sale and disposition of any valuables.

t was all somewhat mind-boggling, but still, the project began to take form.

The group working with Tommy on the Central America project grew gradually larger. What could be called the research group gathered increasing amounts of materials. There were newspaper columns from San Francisco, where the load was gathered and shipped. Accounts from Panama were found. There were letters from people and companies, about the ships and the people involved. Details of the stop in Cuba were added to the total information. Every detail they could find about the hurricane that sent the ship to the bottom were sought out. Reports of the event from Norfolk, New York and everywhere else, were gathered and compared.

It was a mountainous task, and it began to show a much clearer picture of the disaster. Bob Evans, a critical member of the research group, began a Data Correlation Matrix on a wall. 59 survivors and captains had given their stories to the press in 1857. The names of these people ran across the top of this spreadsheet, four names to a page. It became a spreadsheet twelve feet wide and twelve feet high.

You can begin to see why most important names and incidents cannot be crammed into this short article. The book, of course, covers every detail in a complete and interesting manner.

he need for money to make it all go was getting greater, so a group of men capable of attracting investors and working out tough details was created. It is worth noting that this group eventually had to go to investors, all from the Columbus, Ohio area, several times. It was not an easy sell, that of going after a ship sunk in over 8,000 feet of water, and doing something that had certainly never been done before.

Still, the investment offers were made in three parts: the seed phase, the search phase, and the recovery phase.

For the seed phase, they set 10% of the project, and collected $200,000. For the second part, the search phase, they raised $1.4 million, and set aside 25%. For the recovery phase they set aside 25%, to raise $3.6 million. The remaining 40% was held aside for Tommy and his associates.

The first offer was made in March of 1985. The project started much earlier than that, but that was when it officially began.

There were hang-ups, especially when the advice of experts was sought. Two “experts” met with Tommy and took more than two hours telling him what he hoped to do could not be done. Nevertheless Tommy had thirty-eight partners and $200,000 in seed money within the first three months. With that, he had to seek out a vessel, line up the SeaMARC sonar system, and then come back to the investors for the search money.

he search phase was filled with hectic events. Knowing the precise spot where the SS Central America went down was vital. Research gave them an area, but it was to vaguely wide. There was some astonishing work done with probability variables, and putting all criteria together, they at last arrived at what they thought to be the best possible search area small enough to fit into the limited time they could use the SeaMARC sonar system. This was done, and they came up with several possible sites on their graphs.

Work was begun on one site, enough so they put the legal team into action. Other groups were beginning to be a threat to their activities, and Tommy believed that some of them could already be far along in their efforts. They had to recover at least one artifact to put a claim on the site, thus preventing others from horning in on their project.

he book does an incredible job in presenting the frustrations of this search phase:

• How much work was done on the wrong site.

• How a marginal place on their sonar graphs turned out to be the actual site.

• The actual recovery phase, with its problems of raising enough money to continue the recovery attempt.

• The almost piratical competition that showed its ugly face

• The need to bring up at least one artifact that would demonstrate that Tommy’s group had a right to gain salvage rights to the site

• The development of a robot capable of working at such great depths.

Frustrations? Hardly a fitting word — this level of suspense and high intrigue makes for some excellent reading!

hip of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea is a book any treasure hunter — involved in water hunting or not — will find interesting and useful. If ever there was an explanation of how divergent talents and expertise can combine and produce satisfactory conclusions, this book gives it.

This project was long, difficult, often frustrating ... but the group stuck with it. They brought up one of the largest, most superb caches of treasure ever … an accomplishment that will prove to be difficult to improve upon.

It was not even easy to keep any of the treasure, once they began to recover it. When they docked in Norfolk with the first load of gold, there were 28 insurance company representatives, all ready with papers to serve, demanding whatever treasure there was. That a court eventually gave Tommy’s group 92.2% of all the insured gold, and a hundred percent of all other gold found on the site, speaks well for the many people working hard with Tommy on the project.

rom 1986 until 1992, the group’s personnel logged over 400,000 hours, mostly working 12 hour shifts. The cost of the project was about $8.5 million. Even so, investors were rewarded at about 100 to 1 for their investment.

There were about three tons of commercial gold, about the same amount of gold carried by miners and other individuals, and some fifteen tons stored aboard the ship by the army. Much of the salvaged coinage was rare and pristine, worth huge numismatic premiums. It is a surprise to this author that more attention has not been given the project and the well-done book that tells its story so well.

This story is nothing less than phenomenal — a magnificent
journey of invention, dedication, and inspiration.

The book was priced at $27.50, and it was worth every cent of that. It is a marvelous study of well-done treasure hunting. Carson Enterprises, PO Box 716, Dona Ana, NM 88032, has a limited supply of these hard backed books, and offers them, first-come, first-served — at $16.97 until the supply is exhausted.

What A Story! Rich history, modern invention, rivalry, court shenanigans,
secrecy, drive… and a LOT of gold. Highly recommended to all,
but ESPECIALLY LOVERS OF TRUE ADVENTURE.

Please feel free to send this E-Book to a friend.
The book is found at the WaybillToAdventure.com Book Store, at:
http://www.1stopbizshoppe.com/catalog.php?catalog=TOP+00000_SHIP

The download link for this E-Book is:
www.waybilltoadventure.com/printbooks/
23_water/Ship_of_Gold/Carson_Review.pdf

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BONANZA SEEKERS HANDBOOK

A thorough study of the complex effort to seek and recover larger caches of treasure, this book should assist your own search efforts. Recognize good leads, how to develop them, how to pursue and recover caches discretely, and how to use your new wealth without wrecking your life.