This nonfiction book is a fascinating account of the 1857 sinking of the SS Central America and the recovery of her treasures from the deep sea during the 1980’s. It’s an adventure story and history, but it’s also an inspirational look at a talented engineer and scientist, Tommy Thompson, whose ingenuity, persistence, integrity, and vision made the recovery possible.

In 1857 the SS Central America was carrying more than 500 passengers back from the gold fields of California. It was also carrying gold, shipments from the new San Francisco Mint and the gold that the passengers were bringing back in triumph from their adventures during the California Gold Rush. Many of the passengers were miners, now former miners, returning home. As they sailed up the east coast of the United States, the ship encountered stormy weather that blew them off course and eventually sunk the ship with most of the men still on board. (The women and children were all saved.) All that gold ended up at the bottom of the sea.

More than 100 years later, a kid in his early thirties named Tommy Thompson had a vision for exploring in the deep ocean where no one had really been able to explore or work before. He was a guy with lots of ideas, and he had the intelligence, the engineering ability and education, and the persistence and attention to detail to follow through on some of those big ideas and make them a reality. Finding the SS Central America and her treasure while also exploring the ocean at depths that had never been seen before was one of Thompson’s many dreams.

The book tells about the sinking of the Central America and about the individual stories of the survivors. Then, it turns to the story of how Tommy Thompson goes about finding the funding from investors, finding the cutting-edge engineering that he needs to search for and recover the treasure, and finally finding the ship. It takes years to do it, but after much hard work and millions of dollars spent, Thompson is able to not only find the Central America and its gold but also to establish a working presence in the deep ocean more than 200 miles offshore in order to recover the ship’s artifacts piece by piece.

I was so impressed with Mr. Thompson’s hard work and dedication. So I did what anyone might do: I looked him up on the internet to see what wonderful things he was doing now. (The events in the book took place in the 1980’s, and the book was published in 1998.) Whoops. It’s still a good book, but “the rest of the story” is sad, bad, and disillusioning. It looks as if the treasure turned Mr. Thompson’s life upside down, not in good ways. I was prepared to find him doing great things after I read the book, but instead I was saddened by the events subsequent to the book’s ending in 1989. You can read more about Thompson’s downfall here.

Or just read the book and stay off the internet to maintain your illusions. It’s probably what I should have done. (Not that the book is inaccurate, just incomplete.)