Ship of Gold sails into Toronto
Ten years is a long time to write a dive story. But when there is a billion dollars in gold the line you know the book is going to be good.
Random House has just published a number-one-with-a-bullet book about a high stakes deep water expedition. In Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, author Gary Kinder plunges readers 8,000 feet down to the bottom of the Atlantic as American engineer/inventor Tommy Thompson looks for the Central America and her long lost billion dollar cargo of California Gold Rush bullion.
Gary Kinder spent a decade patiently constructing
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. A lawyer by training, his all
-encompassing work is best read out loud. Highly graphic, Kinder writes as 
though he is scripting a final, do-or-die argument to a sceptical jury. Every fact is hidden inside the gem of a yarn. Each character (and there are almost a hundred of them), be it a young mother fighting to keep her tiny baby's head above the frothing waters off the South Carolina coast or coin expert James Lamb numb in shock as he holds a bar of gold worth $250,000 US, comes vividly alive.
Before Kinder permits readers to get to the juicy bits about rival salvagers playing high seas chicken over Central America's sunken remains he details the history of the California Gold Rush. Critical to the tale is how booty rich miners struggled to find passage (boats were scarce because crews abandon ship in California to hunt for gold!) to carry them from the Pacific West Coast to Panama. After walking across the isthmus, the customers and their cargo would board a second ship bound for New York.
In September 1857 close to 600 passengers, most of them weighted down heavily with gold, boarded the Central America, a three masted side wheel paddle ship. Only six years old, she offered a comfortable safe passage back to New Yorkexcept when hurricanes were blowing.
The ship was lost in a big blow but before the Central America sank the women and children took the lifeboats to reach a nearby freighter. Gold is a dense metal; the male passengers left millions on deck rather than let it weigh them down as they plunged into the cold water. Over four hundred lives and at least twenty-one tons (including a huge government bullion shipment) of California gold were lost.
Flash forward a hundred and some years and meet Tommy Thompson. He is a quirky young inventor who, after work ing for an inept gold hunter named Mel Fisher, realised that there is a better way to find treasure. In following his dream, Tommy, like most wreck hunters, sacrificed it all to chase his sunken holy grail. He assembled a team of men in 1985 to create the technologies needed to find the Central America and remove her deep water treasure.
Their problems were legion. Equipment malfunctioned, bad weather was always a factor and for the better part of a year competitors tried to encroach on their survey area. They dogged his every move, there was even an expensive court room fight over salvage rights of what turned out to be the wrong wreck. It took two years and thousands of hours of underwater surveying to find the gold and another eight years to battle insurance companies, the government and other treasure hunters for ownership of the billion dollar booty.
One member of Tommy's crew was a journalist who has worked for a number of Florida newspapers. Even though he was able to write the story about the quest for gold, the job was handed over to Kinder. The California author, speaking to DIVER Magazine, talked about the reason for why he was chosen.
"I think everyone involved in the project were just too close to the story to be able to write the book," said Kinder. "Even though I started this book well into Tommy's hunt for the gold, I didn't miss (all the action). I was on the dock when he came into the dock and there were 39 lawyers waiting to serve him with papers. It took seven years to work through (the lawsuits) and Tommy won almost every one of themI was there for it all!"
A man's got to do what a man's got to do, but it would be nice if book publishers did their part too. Shipwreck hunting is a mixture of high tech hunting, archival research and blind luck. For the fans of the science, bibliographies, maps, and charts are greatly appreciatedneither author documents his sources or includes a bibliography.
Kinder told DIVER Magazine that his book is already going into a second printing. "I am urging (the publisher) to use the blank pages at the back for a map showing where Tommy found his ship."
When Kinder is interviewed on TV he shows footage of what a billion dollars worth of sunken gold looks like. Unfortunately there are no plans to add pictures; readers will have to satisfy themselves with three small colour images on the sleeve.
New for Underwater Canada
He's Back! Doug Rosser, once the driving force behind the Ontario Underwater Council and it's Underwater Canada has been hired back to help the nation's largest volunteer scuba association strengthen its relationship with the Canadian dive industry.
Rosser, once the executive director of the OUC (1978-1990), left the association eight years ago to take a position with the Ontario Sports and Recreation Service. Although formerly not involved with the OUC he has always been an active volunteer with the council's annual dive show.
As well in 1986, together with Jack Bohmrich and Brian Dumont, he co-founded SEMAC the Scuba Equipment and Apparel Manufacturers Association of Canada.
Rosser and his partner Sue Munro (also a longtime OUC volunteer) operate the consulting firm Rosser, Munro and Associates, providing contracted management services to a large number of not-for-profit organisations. He also serves as the Director of Operations for Toronto 2000, the organisation responsible for managing Toronto's millennium celebrations.
"The OUC is very excited that we were able to contract with Mr. Rosser to provide his leadership and vision to activities which involved both the Council and our Underwater Canada Show," said Beth Cornwell, the President of the Ontario Underwater Council. "These are very challenging times for our sport across the country and the OUC wants to develop stronger partnerships with all sectors of the industry including dive retailers, equipment manufacturers and distributors, training agencies and the dive travel industry."
TAM AND THE KIDS
It is one thing to read Jules Verne's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , but it is another to actually have a hands-on look at dive equipment. A Toronto Board of Education reading group took time out from their studies earlier this summer to visit the downtown TAM dive shop. Mark Stanfield not only showed the students how to give a modern scuba tank a visual inspection, he let them try on some historic scuba gear as well to better understand the undersea adventure books that they were reading!