The Gold Rush is OnEvery newspaper in the East ran articles about the ease of finding gold in California. How-to books, like the Emigrant's Guide to the Gold Mines, described vast riverbeds "paved with gold to the thickness of a hand," and claimed that "twenty to fifty thousand dollars of gold" could be "picked out almost instantly." Lectures on gold mining drew enormous crowds, and the lecturers added their own hyperbole: that miners in California were finding up to four pounds of gold, or a thousand dollars a day, that one man had found thirty-six pounds in one day, that not even a hundred thousand men could exhaust all of the gold in California if they worked hard at it for ten years.
"In a moment, as it were," wrote the editor of the Hartford Daily Courant, "a desert country that never deserved much notice from the world has become the centre of universal attraction. Fifteen millions have already come into the possession of somebody and all creation is going out there to fill their pockets."
But all creation had only two ways to get to the new territory: They could walk or they could sail. Those choosing to walk would have to wait until April, for between them and California stood the Rocky Mountains, and winter in those mountains first killed the grass, then buried it under feet of snow. Without feed, the pack animals would die.
The impatient ones sailed, but now they had to decide: around Cape Horn or across Panama. The route via Cape Horn was a four- to eight-month journey of thirteen thousand nautical miles that promised the most terrifying storms a landlubber could conjure. In 1833, Charles Darwin described the Horn in his diary: "The sight," he wrote, "is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck." Waves eighty to ninety feet tall, the Horn's infamous "greybeards," swept across the ocean at thirty knots and battered ships already encrusted in ice. Spars snapped, sails shredded, and men washed overboard to freeze and drown in an icy sea.
The route across Panama far exceeded the other two for speed and convenience, and the ways to die were less dramatic. The first leg, New York to Panama, took but nine days with a short layover in Havana. Once the passengers arrived, the journey across the isthmus was more vexing than life threatening. Ahead of them were five days in a dugout canoe, on the back of an unpredictable mule, and atop their own sore feet. The trip exposed them to tropical heat, outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and yellow fever, and coffee sweetened by natives chewing sugar cane and spitting into the cup. Then they arrived in the three-hundred-year-old city of Panama, which one American described as a "dirty, noisy, and unpleasant place to stay in." The sun was too hot, the water too noxious to drink, and the native lemonade too "sloppy" to swallow. Here they waited on the docks until a vessel could ferry them up the west coast to San Francisco.
When the California steamed into the Bay of Panama for a brief layover and to take on more coal, her captain looked out upon the docks and saw mountains of old trunks, dirty bedding, rucksacks, ropes, tents, pots, pans, utensils, spades, and pickaxes. The stories of gold in the far reaches of the Union had incited riots at the steamship offices back east. Already, the first Atlantic steamer had arrived on the Caribbean side of Panama filled with passengers. Two days later a bark arrived carrying another sixty. By the middle of January, five other ships had off-loaded more passengers to begin the trek upriver and over the mountains to Panama City.
The California had room for 200 passengers, but over 500 waited at the docks. The captain ordered lumber, built berths in the ship's open spaces, and left Panama two weeks later with 365 passengers and 36 crew "crammed into the ship and overflowing onto the deck and the housetops." But by then, a total of four steamers, two barks, three brigs, and a schooner had deposited 726 passengers on the opposite shore to make their way to the Pacific side, and more were coming in daily on vessels embarking from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.
The Voyage
[On August 20, 1857, the side-wheel steamer SS Sonora departed San Francisco bound for Panama with six hundred passengers and crew and a consigned gold shipment worth $1,595,497.13. In quantities rivaling her consigned shipment of gold, unregistered gold traveled aboard her in the carpetbags and money belts of her passengers. Deep in her hold the Sonora also carried a secret shipment of U.S. government gold: 600 fifty-pound bar boxes, or another 30,000 pounds of gold.
On board the Sonora were a number of prominent Californians, including James Birch, who established the first transcontinental stagecoach route, connecting east with west; the famous minstrel and actor, Billy Birch, and his wife of one day, Virginia; Judge Alonzo Castle Monson, who presided over Sacramento County; and Ansel and Adaline Mills Easton, who married the morning the Sonora set sail. Ansel had made a fortune as a forty-niner, selling furnishings to the steamship lines. Adaline's brother was one of the richest men in the state and later founded the Bank of California.
After fourteen days on the Sonora and a forty-eight-mile trip by rail across Panama, all passengers and cargo were transferred to the Atlantic steamer, SS Central America, for the final nine days to New York with an overnight stop in Havana. The Central America was one of two fortnightly luxury steamers traveling between New York and Panama. The captain of the ship, William Lewis Herndon, was a naval officer, internationally renowned as the first American to explore the Amazon Valley.
On Tuesday September 8, 1857, the Central America departed Havana. By Thursday they were in the middle of what the contemporary editor of the Charleston Daily Courier described as a storm "of almost unprecedented fury and violence." The ship battled hurricane-force winds and thirty-five foot seas, and water leaked into her hold, cooling her steam engines. By Friday the engines had died, the paddle wheels had ceased to turn, and the Central America had fallen into the trough of the sea.
As the sixty women and children huddled in the saloon, five hundred men bailed, but the water gained on them until they could hear it rolling in the cabins just below the main deck. In one of the most daring rescues ever at sea, Captain Herndon swung all of the women and children off the weather deck into lifeboats manned by his crewmen, who rowed through the storm to a crippled bark which had happened upon the sinking steamer.
At nightfall, with Captain Herndon standing on the bridge, the Central America sank, creating a vortex, sucking under three hundred men, including Herndon. The rest, exhausted from bailing for over twenty-four hours with no sleep or food, were cast upon the sea and floated on pieces of the wreck. Forty-nine were picked up by a Norwegian bark that sailed into the wreckage after midnight.
Survivors and victims of the Central America tragedy hailed from twelve foreign countries and every one of the 31 states. Within hours after the news arrived in Charleston, disaster headlines appeared on the front page of virtually every major newspaper in the country, from New Orleans to Boston, and as far inland as Dubuque, Iowa. In 1989, in a front page story in The Washington Post, a reporter wrote, "The Central America was as sensational a shipwreck in its century as the Titanic was in ours."]
Excerpt:
The Heat of the Storm
["The bailing was continued vigorously all night, my own dear husband taking his turn and when exhausted returning to my side; and when a little rested again resuming his place . . . . All that fearful night we watched and prayed, not knowing but that every hour might be the last. . . . We resolved that when the moment came we would tie ourselves together and the same wave would engulf us both."-Journal of Adeline Mills Easton, survivor of the Central America]
Friday Night, September 11, 1857
All Friday night, hurricane winds ripped across the steamer's decks, the storm waters crackling with phosphorescence, and every hour the water in her hold rose another six inches. But the bailing never stopped. Hand to hand to hand, the water-filled buckets passed up the gangways, out of steerage, out of the engine room, out of the second cabin, the empty buckets traveling down again to be refilled. Too exhausted to be heard above the shrillness of the wind, and perhaps too fearful to speak, the men worked on in silence as the ship tossed in a dark and relentless sea. From midnight till four on Saturday morning, they grew wearier and wearier from incessant labor and exposure to the storm, and the water gained fast. Yet they continued, and now the women offered encouragement by repeating, "Only another hour to sunrise."
"Oh that long weary night!" wrote Addie. "How I counted the moments as they slowly dragged along! And as morning came, about three o'clock the Captain came in and said if they could keep up the ship about three or four hours longer, he thought we might be saved. The storm might cease and then perhaps they might get up steam, or when daylight came a vessel in sight might give us the blessed means of rescue. So they toiled on, and never was a daylight more gratefully welcomed than on that Saturday morning-the last that ever dawned on many a noble heart."
Saturday Morning, September 12, 1857
Throughout the ship, the coming of dawn fired the men's spirits. They could see through the rain to the haze hanging along the horizon, the sea not cresting as high as before and the clouds beginning to thin. The wind had shifted and dropped, now blowing in at about forty knots from the west and southwest, though higher-velocity squalls within the storm still spun through to rock the ship. Captain Herndon pointed to the thinning clouds and predicted that their breaking up portended an end to the storm. He spoke to the men at the pumps; he cheered the men in the bailing lines. He told them he thought the storm was abating, and that if they would just continue to bail until noon, the steamer might be saved. He delivered the same message to the passengers in the main cabin: They must not abandon hope.
"This announcement caused a general cheer from the men at the pumps," said Judge Monson, "and sent joy and gladness to the hearts of the lady passengers."
Though the passengers received the captain's comments with great cheer, Herndon knew his hope was false. He knew the sea would rise again and the wind would blow with even greater fury. He knew that a ship floating 750 tons of iron with water filling her hold, and more water constantly rushing in, could remain afloat but a short while longer. He also knew that every bucket of water tossed back into the sea gave the ship and her passengers a few more seconds afloat, and that in those hours gained, real hope might appear on the horizon. He was in a frequently traveled part of the ocean, and if he could keep the steamer afloat at least until the storm abated, he had a chance of saving everyone by transferring them to a passing ship.
The Ship is Going Down
Saturday Morning, September 12, 1857
Captain Herndon continued to visit the bailing lines and the barrel gangs, cheering everyone to push beyond their limits and to keep hoping. But about ten o'clock Herndon was in his quarters when Badger reported to him that although the storm appeared to be abating, the water in the ship was once again gaining on the men rapidly. The engines, the boilers, the furnaces were immersed in fourteen feet of seawater, and the water had risen to within four feet of the second cabin floor.
"The vessel must go down," said Badger.
"I believe she must," agreed Herndon. "I have made up my mind to that."
As the two men talked, Chief Engineer Ashby rushed into the captain's quarters.
Badger said to him, "The ship will sink."
The remark seemed to startle Ashby. "She shan't sink!" shouted the engineer. "I'll be damned if she shall! We must all go to work and bail her out!"
Badger replied that he wished talking in that manner would make the waters recede, but he and all the rest on board had been hard at work all night bailing, and still the water was rising. No one knew when, but the ship would go down.
In front of these two men, Herndon allowed his true feelings to show. He too was dealing with his mortality and thoughts of never again seeing his wife, Francis, or his daughter, Ellen. He was tired and dejected and seemed resigned to his fate. He told Badger and Ashby that it was hard to leave his family this way, but, of course, that could not be helped; he was the captain, and as long as others could be saved, he would not leave his ship.
But outside his quarters, Herndon was the forthright commander. He might lose his ship, the mail, and millions in gold, but he still had nearly six hundred souls entrusted to his keeping, and until that final moment when the sea closed over the decks of the Central America and dragged them all into eternity, he still harbored a waning hope that lives might be saved. On deck and in the cabin he exuded enthusiasm and control and talked as if only a short amount of time separated the dismal and trying present from a glorious and certain rescue. The passengers caught his hope and themselves clung to little things that buoyed that hope.
Men have always pondered how they will act under fire, and mostly the reality when it comes is far more sober and sickening than imagined, and the acts are much less quick and noble. When a ship seemed destined to sink, the captain and his officers often had to hold the crew and the male passengers at gunpoint to keep them away from the lifeboats until they could safely remove all of the women and children. Sometimes not even the captain and crew acted nobly. Four nights earlier, Herndon had jokingly turned the dinner conversation from shipwrecks to topics more pleasant by declaring that if his ship ever went down he would be under her keel. It was a charming seaman's segue, and from the mouths of perhaps most men it would have remained no more than that. But the remark had been prompted by the sinking of another steamer three years back, when the captain and crew had commandeered the lifeboats, and 259 of the 282 passengers, including all of the women and children, had perished. Herndon's friends knew that for three years the story had haunted him. He was now in the middle of an even bigger disaster, but he had already determined that surviving by less than honorable means was not worth a lifetime of scorn.
The Discovery of the S.S. Central America
[In 1973, the Dean of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State University posed a simple question to an unusually gifted engineering student: How are we going to work in the deep ocean? Scientists could film and photograph in the deep ocean and do crude sampling and recovery, but no one could work down there. The student, Tommy Thompson, had spent most of his twenty-one-year-old life consciously cultivating a creative mindset, experimenting constantly, driving everyone around him crazy, putting himself in unusual, sometimes dangerous situations, just to see what would happen. He would circle even the simplest problem, look at it from different angles, turn it upside down, challenge the formula he was supposed to use, then give his answer. "If you're going to be educating yourself in this world," he would say, "you might as well be thinking about things that will yield value all the way along."
During the ten years after his mentor posed the question, Thompson read scores of esoteric treatises on working in the deep ocean and telephoned scientists all over the country about their research in fields that might be related. He worked with some of the treasure hunters in Key West, observing their operations and filling notebooks with his observations on their lack of methodology and the myriad problems with trying to find anything in shallow water.
While working as an engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute in the early 1980s, Thompson began researching historic ships lost in the deep ocean. After running many shipwrecks through his historic shipwreck selection process, a form of risk analysis, he focused on the Central America. Two friends, Bob Evans, a geologist, and Barry Schatz, a journalist, joined with him to research the sinking of the ship and brainstorm on how to find it and learn from it with a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers. Thompson's goal was to find the fabled steamer and recover her treasure, but his purpose was to open the deep-ocean frontier to science, history, medicine, mining, and archaeology.
By the summer of 1985, Thompson had the backing of the managing partner at the accounting firm Deloitte, Haskins, and Sells in Columbus and a name partner at one of the biggest law firms in the Midwest, Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur, who helped him shape the project into a business offering that would attract local Columbus investors. Eventually, the partnership raised almost $12 million for the venture.
Before setting to sea, Thompson consulted with Dr. Lawrence Stone, the world's foremost authority on optimal-search techniques. "He was going about this in a careful scientific fashion," Stone remembers in the book. "He wasn't in it strictly for the money. That came through strongly, and it's very consistent with the way he's acted ever since." In the summer of 1986, Thompson and the Columbus-America Discovery Group set to sea to find the Central America with prototype sonar that enabled them to search five thousand feet of ocean bottom in a single swath. The following year he led a group of engineers in creating a robot that could perform intricate, heavy, and often delicate tasks in water over eight thousand feet deep. But their work was delayed when two competitors who had mounted their own expeditions to find the Central America appeared at the site and tried to drive Thompson off. After several confrontations at sea and in the courtroom, a federal court gave Thompson exclusive rights to recover the ship.
In 1988, Thompson flew his unmanned robot over the rusting remains of two huge paddle wheels, the final resting-place of the Central America. Next, he located the ship's three hundred-pound bell, then found steamer trunks, and then came a sight few people could imagine. "'The bottom was carpeted with gold,'" says Thompson in the book. "'Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything.'"]
The Search for the S.S. Central America
["For 131 years one of the world's richest treasures-perhaps a billion dollars in fine gold-lay lost and out of reach in the frigid, lightless depths of the Atlantic. . . . Then in 1985 an unlikely trio from Ohio-a research engineer, a geologist and a journalist-began a cautious but brilliant search for the ship, using cutting-edge technology and a revolutionary undersea robot. In October their research vessel docked in Jacksonville, Florida, having recovered [the Central America's] gold."-"The Greatest Treasure Ever Found," Life, March 1992]
Excerpt:
Outside Battelle, Tommy was now amassing voluminous notes on underwater technology, beginning to formulate relationships with suppliers, and corresponding with historical archives at several libraries on the East Coast. For years he had collected information on deep-water, historic shipwrecks, and the list had grown to forty. He and Bob met more frequently, together refining what they called the Historic Shipwreck Selection Process and narrowing the targets to a project Tommy could present to investors. "We developed the language as we went along," said Bob, "the selection criteria for projects in general, and then we analyzed the risks involved with each ship."
They divided risk into intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic risks were those inherent to the site: probability of previous recovery, accuracy of historical documentation, and the environment around the site. All deep-water shipwrecks scored high in the first category; most of them scored high in the second category; few of them did well in the third. Shipwrecks with a high total score then advanced to form a universe of "Feasibly Recoverable Shipwrecks with Low Intrinsic Risk."
Next, they assessed the extrinsic risks, those that had to do with recovery: Favorable Operational Factors, Positive Site Security, Legal Rights Obtainable. Is the technology available to access that site, can we guarantee site security in that area of the world, and do we have legal protection?
Once they had eliminated all ships but those with low intrinsic and low extrinsic risks, each ship had to pass a final test: Was there anything on board worth recovering?
The Titanic was a hunk of steel seven hundred feet long that would burn a hole through a sonar chart; even if it rested in mountainous territory, they could probably find it, and the abundant historical documentation would help them narrow the search area. But the Titanic presented two insurmountable risks: Her steel hull would be impossible to penetrate even with the technology Tommy saw on the horizon. And if they could get inside, she carried nothing worth recovering; some loose jewelry perhaps, rings and bracelets and necklaces scattered in various small cubicles, but no treasure centrally stored, nothing they could use to make the payoff attractive to investors.
"In terms of financial risk," said Bob, "the Titanic was not a good project."
Other deep-water ships presented similar problems. Myths had arisen around some of them that tons of gold lay stored in secure compartments. But no historical data supported the myths. In 1909, the British White Star luxury liner Republic had gone down fifty miles off Nantucket, and for decades, rumors had circulated that it had taken millions in gold coins with it. But no official records existed. "Sure, there were a lot of rich people on board," said Bob, "but how much was in the purser's safe? Nobody knows."
The Andrea Doria, an Italian liner hailed by her owners as the "Grande Dame of the Sea," collided with another ship in dense fog in 1956 and also went down just off Nantucket. She was a glistening seven-hundred-foot floating museum of murals, rare wood panels, and ceramics designed by Italian artists, and her passengers also were wealthy, but once again myth about the treasure on board sprouted from rumor with no documentation.
Tommy and Bob were convinced that the San Jos had carried more than a billion dollars in treasure to the bottom when British warships landed a cannonball in her munitions cache and sank her in 1708. But the San Jos was off the coast of Colombia in murky, turbulent waters.
After many deep-water shipwrecks were run through the selection process, the sidewheel steamer SS Central America rose to the top in every category. 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 iron works in her steam engines 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.
One other thing appealed to Tommy and Bob: the ship was American and its treasure symbolized one of the most defining periods in American history, that narrow window running from the California Gold Rush through the Civil War. If they could find it, they would open a time capsule representing an entire nation during a crucial period in its formation.
"The Central America," said Bob, "scored much, much higher than any other project when subjected to this selection process."
And her gold shipment was documented: With gold valued at $20 an ounce in 1857, the publicly reported commercial shipment totaled between $1.210 and $1.6 million. Although many of the Central America's records, including her cargo manifest, had been destroyed in the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906, some accounts estimated that the gold carried by the passengers at least equaled the commercial shipment. And the Department of the Army recently had confirmed a story approaching myth that had circulated for years: that the Central America carried an official secret shipment of gold destined to shore up the faltering northern industrial economy. The letter, dated April 2, 1971, acknowledged that the information about the shipment had been declassified, and it verified that secreted in her hold the Central America had also carried six hundred fifty-pound bar boxes, or another thirty thousand pounds of gold.
The Race is On
[The race was on to find the S.S. Central America. Tommy Thompson and the team of the Columbus-America Discovery Group had to work fast since they were being carefully watched by other groups trying to find the Central America. They would experience many games of cat and mouse while trying to locate the site.] Excerpt:
While the vehicle probed at eight thousand feet below, Tommy, Barry, and Bob huddled with Craft and Burlingham on the bridge. In a few hours, the Liberty Star would appear on radar about twelve to fifteen miles to the northwest on a heading that would cross the Galaxy site. This time Tommy did not want Burlingham to slide back over the horizon to avoid detection: Robol had advised Tommy that Admiralty Law required the one claiming a ship to stay on top of that ship; Tommy could rest his crew and repair his equipment, but he could not leave the site, or he risked losing control. On the bridge that morning, he told Burlingham that if the Liberty Star tried to enter the waters above Galaxy, he had to stand fast and, if necessary, drive her off. But Burlingham refused.
Burlingham had his own law, the sea captain's International Rules of the Road, and if another ship towing equipment needed to pass over the site, the Rules forbade him to squat motionless on top of it with nothing in the water. When the vehicle below lost power, they had to recover it, and the moment it hit the deck of the Navigator, the Navigator became the "burden" vessel and the Liberty Star became the "privilege" vessel. Then Burlingham had to give way, and the Rules didn't care if he was resting his crew or mending his equipment, or that giving way might compromise a recovery effort under Admiralty Law. If that vehicle was not legitimately in the water at the end of a long cable, Burlingham would allow the Liberty Star to run right over the Galaxy site.
Robol got on the phone with Burlingham to explain the legal ramifications, but Burlingham did not trust lawyers who were sitting on their behinds in their offices back onshore, when he was two hundred miles at sea in command of a ship and responsible for the lives of twenty men and another sea captain he couldn't predict. The Rules were clear: If you the captain of the give-way vessel encountered another vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver, you gave way, or you the captain lost your license. Maybe paid a fine. Maybe went to jail. Not the lawyers, you the captain. They didn't have to explain things in simple terms to Burlingham; he was as smart as any of them. He just went to college to be a sea captain instead of a lawyer or an engineer, and no lawyer or engineer was going to tell him to do something at sea that he as a sea captain knew should not be done.
