Fantastic Voyage

By John Skow

A kid working in a print shop in Keokuk, Iowa, is dazzled by a book about exploring the Amazon, by a ship captain named William Lewis Herndon. The kid, who is fizzing with light-out-for-the- territory restlessness, quits his job and hops a steamer for New Orleans, hellbent to board the next boat for the Amazon's mouth. But no boats are headed there, then or later, so young Samuel Clemens is stuck with writing about the Mississippi. There is only the most tenuous and delightful of connections with another kid, in Defiance, Ohio, a century later. This fellow, named Tommy Thompson, is an inspired, perhaps even crazed, tinkerer. He conceives that used frying oil could power engines and rigs a car that actually burns the stuff. He's set for a run across the continent, except that car, driver and passengers drip with sticky oil, and smell like the rear of a trashburger shop. Back to the drawing board.

In fact, it is Captain Herndon, not Mark Twain, who is the link to Tommy Thompson, and Thompson who is the main figure of what is so far the summer's best nonfiction adventure story, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (Atlantic Monthly; 507 pages; $27.50). As author Gary Kinder relates, in 1857, some years after making his exploration and writing his book, Herndon had charge of a large paddle-wheel steamer bound from the Panamanian port city of Aspinwall, now known as Colon, to New York City. The S.S. Central America carried 500 passengers, many of them returning rich with gold dust and nuggets from the California gold rush that still continued. In addition to these private, unregistered stashes, the ship carried an official consignment of gold listed, to the penny, at $1,595,497.13.

The big ship had made several trips to Aspinwall and back, but as Kinder relates, its steam engines leaked water, which sloshed without restraint, because the 300-ft. wooden hull was built without bulkheads. Coal, which was both fuel and ballast, was loaded at New York for the round trip, so with more than half its coal exhausted, the ship rode too high in the water on the return. Storm winds canted the hull sharply. Pumps failed. Water swamped the starboard fires.

For a literary archaeologist, the sinking of the Central America was ideal. Nearly 450 people drowned, but 149 men, women and children were saved, and their accounts of the horror began spreading to the continent's newspapers as soon as rescue ships reached port. Captain Herndon, who went down with his ship, was acclaimed for his heroism, and a memorial was built at Annapolis, Md. As the New York Times wrote afterward, "No story so clear and so appalling has ever before been brought to the firesides of the land."

For an undersea salvager, recovery was a different matter. Herndon's vessel went down 100 miles off the Carolina coast, somewhere in sea at least a mile and a half deep. When Tommy Thompson, by the early 1980s a marine engineer at the elite Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, became interested in undersea mining and salvage, technology for very deep recovery had not progressed much beyond the diving bell. This gadget, first developed in the 17th century, could go deep but do almost no real work.

A professor had asked Tommy in 1973, "How are we going to work in the deep ocean?" Fourteen years later, his answer had produced a 2 1/2 ton submersible "that eventually would grow to six tons, with nine mechanical arms, some having as many as 11 segments," along with video and still cameras, strobes, thrusters, suction picker and collections drawers, all controllable through 8,000 ft. of complex cable. Thompson's driving intellect pushed the technology, and his flatfooted, no-blarney confidence persuaded a consortium of Columbus businessmen to put up very large chunks of money. By the summer of 1987, the submersible was diving in deep water, to a large wooden wreck spotted by the expedition's sonar. Men and machinery worked beautifully, but what they proved was that the wreck was not the Central America.

By September 1989-after years of heroism, obsession, storms, electronic sulks, budget ruptures and challenges in court and at sea-the story was different. Thompson's expedition brought up a large part of the Central America's gold bars, dust and nuggets, valued at nearly $1 billion in 1989 dollars. It wasn't easy money, but it sure is a great story. Kinder tells it in fascinating, exhaustive detail, including the following information: as part of the process of securing rights to a wreck, marine law requires that you file a lawsuit. Against whom--Neptune? Close; you sue the wreck itself. Just lower a lawyer in the submersible's claw, and res gestae, the loot is yours.