Deep Sea Treasure Hunters

June 22, 1998

Commercial ('Deep-Sea') Diving School started in Charleston, South Carolina Charleston is now the home to a full-fledged commercial diving school (International Diving Institute). It offers a wide range of courses including some for shipwreck research, search, and salvage It is located on the waterfront at the old Charleston Navy base. Often such deep-sea finds come from companies in the business of trolling the seas for sunken treasures. Salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration has discovered several notable shipwrecks.

BOOKS OF THE TIMES / By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

'Ship of Gold': A Treasure Tale Tempered by Science

SHIP OF GOLD IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA
By Gary Kinder. Illustrated with frontispiece. 507 pages. The
Atlantic Monthly Press. $27.50.

he moment you start reading Gary Kinder's spellbinding story of a suboceanic treasure hunt, 'Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea,' you know that the searchers are eventually going to hit it very big. The narrative begins with the discovery in January 1848 of the gold nugget at John Sutter's sawmill that brought on the California Gold Rush.

From there the story jumps to September 1857 and the journey from Panama to New York of the Central America, a side-wheel steamer carrying nearly 600 passengers returning from the Gold Rush and some 21 tons of California gold worth at the time more than $13 million. Two days after a stopover in Havana, the ship ran into what was described at the time as a storm 'of almost unprecedented fury and violence' and eventually sank.

Drawing on the extensive testimony of eyewitnesses and survivors, Kinder ('Victim: The Other Side of Murder' and 'Light Years: An Investigation of the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier') has reconstructed the sinking of the Central America in harrowing and often poignant detail. But you read these chapters a little impatiently. You itch to get on with the treasure hunt. There's been enough of sinking ships and killer vortexes and floating corpses in this season of Leonardo DiCaprio.

In any case, the narrative picks up pace as the scene shifts to the town of Defiance, Ohio, in the 1960s, and you meet Tommy Thompson, a young genius who wants to know how everything works and who once drove his car cross-country powered with used french-fry oil.

Following wherever his insatiable curiosity takes him, Thompson ends up in the business of salvaging sunken treasure ships, not so much for the sake of fortune hunting as a way of financing the scientific exploration of the ocean floor. Breaking down the problems of deep-sea salvage systematically, he determines the best approach to be the use of an unmanned, remote-control vehicle. Rating the most feasible wrecks on a scale of risks, he and his team arrive at the Central America as their target.

As Kinder writes: 'It had sunk in an era of accurate record keeping and reliable navigation instruments. Dozens of witnesses had testified to the sinking, and five ship captains had given coordinates that placed the ship in an area where sediment collected no faster than a centimeter every thousand years. The extrinsic risks looked as favorable: she had a wooden hull, which would be easier to get into, and massive ironworks in her steam engine and boilers that would provide a good target for sonar, even if much of the iron had corroded and disappeared. And it was off the coast of the United States, so they wouldn't have to negotiate with a foreign government and they could more easily provide site security.'

Finally, if they could find the wreck, 'they would open a time capsule representing an entire nation during a crucial period in its formation.'

Once Thompson wins financial backing and gets to work, the fascination of the story lies less in whether he is going to succeed and more in the genius of his approach. For instance, to determine where to search with the advanced sonar device he has leased, he and his team prepare what they called a probability map based on the ship's last known position, variously reported at the time of the sinking. One of these coordinates seems to make no sense. By going to the historical record and cleverly inferring one man's behavior during the catastrophe, the team is able to resolve the anomaly.

Once the search begins and a site is found that seems to be the Central America, some members of the team insist that there is no point in looking further. But Thompson, arguing that they have succumbed to treasure-hunt fever, demands that the search go on and that in the interest of scientific discipline all high-probability sectors be scanned. It is a good thing that he persists, for as it turns out, they are still a long way from hitting pay dirt.

Yet when competing hunters threaten to poach on sites that Thompson has discovered, he is able to improvise brilliantly and to snatch almost from under his rivals' noses what some consider the greatest sunken treasure ever found.

That Thompson stressed scientific discovery over fortune is one of the main points of 'Ship of Gold.' As Kinder concludes: 'Since 1989, he has used his new technology to provide an opportunity never before available to science: data, specimens, photographs, film and on-site time at sea observing and experimenting in the deep ocean for over 150 scientists, researchers and educators in the United States, Canada, Germany, Monaco, England and New Zealand. They are corrosion experts, underwater archeologists, marine biologists, marine geologists, ocean chemists, ocean physicists, material scientists, bacteriologists, fisheries scientists and maritime historians. The scientists have been identifying life forms, determining life cycles, evaluating data and providing insight.'

This is certainly good news, but it is finally not what draws you on through Kinder's pages and prompts you to forgive his occasionally clunky prose and his curious omission of pictorial material. Succumbing like Thompson's subordinates to treasure-hunt fever, what you hunger for is the glitter of the payoff, which you get not only as information but also in the author's striking word-portrait of a scene glimpsed through a camera eye two miles below the sea's surface.

'Like deep-ocean sentries, sea creatures guarded the treasure: gorgonian corals, feathery and white, stood erect above the gold; brisingid sea stars, a brilliant pink-orange, sprawled across piles of yellow bricks or perched atop a single bar, their arms drooped possessively; red anemones, their tentacles splayed, stuck to ledges and inside crevices spilling with coins and bars. The scene was live, yet seemed forever like a photograph: piles of gold, much of it yellow as the night it went down, surrounded by the neighbors it had known since that night in 1857.'

And no one risked getting the bends or rapture of the deep.

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Deep Sea Treasure Hunters By Ramona Rivera

According to archaeologists and scholars, we investigated only less 5 percent underwater worlds. This means that at the bottom of our seas lie sunken treasures, boats, whole cities built a century ago and, above all, the substance of which we didn’t even know existed. Therefore, the sea around the world is still full of mysteries, as well as a space where alien life forms might be lurking in areas that we have not yet managed to explore.

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Usually its the most can be found in the sea. Not at the seaside and in the truest sense of the large deep blue ocean. Experts found that almost all of the pyramids, in Bermuda in Kailash in Tibet, A team of scientists using deep water work exploring the ocean floor, treasure of lost ships – boats that have sank with treasure.

was discovered in the year 1900 pearls seekers. The mechanism has been extracted from the remains of the shipwreck in Greece. This is one of the strangest and most amazing things ever to be raised from the bottom of the sea, because the mechanism was presumably built in the second century BC. Another reason is that many consider him to be the world’s oldest computer, due to the fact that the device was expected to schedule the movement of planets and the passage of years. However, the use of or the actual function of the device remains unclear. He was named the world’s first computer only due to the complexity of its design.

The existence of the ancient Egyptian ruler Cleopatra in Alexandria, has eluded many. In 1998 year, archeologists have finally discovered the part of the world, which was lost for civilization for 1600 years. The remains are on our list of strange finds, as was proposed by the project of the Museum of the city of Cleopatra, which will become the world’s first underwater Museum to ensure that the public can see it intact.

From Sphinxes and temples and statues to parts of the Palace, which is presumed to be scientists, belonged to the Cleopatra, a large part of the city is surprisingly well preserved and is in almost perfect condition. The United Nations insists that the city remained underwater on the spot to save his place in history. That is why in the development plan is a special Museum beneath the Bay of Alexandria. It will include the construction of tunnels at the Museum for tourists to see the city and its remains.